Chocolate – where to begin?

Chocolate needs no an introduction; it has become one of the most desired tastes throughout the world and continues to be the key ingredient in most sweet foods such as ice cream, sweets, cake, biscuits, and puddings.

So what exactly is chocolate? What is in it to make it so delicious and so tempting? Chocolate is a mixture of cocoa paste, cocoa butter, and sugar. The main ingredient cocoa comes from the seed of the tropical cacao tree which are grown in hot countries such as West Africa, Brazil and the Indies.

Who found Chocolate and how did it come about?

Chocolate first became popular in the form of a drink, your run of the mill hot chocolate, and is first documented in 1100 BC around Mexico and Central America. Now I’m quite sure they didn’t have a jar of Cadburys instant hot chocolate, added hot water and hey presto you have a nice steaming cup of hot chocolate! It was a little different back then and took a little longer, they had to take the pulp from the cocoa beans and start from there. It was only until the 1828 a Dutchman, Conrad Johannes Van Houten, patented a dry-press extraction method for obtaining "chocolate powder” which we all know and love today. It was not until the 19th Century that chocolate became a sweet bar and not just a type of drink.

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Types of Chocolate

There are thousands upon thousands of types of chocolate, it would be impossible to name them all, from dark chocolate to white chocolate, to Christmas tree chocolates to Valentines day chocolate hearts, from chocolate with nuts in them to chocolate covered strawberries – you can pretty much put chocolate with anything and it’ll taste good, with the exception of curry! There are hundreds of chocolate brands today: Cadburys, Nestle, Terrys, Ferrero Rocher, plenty of choice to choose your favourite!