sophie's fair

(c) Godiva Chocolatier Inc.

Chemically speaking, chocolate really is the world's perfect food.
-- Michael Levine, nutrition researcher, as quoted in "The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars"

take a deep breath, ladies -- i know exactly how you feel... while the way to a man's heart is to feed him a 1 3/4" thick premium black angus filet mignon (he'd be smiling for a week), the way to ours is a rich 72% cocoa dark chocolate ganache in a dark chocolate shell dusted with cocoa powder. and the best part is, it doesnt add unnecessary weight nor does it cause/aggravate acne.

A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. But what if your pills are administered in the form of chocolate bonbons? It may be time to put the sugar bowl away because cough remedies have never tasted so sweet. A recent study reports that theobromine, found in chocolate, is more effective than codeine when it comes to easing coughs. That's good news for chocolate lovers the world over. Now you're free to eat those truffles in plain view and if anyone challenges your right to the Whitman's Sampler, it's doctor's orders. While chocolate (+17%) has been banned from many diets, it hasn't been banished from search where it's always a favorite. The folks with the fewest waistline problems and the highest average metabolism (the 18-and-under crowd) provide 40% of overall searches. The rest of us are showing signs of restraint, though interest in theobromine has soared among those 35 and up. After all, the weather's getting colder, and those nasty bugs are going around the office.

All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt!
-- Lucy Van Pelt (in Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz)

willy wonka couldnt have agreed more. a gourmet chocolate is a confectioner's delight.
The celebrated Italian libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) took chocolate before bedding his conquests. This was on account of chocolate's reputation as a subtle aphrodisiac. More recently, a study of 8000 male Harvard graduates showed that chocaholics lived longer than abstainers. Their longevity may be explained by the high polyphenol levels in chocolate. Polyphenols reduce the oxidation of low-density lipoproteins and thereby protect against heart disease. Such theories are still speculative.
Today, chocolates of every description are legal, unscheduled and readily available over the counter. Some 50% of women reportedly claim to prefer chocolate to sex, though this response may depend on the attributes of the interviewer. More than 300 different constituent compounds in chocolate have been identified. Chocolate clearly delivers far more than a brief sugar high. Yet its cocktail of psychochemical effects in the central nervous system are poorly understood. find out more about how chocolate works.

Good living
is an act of intelligence,
by which we choose things
which have an agreeable taste
rather than those which do not.
-- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

here's to all the chocolate lovers out there who would gladly trade their holiday lingerie presents for a toothsome dark chocolate shell containing two layers of espresso-flavored mousse and vanilla cream...

Giving chocolate to others is an intimate form of communication, a sharing of deep, dark secrets.
-- Milton Zelman, publisher of "Chocolate News"