Chocolate for occasions
Christmas, Easter, Valentine's, weddings, parties and gifts — what each tradition actually is, why the chocolate made for it is the way it is, and how much of it you need.
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Chocolate quantity planner
How much for a party, a wedding, a fountain, a hot chocolate bar, a tasting or a set of gift boxes — with the reasoning shown beside every number.
Choosing chocolate as a gift
What makes a gifted chocolate a good one, in terms of composition and keeping rather than of packaging.
Wedding chocolate
Favours, dessert tables and the weather problem that ruins more of them than under-ordering does.
Seasonal chocolate is a different product, and the reasons are mechanical
A hollow Easter egg, an advent calendar window and a Christmas selection box are not ordinary chocolate in festive packaging. They are formats with their own engineering problems, and understanding the problems explains a great deal about why the chocolate in them is what it is.
THIN AND HOLLOW IS HARD. A hollow figure is a shell a millimetre or two thick with a very large surface area for its mass. That shape blooms fastest, warps easiest and demoulds worst, and it has to survive being boxed, transported and stood in a warm shop for six weeks. Every one of those pressures pushes a manufacturer toward a formulation that sets hard without tempering — which is why so much seasonal chocolate is compound coating rather than chocolate.
A SINGLE SELLING WINDOW CHANGES THE ECONOMICS. A product made for one week of the year is manufactured months ahead, warehoused, and sold at a price set against every other product in the same aisle. It is not surprising that the chocolate is thinner in every sense; it is surprising how good some of it is.
AND THE SHAPE IS THE PRODUCT. Nobody buys an egg for the flavour of the shell. That is a legitimate thing for a confection to be — the object and the occasion are what is being given — and it is worth knowing so that the disappointment is directed at the right thing.
The two failures that ruin event chocolate, and neither is quantity
HEAT IS THE FIRST. Cocoa butter is fully liquid a little below body temperature, so chocolate placed on tables in a warm room in summer softens within the hour and blooms shortly afterwards. A poorly tempered piece does it faster. Almost every wedding-favour disaster is a temperature story rather than a supply one, and the fix is to set them out as late as possible and keep the boxes cool and dark until then.
SHELF LIFE IS THE SECOND, and it catches people who have made things themselves. A well-tempered plain chocolate keeps for months. A ganache with fresh cream in it keeps for days to a couple of weeks depending on the recipe, and a gift that goes off unannounced is worse than a smaller one. Say what is in it and when it should be eaten.
QUANTITY, which is what everybody worries about, is the easiest of the three to get approximately right — and the quantity planner will do the arithmetic and show you the convention behind every figure.
The calendar
Four festivals with genuinely distinct chocolate practices, each covered twice — as a documented tradition and as a practical guide to buying for it.
Christmas chocolate traditions
Selection boxes, advent calendars, tree decorations and the traditions that differ by country more than people expect.
History and culture
Christmas chocolate
What to buy and what to make, and why the seasonal shapes are formulated as they are.
Guides
The Easter chocolate tradition
The egg, the hollow form and how a spring festival acquired the largest single chocolate format there is.
History and culture
Easter chocolate
Buying and making, including why a hollow egg's shell thickness is the thing to judge it on.
Guides
The Valentine's chocolate tradition
How chocolate became the romantic gift, which is a nineteenth-century commercial story rather than an ancient one.
History and culture
Valentine's chocolate in Japan
The same festival, an entirely different practice — giri choco, honmei choco and White Day a month later.
History and culture
The Halloween chocolate custom
Fun-size formats and the trick-or-treat economics that produced them.
History and culture
Hanukkah gelt
Chocolate coins descended from actual money, and the four manufacturing constraints that explain why they usually taste poor.
History and culture
Chocolate at Diwali
Boxed chocolate taking a share of Indian festival gifting from mithai, and why shelf life and sealed packaging did most of the work.
History and culture
Weddings, parties and events
The occasions where quantity, temperature and timing all matter at once, and where a decision made three weeks ahead determines whether the chocolate is any good on the day.
Wedding chocolate
Favours, dessert tables, fountains and the arithmetic behind each.
Guides
Chocolate quantity planner
Six modes over one set of conventions, including the fountain answer that every per-guest figure gets wrong.
Tools
Running a chocolate fountain
Running one: viscosity, the working charge, and what wet dipping items do to the curtain.
Preparation
Chocolate fondue
The smaller, older and considerably more manageable version of the same idea.
Preparation
Setting up a chocolate tasting
Hosting a tasting: order, temperature, palate cleansing and how many samples before nobody can tell anything apart.
Preparation
Building a tasting flight
Choosing what goes in the flight and what order it goes in.
Guides
Tasting scorecard
A structured way to record what people actually taste, rather than asking which they liked.
Tools
Giving chocolate
Gifting is where the most money is spent on chocolate and where the least useful advice is available — most of it is about packaging, and almost none of it is about what keeps.
Choosing chocolate as a gift
Composition, keeping and what a recipient can actually tell, rather than what a box looks like.
Guides
Seasonal chocolate
Chocolate made for one date, and the economics and formulation that follow from a single selling window.
Chocolate types
Advent calendar chocolate
Why the chocolate behind the windows is what it is, which is a moulding problem before it is a cost one.
Guides
Chocolate truffle
The default gift confection, and the shelf life its filling actually has.
Chocolate types
Making the thing yourself
Every occasion format above is a technique somebody has to execute, and the three that most often go wrong at home are hollow moulding, dipping and tempering thin shapes.
Making hollow figures and Easter eggs
Eggs and figures: shell thickness, joining halves, and why a well-tempered shell falls out of the mould on its own.
Preparation
Making truffles
A ganache rolled and coated — the simplest confection to give and the easiest to over-plan.
Preparation
Dipping in chocolate
Dipping fruit and biscuits, and the moisture problem that makes dipped fresh fruit a same-day product.
Preparation
How to temper chocolate
The technique everything above depends on, explained from the crystal forms outwards.
Guides
Making chocolate bark
The lowest-effort thing that looks like real work, and the one occasion confection that forgives an imperfect temper.
Preparation
Places to go
Chocolate as an outing rather than as an object, which is the part of this subject that most rewards planning and is least written about usefully.
Chocolate tourism
Museums, factories, farms and festivals — what is worth the trip and what is a gift shop with an exhibit attached.
Guides
Beginner chocolate tasting
A first tasting at home, which is the cheapest chocolate experience there is and the most useful.
Guides
Keep going
- Cooking with chocolate — The technique behind every home-made favour, truffle and moulded shape on this page.
- Chocolate drinks — Hot chocolate bars, and the drink itself done properly.
- History and culture — Where each of these traditions came from, and which origin stories do not hold up.
- Calculators — Quantities, ratios and substitutions, each stating what it cannot tell you.