Chocolate Gift ideas

Chocolate….how easily we succumb to its charms. A glance, a fragrance, a recalled memory of past pleasures, and all resistance melts away ---- a piece makes its way into our mouth.

Dark or milk, solid or packed with fruit, creams or nuts, chocolate washes over the taste buds with silky smooth flavors, and we can only give into the pure joy. Probably not a surprise that chocolate's scientific name, “Theobroma cacao”, means food of the gods.

It makes a perfect gift asit is rich, succulent and so very very tasty. Many places claim that they make the best chocolate but while I have found it difficult to narrow down to one type. I have some recommendations.

Chocolate begins with the cacao tree. And the cacao tree goes back to the Mayans and Aztecs. They placed a high value on the beans and even used them as currency when they were not being made into a drink. The Aztecs called the drink Xocoatl (meaning “better water”). Montezuma, the famous Aztec leader, would drink Xocoatl from gold goblets and throw them into the lake. Before the Aztecs performed a human sacrifice, they gave the victim a last taste of xocoatl, as a taste of heaven before they “expired”. I wouldn’t try that with your date or spouse.

In the 16th century, Hernan Cortes (the Spanish conqueror of Mexico) brought the beans back to Spain.

By the 17th century, chocolate had become the fashionable drink of Europe's wealthy. Maria Theresa, who married Louis XIV in 1660, had one servant whose only job was to make her favorite chocolate drink. The English diarist Samuel Pepys, having spent the day and night celebrating the crowning of Charles II, headed to his favorite chocolate house, where the proprietor "did give me a chocolate to settle my stomach." As more cacao beans were imported, taxes, and then prices, fell until chocolate was no longer limited to the rich. By the mid-1800s, the first chocolate bar was made. Ever since, chocolate has found a thousand ways to tempt and tantalize.