The "Are You Ready For The Easter Bunny?" Story

My favorites: milk, white and dark chocolate.

It was an ordinary day.  Shopping for a few pieces of chocolate to give to our grand- children for Easter.  Our oldest is 16 and youngest 12, but they all still love to hunt for plastic Easter eggs filled with money and treats as well as enjoy a few Easter baskets filled with chocolate treats.  I must admit I enjoy shopping for the chocolate, since there always seems to be some left over that doesn't fit into the baskets and I naturally have to eat it so it won't go to waste.  Living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania we get some of the best chocolate in the world right in our area.  We are less than half and hour from Hershey Chocolate Company and 20 minutes from both Wilbur Chocolate in Lititz and M&M Mars Chocolate in Elizabethtown.  And, if we get real hungry, we can walk about 5 minutes to the nearby Miesse's Chocolate and get our favorite sea salt chocolate caramels.  Well, a few facts about chocolate for you are:  

(1) Chocolate comes from the Aztec word "Xocolati" which means bitter water.  It was an unsweetened drink that the Aztecs used to  imbibe.  (2) Chocolate is made from the cocoa beans of cacao trees which are cultivated in Hawaii and in the areas of the world 20 degrees north and south of the equator.  (3) Cocoa beans, which are seeds, and pulp are fermented together and then those beans are dried in the sun before they are moved to chocolate factories.  (4)  The beans are then sorted, cleaned, roasted and then the husks are removed by blowing air onto them so the roasted beans shatter into fragments called cacao nibs.  (5)  These nibs are ground into a paste called chocolate liquor which is used as the base for chocolate products.  When you buy chocolate items, check to see if they have at least 54% cacao which is considered good chocolate for recipes needing chocolate.  A few more things about chocolate are:  

Check out this 1940's advertisement for chocolate.

(1) It takes 400 cocoa beans to make a pound of chocolate, (2) Cacao trees can live for more than 200 years, but only produce marketable beans from about 5 years of age and until they are 25 years of age. (3) Most cocoa farmers only raise the beans and don't make the chocolate, (4) Benjamin Franklin sold chocolate in his print shop in Philadelphia, (5) It takes 2-4 days to make a single-serving chocolate bar, (6) German chocolate cake was named for Sam German who developed a sweet bar for Baker's Chocolate.  He wasn't from Germany. (6) Champagne and sparkling wines are too acidic to mix with milk or dark chocolate, but sweet bubbly mixes well with white chocolate and red wine with dark chocolate.  (7) Finally, the French celebrate April Fool's Day with chocolate-shaped fish known as "Poisson d'Avril."  Now that's something I think needs to be done in my house starting this year!!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.