Saturday, February 12, 2011

La Fiera del Cioccolato Artigianale

The Artisanal Chocolate Festival!

Usually, I find it obnoxious when people use the word "epic" to describe anything but harrowing adventures and impressive battle scenes but, in this case, I will make an exception. The Chocolate Festival in Florence was EPIC.

For someone with a sweet tooth as big as mine (which I get honestly. If you know my Dad, you know exactly what I'm talking about!), this was Heaven on Earth. The only problem: $$$. This stuff was expensive. I went 6 times and only bought something once. But, no worries, the samples were nearly sufficient.

It was booths upon booths of Europe's best chocolate, made in every shape, color, flavor and form that you could possibly imagine. When I say every flavor, I mean EVERY flavor.

Some of the strangest chocolates:
-Pepperoncino (red pepper)
-Marijuana
-Various alcohol-infused chocolates (which were disgusting! Grappa in chocolate? Really? Why would you ruin chocolate like that?)
-Various chocolate-infused alcohols (I don't drink but chocolate wine doesn't sound appealing at all!)
-Basil (apparently, some people put it on pasta. Who knew?).

On the bright side, Italians are very well known for their cioccolato fondente (dark chocolate). Personally, I prefer sweet to bitter but this dark chocolate was amazing. And probably the most typical chocolate of Italy is called Cremino, milk chocolate with a hazelnut cream. Yum. I also discovered a love for marzipan at the festival.

If you're not already drooling, just scroll down a bit. You will be.


Chocolate Nikons (Taken with a Nikon D40)
Tools!


Yum!

Cremino
Tartufo (truffles)

Marzipan!
Kiwi

Valentini





Awww.
Hello Kitty

Gnomes are too cute.


Got Milk?
My only purchase (which I am enjoying above ^^^) was a white hot chocolate. I am obsessed with white chocolate (the more teeth-rottingly sweet, the better) and had no idea that white hot chocolate existed. Also, Italian hot chocolate is MUCH thicker than our watery poser hot chocolate. It's only slightly less thick than a melted candy bar. So, needless to say, my white hot chocolate was pure, face melting rock'n'roll on my taste buds.

Enough said.
~Britt

5 comments:

  1. Wow they had it right outside of the Duermo! Cool! That sounds amazing. In Madrid they have a tomato-throwing festival and Running of the Bulls. Not nearly as cool as a chocolate festival. Glad to see you're doing well!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Haha. The running of the bulls would be awesome! Unfortunately it wasn't outside of the Duomo. It was in Piazza Santa Croce...which is a decent trek from my apartment.

    ReplyDelete
  3. P.S. How did you get the cool arrangement of photos on your blog beneath the title? I'm trying to make a blog but all I've been able to do is one pic. Did you use a certain template?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, I made that header in Photoshop and then uploaded it as a single .gif file. Unfortunately, that's really the only way you can do it if you want to use several of your own pictures. Otherwise, you're either stuck using just one of your pictures or a pre-designed header.

    ReplyDelete