Easter Bunny

I always looked forward to Easter as a child.

Resplendent in my Easter finery, 4/11/71
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

In this 1971 Easter Sunday photo it was the day after my second birthday and the beginning of my collection of 'squinting into the sun' photos. I was outside my maternal grandmother's Milwaukee house.

Easter and my birthday have always been linked, both in my mind and in my family celebrations. I have an early April birthday, and, although Easter moves around every year – we always celebrated my birthday with extended family on Easter Sunday.

I didn't mind this arrangement. It's not like everyone was sitting around exchanging gifts at MY birthday party. Except for one aunt who insisted on giving my brother a present for MY birthday, because it was what she did for her own children. We just wrote it off as a bit strange.

But she could be forgiven because she would also bring Easter candy for all of the kids. Nice thought, right? Even though my brother and I always had an early morning in-house hunt for a handful of baskets, we could count on a little more chocolate in the afternoon, courtesy of our aunt.

The only problem? Somtimes she would buy – horror of horrors – HOLLOW Easter Bunnies! They never tasted the same to me and frankly just freaked me out! Where were the poor bunny's insides?

As I recall, it was not good chocolate. In fact it was really bad chocolate. Thin, waxy, tasteless. Good times!

But, as you learn in life sooner or later, it could always be worse. And so it was one REALLY bad year when she brought ... WHITE. CHOCOLATE.

Oh dear. Err, bunny?

As an adult, I've learned to appreciate, if not exactly seek out, the delicacy known as "white chocolate." But as a child, it was just SO weird. As a friend always says, "It would be okay if they didn't call it chocolate."

Those days are behind me now, I've graduated to the darkest of dark chocolates and I can buy my own darn chocolate bunnies!

Speaking of those bunnies, the Chicago Tribune recently published a short, Easter-related article titled: Making the Giant Chocolate Easter Bunny.

As mentioned in the article, this 13+ minute video – Morkes Chocolate Presents: Making a Giant Easter Bunny – lets viewers experience the making of a 3-foot, 3-D Easter Bunny. Now that's a lot of chocolate!

Also in the article, Chicago's Field Museum recently did a major Chocolate Exhibit. In the section titled All About Chocolate: Making Chocolate, they included a timeline of the history of manufacturing chocolate – Stage 3: Manufacturing Chocolate. Chocolate molding has been around in some shape – ahem! – or another since the late 1880s!

It was in the 1910-1930 "Simplified Styling" phase of chocolate manufacturing when those pesky hollow bunnies came into being (or at least were "perfected," whatever that means.)

"Manufacturers (also) perfected the rotary machine for hollow molding during this period. These devices spun hollow molds so that the chocolate clung ony to the inside of the piece."

Well, good for them!

Now pass me a solid, dark chocolate bunny, will you please?

Hot, spicy little number...

Last weekend I went to a Baggallini trunk show at The Bibelot Shop on Grand Avenue in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

It was fun to see Baggallini's new products for Spring (hint: teal ["lagoon"] and magenta ["orchid"] are hot! hot! hot! right now - FANTASTIC!) After perusing the new offerings, I also wandered the entire store.

You canNOT just walk in and out of Bibelot. You MUST browse!

So it was that I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon these little gems just calling my name:

I didn't know if these Lake Champlain organic chocolate bars were new, or just new to me (and, as it turns out, to Bibelot). After reading Lake Champlain Chocolate's website, I believe the packaging was re-designed, perhaps that's why they didn't look familiar. But I'd never bought one before.

I, along with the rest of the free world, am currently obsessed with all things Salted Caramel. Add Salted Caramel to Dark Chocolate, and there's no possible way I could resist.

Although I consider dark chocolate an essential part of a healthy diet (sincerely!) I still forced myself to eat dinner before sampling these. (It was cauliflower crust pizza so it wasn't much of a punishment.)

I really like Lake Champlain chocolates. How can you not love something that's made in the picturesque and amazingly quaint Burlington, VT? And you can often find mini-bars or even little squares of their chocolate, so you can taste test. (I've found them in stores from Minnesota to New Orleans, that's the entire length of the Mississippi River!)

Salted Caramel – Description from package front: "dark chocolate bursting with salty-sweet caramel." OKAY, bring it on!! Organic, 57% cocoa. Fifty-seven percent is not as dark as I'd like (I love to keep my cocoa count above 70%) but we all have to make sacrifices.

At first taste (which, by the way, was two squares, for a total of less than 1 oz – entire bar was 8 squares and 3 oz. total) I was immediately impressed by the dark, liquid caramel oozing out. Delicious!

However, I didn't get a huge salt taste. In fact, after eating both squares, I didn't really notice any salt at all.

Being a trooper, I tried another 2 squares the next day. This is a delicious, albeit messy, dark chocolate caramel bar. I just didn't notice even a hint of salt taste or texture.

Spicy Aztec – Description from package front: "bold dark chocolate with cayenne, pumpkin seeds, and cinnamon." Their errant (superfluous?) use of the serial comma aside, ALL of these ingredients are on my health food list. Again, seriously. Also 57% cocoa and organic.

This bar was H-O-T HOT from the first bite. In fact, I hadn't even bit into a square entirely when the cayenne hit my tongue and stayed there.

I am NOT the stereotypical Minnesotan who's afraid of heat, or any spice for that matter. I LOVE hot food, spicy hot chocolate, you name it. That said, the cayenne was a bit overwhelming. I only noticed a small hint of cinnamon.

I did like that you could immediately see whole pumpkin seeds within the chocolate. They were really crunchy too. For some reason, this surprised me. But I loved it.

Overall, I really liked this bar too. I love hot pepper dark chocolate. Once I accepted that the first taste is cayenne and there's a long after-burn, this was a pretty fun bar.