We had a great time over the last couple of weeks with ten people joining me in my shop for each of five evenings of tasting fine chocolate. Everyone got to try eleven different chocolate samples ranging from a supermarket bar, as a starting reference point, to a some of the finest single estate bars from the top producers in the world. Most participants hadn’t done chocolate tastings before and were surprised the variety and complexity of tastes they discovered. Feedback was uniformly good.

On another front we did one of the desserts for the Urban Harvest Wellington on a Plate’s “Five Puddings, Five People, Five Places” for about 50 people. A orange posset with cocao nibs and a mini chocolate bar on top went down very well with pretty much everyone. The posset is a curdled cream custard and I was told by one mother who attended with her daughter that her daughter never ate custard but really loved the posset.

And after an early start yesterday morning 40 or so attendees at the NZ Food Bloggers Association 2012 conference joined me at the new Cordon Bleu school in Cuba Street for a short  tasting session before I had to rush off to open the shop. Short but sweet and a lot of fun.