30 Quotes About Chocolates

When the snow began to fall, Maman was working in the shop, making Easter chocolates. Rabbits and chickens and baskets of eggs. Mendiants and nougatines. Nipples of Venus, and apricot hearts, and bitter orange slices. All wrapped up in cellophane, and tied with colored ribbons, and packed in boxes and sachets and bags, ready to give for Easter.

This morning it was sunny and bright, and Maman was making Easter things. There were eggs, and hens, and rabbits, and ducks, all in different sizes and varieties of chocolate, and Maman was decorating them with gold leaf, and hundreds and thousands, and sugar roses and candied fruit. Later she'll wrap them in cellophane, like fabulous bunches of flowers, each tied with a long curly ribbon of a different color, and put them all on shelves at the back, as part of her annual Easter display.

The scents of chocolate and other rich ingredients filled the air. Vanilla, sugar... raspberry, apricots... almonds, pistachios, pecans... cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cayenne. Celina breathed in. She loved the aromas of her artistry.

There was Le Petits Mitrons, a cute little pink pâtisserie in Montmartre that specialized in tarts: chocolate-walnut, chocolate-pear, apple-pear, straight-up chocolate, straight-up apple, apricot, peach, rhubarb, fig, fruits-rouges, strawberry-cream, mixed fruit, and on and on.

They drive back home to grab his backpack and as he bends and kisses his grandma Agnes, she scrunches a one-hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “Buy yourself some chocolates, Tom.”It’s what she’d say to him as a kid with a twenty cent coin.

I'm going to need chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.Since tomorrow is my free night, I figure I will swing by Teresa's and visit, and as I recall, she always loved chocolate too. So tonight? I'm going to do a final test of my triple-chocolate chewies, dark chocolate cookies with white and milk chocolate chips, one of the recipes I'm thinking of including in the proposal, and I just want to make them one more time to be sure they are perfect.

I go back into the kitchen. There are mendiants cooling on a sheet of greaseproof paper; little discs of chocolate, scattered with pieces of crystallized fruit; chopped almonds and pistachios; dried rose petals and gold leaf. Mendiants were always my favorites; so simple to make that even a child- even Anouk at five years old- was able to make them unsupervised. A sour cherry for the nose; a lemon slice for the mouth. Even her mendiants were smiling.

Here, try one of my mendiants. Dark chocolate, sour cherries, and a sprinkling of coarse black pepper. They're new. Tell me what you think.

Celina loved experimenting with new flavors and expanding Stella di Cioccolato. She'd created a spicy chocolate truffle with mild chili peppers and white truffles made from cocoa butter and lemon. But the secret of the gran blanco- the rare white beans- would remain a secret of the Andean people until they wished to share it with the world again.