This is a picture of one of the pretty display cases at Aroa Fine Chocolate, which features truffles and confections made with Venezuelan El Rey chocolate. Aroa opened recently in Boston's South End. My friend Christine and I popped in there yesterday to keep the whole Venezuela theme going after having lunch at the nearby Venezuelan lunchspot Orinoco.

Yesterday my lovely friend Mariah and I made our own version of the famous and beloved Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream. We used the same simple ingredient proportions as the brown sugar peach ice cream I made a couple days ago - it was super easy, no cookbooks required!

Homemade Chunky Monkey Ice Cream

Ingredients
2 ripe bananas
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup whole milk
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup halved walnuts
1/3 cup dark chocolate pieces*

Tools
Ice cream maker

Mash the bananas (peel first, please) in a bowl until they are a just little chunkier than a puree. Add the brown sugar and blend thoroughly. Add the milk, cream, and vanilla, and mix well. Pour into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's directions. After the mixture is partially frozen (around 10 minutes into the process), add walnuts and chocolate pieces (while the ice cream maker is still going) and allow the ice cream maker to run its course to complete the process.

Also note - for the chocolate pieces, we used Cote d'Or Orange for an added orange twist.

*For this recipe, we used untempered chocolate pieces. To make it, we melted the chocolate bars, poured the liquid chocolate onto parchment and spread it into a thin slab, stuck it in the freezer to harden, and then broke the untempered chocolate into pieces to add to the ice cream base. The reason we did it that way is that tempered chocolate is very hard at room temperature, and considerably more so when frozen. Untempered chocolate is much softer at room temperature, and when it's frozen, is about as hard as room temperature tempered chocolate. Chocolate pieces that are put into ice cream are often untempered so that they are a little less brittle in their frozen state.

My nice friend Aaron emailed me this New York Times article that came out today about miracle fruit parties ("Flavor Tripping") in New York.

I have never tried miracle fruit - but have been dreaming of hosting my own miracle fruit parties ever since I saw this blog post around a year and a half ago. I obsessed about it and told everyone in my office about my plans to have the most awesome miracle fruit party ever. At that point, however, miracle fruit was not available online, and after trying to call some farm in Florida more than thirty times over the course of a week, I finally searched on eBay and found a miracle fruit plant that I purchased immediately. I waited on edge until it arrived in the mail, only to learn that it would take a short six years for the damn thing to produce berries. . . and then everyone in my office made fun of me (especially you, Eric, and you're still on my shit list). Traumatic, I know.

How many parties do I have to have until I'm satisfied? Last week it was a chocomusic party, then I wanted to have another cupcake week, and now it's miracle fruit parties?

I'm so mad that I haven't tried miracle fruit yet. I'm in a jealous rage. I have to go make some lists of things now. It's the only thing that calms me down.

The above image signifies the utter agony I feel that I have not yet hosted a miracle fruit party. It was taken by my friend Dan Reed.

Cupcake lovers can continue rejoicing ... a new cupcake bakery called Sweet is now open near Newbury Street. And here's a story I found about the owner.

Is it time for another Cupcake Week at the Tasty Show?

When I was making brown sugar peach ice cream earlier this afternoon, I envisioned the title of this post as "The Day Ice Cream Saved Me From Boredom," but then I texted my friend Jeff and asked him if I could swing by and deliver some 'awesome' (which, in this case, was ice cream) and the whole focus of the post shifted. (Either way, the ice cream recipe is at the bottom of this post.) Delivering awesome to your friends can be done in many ways. I chose to do it with homemade ice cream. The parameters of such deliveries are as follows:

• It has to be awesome and enjoyable.
  
• It has to be spontaneous.
  
• You must bring everything with you so that your friends don't have to do anything or supply anything in order to take part in the awesome.

Here are some pics:

Lovely white peaches

The two main flavors in the ice cream - mashed up peaches and brown sugar

Tiny heart-shaped (or bum-shaped, depending on which way you look at it) spoons, colored bowls, a mini ice cream scooper, and orange napkins, and a basket to put them all in.

Happy friends.

Brown Sugar Peach Ice Cream

I adapted the recipe after looking at a bunch of fruit ice cream recipes online. I used white peaches because of they have a delicate flavor that I love, but you can also use regular ones.

Ingredients
5 ripe medium white peaches
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup whole milk
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Tools
Ice cream maker

Peel the peaches and remove the pits. Then mash them up with a food processor or just put them in a bowl and mash them up with your hands or some sort of tool that mashes. The end result should be a little chunkier than a puree. Add the brown sugar and blend thoroughly. Add the milk, cream, and vanilla, and mix well. Pour into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's directions.

My nice friends Naf and Ariel alerted me to the heart-breakingly beautiful tarts and pastries at Tatte Bakery in Brookline. Never have I seen pastry crusts so rich and sensuous as the ones lining their counter tops.

My eternally awesome friend Jeff just made my day by sending me this link to a BBC article about how music enhances the taste of wine. The article cites a UK study that found that there is up to a 60% change in the taste of wine depending on what types of music are played. They even list wine + music pairing ideas. According to the study, a cabernet sauvignon pairs well with All Along the Watchtower, while Chardonnay pairs nicely with Kylie Minogue... interesting.

Going back to the idea I had a few months ago about pairing chocolate with music... I'm quite sure that the same concept applies.

That's it. This calls for a experimental chocomusic pairing party ASAP. I'm so excited. I think I'm going to have a heart attack.

Above photograph of girl with headphones graffiti on a wall in Tel Aviv was taken by my friend Dan Reed.

The wonderful, Somerville-based La Tene Chocolate is, sadly, closing its doors. For those of you who want one last fix, the last batches of La Tene's handmade confections are available through the website. Guests of The Tasty Show Bday Party last month may remember La Tene's delicious chocolates from the gift bags!

Image from La Tene website.

When you taste a range single origin chocolate bars, you can compare them and isolate the flavor characteristics of cacao beans from different places in the world, which is really fun. Over the past couple days, me and my office pals tasted two 70% bars made by micro-batch chocolate-maker Soma (see my previous post for more details). One of them was a blended bar, made of a mix of forastero cacao from Ghana and criollo cacao from Madagascar, and the other was a single origin, made of only forastero cacao from Ghana. (Forastero and criollo refer to the variety of cacao tree, kind of like cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon - both red grapes, but different varieties with different flavor profiles.)

The bar with the criollo beans starts out with notes of mild coffee and nuts and moves to pleasantly fruity/berry flavors right in the middle. Many other Madagascar origin bars that I've tasted have also exhibited dark berry fruitiness. The Ghana forastero was more on the earthy side and also a little less exciting than the blended bar. My office pals detected some fruit aromas, but not anywhere as strong as the blended criollo/forastero bar.

Forastero beans are known for being hardy, plentiful, but a little flat on the flavor side. The vast majority of the chocolate in the world is made with forasteros, which are the most common, and therefore the least expensive. Ghana produces the second biggest cacao crop in the world, and it's pretty much all forastero. (Ivory Coast is #1.) Criollos, on the other hand, are more prone to disease and more difficult to cultivate, and are therefore much more rare and expensive. However, they are also known for their big flavor and complex aromas, which makes them worth paying for - for some chocolate-makers. Less than 10% of the chocolate in the world is made with criollo beans.

Based on this tasting and several others I've done, I'm a pretty big fan of cacao from Madagascar. If I were going to do a single origin Madagascar tasting, this would be my line-up:

Valrhona Manjari 64%
Michel Cluizel Mangaro 65%
Amano Madagascar 70%
Domori Sambirano 70%

My friend Karen emailed me this research brief from the Center for Media Research that states that while passionate female bloggers would give up quite a lot to continue their bloggy lifestyles, precious few would give up chocolate.

According to this survey, for 80% of the female blogging population, chocolate is more important than blogging. So, really, the only way out of this chocolate vs. blog power struggle is to write about chocolate on your blog. OR eat chocolate while writing your blog. Pure genius.

To celebrate, I enjoyed the following chocolate while I wrote this:

Soma Chocolatemaker Africa 70% - Ghana Forastero: Soma is a chocolate maker based in Toronto that makes a line of really interesting micro-batch chocolates. Here's a past post about them. The problem is that I was so focused on writing this blog post, that I forgot to pay attention to what I was tasting, and therefore cannot write an accurate description. So lesson learned, blogging and chocolate are best enjoyed separately, contrary to what I just said two paragraphs ago.

To remedy this situation, I will try the chocolate again tomorrow and then write about it (but only afterward), breaking all convention by posting here two days in a row!

The picture above is of me peeking into a really big closet while apartment hunting at some point last fall. It relates to this post because it reminds me of how happy I will be tomorrow when I re-taste Soma's 70% Ghana bar.