Hearts Chocolate
Like many young people (perhaps a disproportionate number from the fields of science and technology), my relationship with the recent romantic holiday is somewhat apprehensive. I don’t mean to say that I’m luckless in love, or that my Valentine’s Days have been perennially poor, but the idea of having one day so very focused on romantic love doesn’t quite appeal to me. Sure, later in life an annual celebration of one’s (presumably stable) relationship status must be nice, but with the romantic volatility at this stage of life the holiday is a bit of a tossup – and as a scientific individual I must question its methodology.
Imagine a student returning from winter break only to be dumped by a long time significant other. Alternatively, imagine a different student suddenly finding themselves embroiled in a fiery romance mere weeks before cupid’s cameo. In both of these situations, the snapshot offered by Valentine’s Day would be a poor indicator of broader romantic trends. I therefore posit that as a young person, quality of Valentine’s Days is random error at best.
For this reason I decided somewhere over the course of the last year that I should find an alternate, more stable association for February 14th, and I believe the one I chose is at once elegant and obvious.
Valentine’s Day is, at its core, an opportunity to create and/or consume outsize amounts of chocolate.
If you’ve read my other post concerning food, then you know that I’m a fan of cooking that is… Well let’s just call it epic. Therefore it should come as no surprise that my culinary goal for this Valentine’s Day was to create (and ideally consume) bacon chocolate.
I don’t claim to be the first to have had the idea for bacon chocolate. As a matter of fact it’s already on the market.
Unfortunately retail bacon chocolate is basically a chocolate bar with a handful of bacon bits. I was looking to prepare something more akin to a bacon strip with a chocolate coating.
The plan was relatively simple: Fry up some bacon, melt a whole mess of chocolate in a double boiler, then dip the aforementioned bacon in the aforementioned chocolate.
I decided it would be prudent to also chocolate-coat some fruit in case the bacon didn’t pan out.
Filling strawberries with caramel, then freezing them
A couple of friends stopped by and offered to help out. This was fortunate since they were much more adept at dipping than I was.
We left our creations to cool on the porch, then packaged them for distribution.
Everything was ultimately delicious and the newly-caloric Valentine’s Day was a success.
