An artsy chocolate kind of day!

Chocolate brought me to the museum!

I can't believe that after 17 years in Cambridge I have never been at the Peabody Museum, right here in Harvard square. Don't take me wrong, I do like museums and have visited them in many places in Europe and even North Africa but I guess not so much when they are literally 10 minutes from my house. So, TAZA CHOCOLATE (tazachocolate.com), which is a local organic chocolate company with a factory half a block where I work (then again so close to me) had an event at the Peabody Museum yesterday. Honestly I went for the chocolate not to see Aztec art but I'm glad I did. IT WAS AMAZING!!!!!!

I got there and they had a room with kids coloring Aztec work and I said to my self... oh no! This is going to be awful, but then in another room, there he was, the Taza creator with a table filled with chocolate treats, utensils from his factory and tons of information about the company and the makings of chocolate. It was a treat:)

Here are some photos of my visit:

These are the roasted beans, then they crack them open to get the nibs and that is what they use to make chocolate. I tasted them and they are bitter!! FYI: To make 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of chocolate, about 300 to 600 beans are processed, depending on the desired cocoa content. In a factory, the beans are roasted. Next they are cracked and then de-shelled by a "winnower". The resulting pieces of beans are called nibs. Cocoa Nibs are the dry-roasted pieces of the cocoa bean. These nibs are usually sold in small packages at specialty stores and markets. Nibs can be used in cooking, snacking and chocolate dishes. Since nibs are directly from the cocoa tree, they contain high amounts of theobromine. Most nibs are ground, using various methods, into a thick creamy paste, known as chocolate liquor or cocoa paste. This "liquor" is then further processed into chocolate by mixing in (more) cocoa butter and sugar (and sometimes vanilla and lecithin as an emulsifier), and then refined, conched and tempered

 

Do you see my Aztec dude with this container? well... he has his chocolate drink inside:)

my day did not end there, I decided to visit the whole museum, since I paid for the admissions and guess what? The Peabody Museum is connected to the Natural History Museum so I spent many hours on both museums. Enjoy the pics:

See the guy to the far right with his chocolate container? he knew better: never leave the house without your chocolate!!!

                                                                  an Aztec mural:

Did you know that there are over 350,000 types of beetles? CRAZY!!!

                                    Another Aztec mural:                              

nice jewelry :)



So the moral of the story is that "You must like chocolate to be artsy"..... see all I learned and saw today? if it wasn't for chocolate who knows when I would have made it to my Cambridge museums.

Thanks for reading my blog

CHOCOLATINA!