Recipe: Blended Chocolate Frappuccino

As you may know, I have a disproportionate fondness for Starbucks Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino". One day, as I was paying $5 for one of those bad boys, it occurred to me, "Hey, I could make this!"

Is that true? Read on. I don't want to spoil the surprise.

Here were my ingredients:

1) ice
2) milk
3) chocolate chips (I used a bag of Ghiradelli Semi-Sweet)

4) chocolate sauce (I used Dilettante Dark Chocolate Truffle Topping, which my friend Kendra gave me for my birthday and which I love)


I put some arbitrary quantity of each of these in the blender, and I drank the final product. It looked like this:



The taste was very similar to Starbucks'. I was pleased. It was cold and chocolatey and refreshing and not too milky.

The texture gave me some trouble. There were sips that tasted just like they ought to (a little crunch of chocolate chip, a little crunch of ice, and a lot of fluid). But there were also huge clumps of unblended ice at the bottom and for the life of me I could not figure out how to make them blend. Was there too much milk in the blender with them? Too little milk? I'm sure there are basic rules to using kitchen appliances that would make this really easy to figure out, but I am not very handy in a kitchen. Maybe you have already figured this out.

BOTTOM LINE: An excellent chocolate beverage for a warm summer's day. If you make it, and you figure out how to work a blender, please comment below.

The Chocolate Room Chocolate-Mint Milkshake

I went back to the Chocolate Room, which, as we have said again and again, is one of our favorite places for chocolate in the city. This time my friend Kendra and I split a milkshake that was half chocolate and half fresh mint chip.



What can I say? It was a pure delight. Their mint chip is not peppermint, it is fresh mint, so it takes a little getting used to, but once you're in it, there's no turning back. Their chocolate ice cream is always wonderful. The milkshake itself was large enough that Kendra and I each got a full one of these cups.

BOTTOM LINE: The Chocolate Room never disappoints. They don't even know how to.

Kohr's

I went to Seaside Heights, home of the TV show "The Jersey Shore," for the first time last weekend. Much like Coney Island, the Seaside Heights boardwalk, while awesome, does not have many fresh ice cream options. It's a lot of Hershey's and soft serve. Unlike Coney Island, however, the Seaside Heights boardwalk has Kohr's.



Kohr's has been around for nearly a century. They make some hard ice creams but they specialize in custard, which the scooper told me was ice cream with an egg added into it to give it a smoother, more whipped texture. (Think whipped cream cheese versus normal cream cheese. Only ice cream, not cream cheese, duh.)



I got the chocolate custard, and it was pleasant, though nothing to write home about. The texture was quite nice, but it did not have a very strong chocolatey taste. The sugar cone was godawful-- if you go, just get a cup.

One thing Kohr's has going for it is a storefront placed roughly every three blocks along the boardwalk, each one with ever-so-slightly different flavors, so if you don't see what you're looking for at the first stop, just walk a little.

BOTTOM LINE: Not too remarkable or too chocolatey, but on a summer day on the Jersey Shore, Kohr's hits the spot.

Roh-Kaolade 60% with Spurulina

So I am mostly vegan now, which makes people do strange things.  My aunt wanted to buy me a bar of chocolate.  So instead of buying me a bar of chocolate, which is already vegan, she bought me this:

"Raw" chocolate with spirulina.  Now, if you are like me, this sounds like a terrible and unnecessary idea.  But sometimes bad ideas have happy endings.  This was actually really delicious?  It did not taste like spirulina -- it just made the chocolate taste nice and earthy, which I always like.

Bottom Line: When your teachers told you to make mistakes, I think this is what they were talking about.

New York Naturals Coconut Cacao Kale Chips

Someone left this in the office kitchen for anyone who wanted it...

because it is easily the worst-tasting food product on this planet.

Bottom Line: DO NOT PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH.

Lindt 90%, Theo 85%, Chocolove 77%, and Green and Black 70%

So I ate some chocolate bars and didn't take pictures.  Here are some quick thought:

Theo's 85% bar is disappointing.  I often find 85% bars disappointing, and I'm not sure why.  I think maybe they are just sweet enough that you don't get the Pure Chocolate Feeling of 90% but still bitter enough that the sweet taste feels a bit fruity?  Or in this case raisin-y?  Or maybe I just call everything I don't like either "fruity" or "raisiny" as a post-hoc explanation?  I'm not sure.  I think I'm still bitter that they discontinued their 91% special edition Venezuelan-origin bar, which was maybe the best bar I've ever had.  That said, I usually like Theo, so maybe just avoid this bar.

Green and Black's 70% was much better.  There was really nothing special about it, but it tasted like 70% chocolate, which, when you think about it, is something really damned special about it.  I'll eat that stuff all day.

I also had Lindt's 90% (for the 100th time since I reviewed it) and Chocolove's 77% (for the first time since I reviewed it), and my opinions were unchanged.

This is also a good time to talk a little bit about tempering and chocolate storage.  All these bars were purchased at bodegas.  Bodegas increasingly have a good selection of chocolate, but they do not do a good job of storing them.  As a result, they freeze or melt (as the season demands) and then reform "good as new."  But it's not good as new, and you can tell.  They lose their shine and their snap, and there is often white bloom all over them.  But worse is the texture problem.  You bite in, and they crumble in your mouth.  Or they are waxy.  In fact, the reason I went so long without eating a Green and Black bar was because I used to buy them in bodegas, and they were super waxy and gross.  This bodega had done a better job of storage, and the bar was leagues better.  In contrast, the Lindt bar's texture was all wrong -- Duane Reade's perfect air conditioning generally keeps the bars in much better shape than whichever bodega served me the bar more recently.

Bottom Line: Where you buy the bar of chocolate can be almost as important as which bar you buy.  Unfortunately, there's no good way to find out a shop's ability to store chocolate until you open the bar.  But once you do, it's important to keep track.

Alter Ego 60%

 I ate this:

It was actually quite good.  It was a little fruity, which is not my favorite thing, but I still liked it.  The mini size is nice for when you don't want to have regrets over eating a full-size chocolate bar like some kind of animal named David.

Bottom Line: Nothing mind-blowing, and a bit fruity-tasting, but a nice dessert.