Come Away with Me

Choco choco everywhere!

Happy Valentine’s Day! February the 14th may mean oversized and overprized bouquet, silly looking stuffed toys and glitzy presents, a romantic dinner, or simply a day where you celebrate friendship in Singapore.

Valentine's Day remains firmly the Day Of Chocolate for many Japanese. Indeed, V-Day is a very odd and overly commercialized day in Japan. If you step into any departmental stores, supermarkets big or small (even my minimart here in Narao) you will see acres of floor plan being dedicated to chocolates of all varieties. For the month of February, chocolates dominated the supermarket scene and you can find local chocolate and sweets giants like Meiji and Glico alongside Godiva and other fancy gourmet chocolates. Besides chocolates, other related products such as cocoa powder, cream and confectionery chocolates sell especially well during this period too as there are those who prefer to make their own truffles just for that special one.

On this day, the ladies are made to feel obligated to hand out chocolates called giri (義理) choco (or obligation chocolate) to people they don’t particularly care about (e.g. bosses and fellow workers etc) as well as to their real love interest while males anxiously wait to see if they get ‘enough’ chocolates to satisfy their egos. Exactly a month later on March 14th, an artificially created and termed “White Day” is designated as the males-give-back-to-females day where another round of chocolate exchanging will ensue.

While i certainly do not feel obligated in any sense to hand out chocolates to my colleagues at school, i feel very obligated to try out several chocolate recipes which i had collected along so far.

One simple style of homemade chocolate called パブェ．オ．ショコラ　(Pave au Chocolat in French) or more commonly known as 'nama' choco (生チョコ)is especially popular in Japan and there are so many recipes going around. The name is as such because all you have to do is to simply cut up the required amount of chocolates into small bits, melt them in warmed-up 生クリーム(fresh cream), adding any liqueur if desired and put into the fridge to harden. After which you just cut them up into little squares and powdered every cube with thick and pure cocoa. If you still cannot imagine what i am talking about here, think the very popular cocoa powder coated Royce chocolates and you'll more or less get the idea.

Although not that complicated a task, grinding the chocolate bars into smaller pieces took a much longer time and required more strength than expected. The cutting up of the hardened mixture proved to be challenging too. Despite my best effort, it was really difficult to get them to be equal size. The taste however is so marvelicious that i had to summon every ounce of self-discipline to avoid gobbling up the entire plate!


And so i packed those precious pieces and brought them to school as part of my 'giri' :P

posted by テレサ @ 1:55 PM