Santa Cruz Chocolate Festival

Don’t forget - the 2011 Santa Cruz Chocolate Festival is Sunday, January 23 (1-4pm, Cocoanut Grove) with more than 25 vendors including Snake & Butterfly Chocolate and Original Sin – details on these businesses and their tasty samples for Sunday are below. Benefiting re-entry student scholarships via the UC Santa Cruz Women’s Club, the chocolate festival is a popular event you don’t want to miss! Read more in these articles:

Snake & Butterfly Chocolate is an award-winning South Bay company that refines organic, fair trade chocolate from the bean. Snake & Butterfly makes single origin chocolate, which is one bean from a particular country or region in small batches using traditional stone melangers. The company uses three ingredients in its chocolate: cacao beans, cocoa butter and sugar (or agave for its raw bars); it doesn't add emulsifiers or artificial ingredients. It uses this chocolate to create plain and flavored bars, truffles and confections -- many suitable for vegans. At the Chocolate Festival, Snake & Butterfly will be sampling a variety of single origin chocolate (Ghana, Venezuela, Madagascar), flavored bars (Salt & Almond, Ginger & Nib, Maple Syrup & Bacon Brittle, Cherry & Chili), raw chocolates, and caramels. Snake & Butterfly will have its entire chocolate line for sale, too. Awards the company has recently won: five medals at the San Francisco Fall Luxury Chocolate Salon (including Gold for Best Organic/Fair Trade Product and Silver for Best Flavored Chocolate Bar) and three medals at the Napa Luxury Chocolate Salon.

 

Original Sin Desserts is a Santa Cruz company founded and owned by UCSC graduate Tanya DeCell. Original Sin will be sampling its signature product, Chocolate Sin Cake, in exchange for customers’ tasting tickets at the Chocolate Festival. It will also sample Chipotle Chocolate Cheesecake (DeCell comments: “spicy/smoky pairs really nice with dark chocolate"), Black Velvet Cheesecake, Peanut Butter Silk, and Boston Cream Pie. All of the Original Sin sweets being sampled will also be available for customer purchase. The company is committed to top-quality ingredients including Guittard chocolate and Nielsen-Massey pure Madagascar vanilla. Baker DeCell uses only hormone-free dairy products, and most desserts aremade without any hydrogenated oils. Original Sin had a retail storefront in downtown Santa Cruz (with bakery and deli items) that closed in December. You can still find its products around town -- for example, the cheesecakes are at New Leaf, the soups, salads, burritos & wraps are at Cabrillo College bookstore, and you can place orders for custom cakes, catering, and wholesale business at the Original Sin web site.

Anyone else as hungry as I am after reading all this? Can’t wait ‘til Sunday! And a bonus: it's all for a great cause!