Competition! For Chocolate!

After indulging myself at their chocolate tasting the other week, the good people at Hotel Chocolat have offered up a competition to help one of you (yes, you!) indulge themselves in their lovely chocolate as well. It's worth your while entering since one of you is guaranteed to get the goods. Free chocolate! Christmas has really come early. Be sure to enter soon, though, since this closes at 11.59pm on Dec 12.

Win luxury Hotel Chocolat Christmas Prizes - for you or a loved one
Tis’ the season to be chocolaty. As Christmas time approaches, Hotel Chocolat is reaching out to Ambrosia and Nectar readers in search of the finest Yuletide themed chocolate recipes.

Do you have the best Christmas chocolate-chip cookies in town? Is your Christmas chocolate log simply to die for? Then why not put your recipe to the test against the rest of the country.

All you have to do is submit your recipe – the more original the better - and you could win a host of luxury chocolate goodies. The lucky winner of the Ambrosia and Nectar and Hotel Chocolat Christmas competition will also be automatically entered into the Hotel Chocolat Grand Prize recipe competition and could win even more seasonal chocolate goodies!

Do you think you’re the finest chocolate chef in the land? Well there really is only one way to find out …

Click this link here to enter!

Competitive Baking Day

A few weeks ago, some friends had the foresight to call a competitive baking competition. Are there sweeter words to my ears? I love baking, and I can't help but be competitive, so this was a combination I was destined to take seriously.

After planning my recipe for several days, sourcing the ingredients, and spending a fair amount of sweat putting together my Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake Brownies with a Oatmeal Cookie crust, I discovered an hour before we went that they were terrible. Utterly awful. I had doubled the brownie amount without getting a large anough dish, so the top and bottom had burnt and the middle was raw. I panicked but decided to stick with the brownie theme: I'm a brownie maven, and can create a batch from scratch within 4 minutes (minus cook time) even when drunk. Being American, I know a good from bad brownie and I have a good recipe. So batch number 2 became brownies with a peanut butter topping (seen below, decorated with hearts and stars. HEARTS AND STARS. Bring on the accolades).
All entries were graded on 5 seperate criteria, with you not being allowed to award yourself any points:

• Taste
• Texture
• Presentation/implied effort
  
• Originality
• Carbon Footprint

Taste, being all important, was saved until last and received double the points. How did I do? I was in the lead, resoundingly (except for taking a clobbering on the carbon footprint - darn North American peanut butter)...until it came time to the taste round.

One by one, everyone gave me the least number of points available. Reasons? They didn't like peanut butter. The brownies were a bit dense. They 'just didn't like them'. These. These brownies, which when I sampled them, made me think: 'this is the best batch you've ever done'. I didn't just tate brownie when I ate them, I tasted victory.

C'MON PEOPLE! Don't like peanut butter??! Too dense (and this from my husband, too)!? I've lain awake many a night since this bake-off, wondering where things went wrong. Had some of them never tasted a real brownie before? Were they beaten as children while their school teacher made them eat brownies? I don't have an answer, I just know this was a dark day for my soul and that I haven't baked a batch of brownies since.