Happy New Year!

OK, it's a little late, but it isn't quite Christmas again yet. Though I'm sure that this year it will arrive as quickly as it seemed to last year! In the meantime, there's a lot of chocolate to eat.

Back in the UK now and I'm tempted on almost every corner by quality European brands and my chocolate consumption has returned to its sky-high levels, unfortunately this hasn't been accompanied by resuming regular exercise. Oops. Though I have been doing quite a bit of wandering around London in my research for the 2nd Chocolate Tour, which will launch in the next few months (hooray!).

I hope you all had a fabulous start to 2008. We did, celebrating at home with great friends and great food (well, the ingredients were good, I shouldn't shout too loud as I made most of it). We did have lovely homebaked bread (not made by me) and our friends brought taramasalata from Fishworks (soooo good, if you haven't tried it and you are anywhere near a Fishworks restaurant, go now!) and they also bought chocolate cakes. So we had two chocolate desserts, the one I prepared (to be more specific, this is one I had only got as far as getting the ingredients out for but decided to make even after hearing they had brought another chocolate dessert) and the Christmas Logs from La Maison du Chocolat. The home-made dessert was a peach and chocolate pudding. What can I say? it's Winter here, and hot chocolate pudding was required. I feel I should perhaps clarify that we also had a main course of baked salmon, kale and hazelnut and parsley mash potatoes. I'm getting hungry writing this...

Three days later I was treated to dinner in Claridge's. We discovered they do a fabulous deal on a three course meal. Delicious food, and they use Valhrona Manjari in their chocolate dessert (though the raspberry was actually the tastier dessert, I think).

If you have found this site through Red Magazine, welcome! I hope to see you on a tour sometime!

Now it's really time for dinner. Wishing you all good food and good chocolate and good health for 2008!

Back soon...