Slice of Life - Chocolate

This is a Slice of Life post. Slice of Life is a weekly prompt to encourage writers to tell personal history stories. Click on the link to participate.

You can have your truffles and your Dove bars and all your fancy chocolate. My favorite is good old Hershey's cocoa. Now it has even been discovered that dark cocoa is actually good for you. Low in fat and high in antioxidents. Of course, you have to add a lot of sugar to make it taste good.

When I think of Christmas, I think of the whole house smelling of warm chocolate and of sweet chocolaty candy full of pecans, kind of hard instead of "fudgy". My mother would cook it to the soft ball stage and then she would add vanilla and butter and beat it until her arm was sore.

I recently tried my hand at homemade chocolate pie from an old family recipe. It didn't look like the picture above but it was good. Homemade crust, homemade chocolate custard and homemade "egg icing" (meringue) - all listed as difficult in my personal cooking catalog. The homemade chocolate pudding may be a lot of trouble but it tastes entirely different from the instant pudding you can buy at the store. In fact, take a can of Hershey's cocoa and make yourself a cup of hot chocolate. If you haven't tried it in a while, it will wake up your senses.

I also love to make chocolate bundt cake with Hershey's cocoa. It is so moist it doesn't need icing. I just add a little sprinkle of powdered sugar on top. From Ina Garten (The Barefoot Contessa) I learned to add a little instant coffee for added flavor.

Click on this link for the official Hershey's site for lots of great recipes.