What a great day! Especially for a Monday!!
Once again, this year (today), I was gifted with a package of chocolate candies and truffles from that famously generous chocolatier, Candy Claus (aka, Dr. Brautigam, one of the investigators here at work). To quote from the gift package, "all Candy Claus confections are made in his North Texas sweatshop by happily indentured elves."
Also accompanying the box is a description of the candy and at least one Skeltonic verse (e.g. tumbling verse - every line rhymes - used frequently by John Skelton [1460-1529] - the Snoop Dog of his day).
This year the descriptions were semi-historically based (much too much info to include here)...and only one poem but in my box are:
Snows Atop Mt. Dallas (orange wrapper) - chocolate ganache topped with homemade marshmallow, enrobed in dark chocolate
Chocogasm (purple wrapper) - milk chocolate/vanilla ganache enrobed in milk chocolate
Schokolandenfreude (blue wrapper) - white chocolate with chopped dried cherries and Kirschwasser (cherry-flavored brandy) enrobed in white chocolate
Mint Glasnost (green wrapper) - mint and dark chocolate enrobed in dark chocolate
The Temple of Xocolatl (red wrapper) - homemade cajeta ganache overlaid with strawberry jelly, coated in dark chocolate
Good Morning, America (gold wrapper) - coffee ganache made with dark and gianduja (milk chocolate/hazelnut) chocolates, flavored with Kahlua, enrobed in dark chocolate, garnished with chopped roasted hazelnuts
And, last but not least, Am I Blue, Too? (silver wrapper) - butter ganache with blueberry preserves and blueberry schnapps, coated in semisweet chocolate and (because it contained blueberry) accompanied by this year's Skeltonic verse:
Once again, I dare to say,
Stop brewing your brew
and do honors that are due,
yea, make a hue‐y ado
to the truffly chew
made from the berry that is blue!
For the storming winds that blew,
as if on chocolatey cue,
whispered a whistling clue
to brewers, the likes of you,
who candies and truffles do eschew:
“The goodies that Claus did accrue
taste better than bluish shampoo,
yea, o brewer of malty stew,
those rumors of ill‐taste are vastly untrue.”
So eat up your due,
don’t stop ‘til you’re through,
then take up your brew‐tools and barley anew.
My response to him this year was also in Skeltonic verse:
Your candies delight in every way.
Control's the goal: only one per day.
But on the gluttony side I stray.
I stop my hand - my soul cries "Nay!"
"More," it begs. I say "Okay".
I know there'll be a price to pay.
I'll be merry and I'll be gay,
But to get around, I'll need a dray.
I'll block the sun; it'll all be gray.
Dogs will bark and dogs will bay,
Mules will kick and donkeys bray.
But on the wagon bed I'll lay,
Like a huge, round bale of hay.
Too fat to move, come what may.
But my soul's hunger you did slay.
And wrappers on the floor will stay.
J.
So the question is...which one do I eat first?
It was amazing...great wine, awesome food and I'm sure that somewhere in the several hundred people attending, there were people that the Dallas social scale considers important. All we know is we got to eat food by some of the city's best female chefs - our favorite, Sharon Hage of York Street among them. Sharon was distributing some of the best crab salad on the planet. Another favorite was a squash and corn casserole from the Texas Chefs Association. And in the cork pull, we scored a bottle of chardonney from Cakebread Cellars and a cookbook (Mangiamo: The Sebastiani Family Cookbook by Sylvia Sebastiani).
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