Fall Luxury Chocolate Salon in pictures (2013)

Tea Time Adventures is happy to volunteer and help you with your foodie event! It's how we got involved with the Chocolate Salon! Now we know all the major players and chat them up whenever we get the chance. If you're interested in volunteering for a foodie event, (Tea Time also helps with the San Francisco Street Food Festival, Oakland Eat Real, the MOWSF Gala and we're looking for more!) just go to the website of the company hosting the event and click the volunteers link. You'll meet a bunch of fun people and get to see behind the scenes of a major event. Plus you (usually) get to attend the event for free (sometimes with restrictions). It's totally worth it!

Art Pollard (Amano Chocolate) and Chuck Siegel (Charles Chocolate)

There was a full roster of presentations.

Art Pollard's talks are always popular.

Angela loves the Teriyaki!

Tea Lovers chocolates

Art perusing Chuck's wares.

Plumeria flour

Their popcorn is always popular!!

Aaron Pollard minding the store while Art gives his talk.

Stephanie of Tea Lovers Gift Baskets

Angela and Adele of Tipsy Tea

Nothing like absinthe to bring out the essence of chocolate.

Chocolate Salon Presentations

Katreece Montgomery (The Chocolate Addict), Bethany Garland and Nicole Knobel gave a joint presentation about different ways to decorate chocolate. Nicole manufactures transfer sheets (and a whole line of other supplies, including molds) and Katreece uses the transfer sheets to decorate her chocolates. They both also sell instruction videos.

Bethany hand paints edible works of chocolate art.

Nicole included a sample transfer sheet with her card.

Art Pollard, of Amano Chocolate, spoke on the negative aspects of organic and fair trade certification for cacao growers. Art has spoken on this topic before, but he doesn't give a canned speech. His talk is always different and informative.

Art Pollard

Attentive crowd.

Elyce Zahn from Coco Tutti was our final speaker, doing a staged tasting showing how the aroma and flavor of raspberries enhance the chocolate experience.

We started by eating a dark chocolate disk, followed by a fresh raspberry. Then we tasted Elyce's house-made (and strained four times!) raspberry jam. Next we dipped another dark disk into the jam. The final step in this progression was a raspberry truffle, made with the jam, with dried raspberry on the shell. The last piece in the box was a mocha truffle, another great scent/flavor pairing with chocolate.