Never Too Much Chocolate

Today was the most anticipated day of our holiday as we were going to be doing a Chocolate Tasting Tour. The kids had never been so efficient in the morning, having had their breakfast, showered, done their journals and cleaned their rooms by 9 am. We walked to our tour meeting place and joined up with the rest of the group.

We visited about 5 different chocolate shops including San Churros, Golden Moments, a Japanese Shop and the Noosa Chocolate Factory. Golden Moments was quite a unique experience. Gerrard is the owner and is apparently Brisbane’s most famous chocolatier. They hand make their chocolates all on premises and he gave us quite an insight into how it’s made. I didn’t know that there are two types of chocolate, compound and couverture. Compound chocolate is what you buy in the stores from the likes of Cadbury, Lindt etc and may or may not include much cocoa or chocolate. Couverture chocolate on the other hand has a much higher concentration of cocoa butter and chocolate. And it tastes a lot better. What made the experience unique was the fact that Gerrard is also an avid sportsman and competes in triathlons and has also climbed Mount Everest twice and represented Australia in the paralympic games. He has achieved all this while being blind from birth.

The Japanese chocolate shop was also quite different because the Japanese are not known for their sweet tooth. We drank some molten chocolate as well as some flavored with coffee, which the kids found a bit strong. The cakes were quite interesting and included strong flavors like seaweed and moss.