Friday, November 7, 2008

Chocolates for the elect show Calvin’s soft centre

From the "Truth is Stanger than Fiction" Department. In the Church Times. (Where do buy an orange top hat?)

CHOCOLATE BON-BONS have been created by a Swiss chocolatier to honour the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Reformer John Calvin The chocolates were ordered by the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches.

“It was an interesting challenge,” said Blaise Poyet of the Maison Poet company. “It’s not easy to represent theological ideas by using the taste buds,” he told Ecumenical News International. Getting the taste right took weeks of discussion and research. He has included ingredi ents local to Geneva which were available 500 years ago. They include lemon verbena, which was used to represent the reformer’s ability to plant new ideas and to see them flourish.

The first layer of the sweet was based on a smooth, runny praline mix. “But we have reformed it,” Mr Poyet said. He had used crunchy caramelised hazelnuts, and salt from the Alps, to make the praline slightly savoury. He also used a “chocolate grand cru from Bolivia”, made from 68-per-cent cocoa paste, to signify Calvin’s theology of perfection.

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=65927

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