Nothing says Valentine love like dark chocolate. To help you express your love to your special sweetheart we’re doing free FedEx Ground shipping for orders above $50 through Valentine’s.

Valentine’s is Sunday so if you are shipping via FedEx Ground I’d suggest having your orders in by Wednesday. (FedEx will do Saturday deliveries for residential areas when ordering by Ground mail)

I mentioned that Art Pollard, one of the founders of Amano Chocolate, will be at Fortnum and Mason on the 14th of February in London, England. In addition to that he’s the featured guest at the 70% Tasting on February 11th from 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society at 19 Greville Street, London. This is not a free event. But you can get a discounted ticket of £22.50 using PayPal.

I’m sure Art will take lots of pictures we’ll put up here at our blog. Art hasn’t been in London since winning the gold at the London Academy of Chocolate in June. So this is a great opportunity for our English fans to give us some feedback.

Art Pollard, the founder of Amano chocolate, will be in London all next week. I’ll put up any events he is going to so that all our British fans can meet him. The biggest event he is doing is at Fortnum and Mason on the 14th. Fortnum and Mason is famous for its selection of fine chocolate and is one of London’s oldest department stores. (They are also certified purveyors to the Queen.) We are really privileged to have our chocolate in their fine store. Art will be holding a tasting there and meeting people curious about our chocolate. And for the really curious, this is one of the few times you’ll ever catch Art wearing a suit. (Shhhh…. Don’t tell anyone that Art ever wears suits!)

Art will also be holding tasting events for SeventyPercent.com, Paul Young, Melt, and will be catching up with Damien Allsop London’s first chocolatier to use Amano’s chocolate for his confections. Damien is really excited about the truffles he has made with our chocolate. They have turned out fabulous — both in Damien’s opinion as well as ours.

For all of you who were hoping we’d be available in your local store in England please talk to the managers of your favorite stores. We have a distributor for England and we can make sure that our chocolate is available locally for you. Since Art will be in London he may even be able to stop by the store directly.

One of the things we love to do here at Amano is get out with the public through tasting events. We’re always shocked at how many people have never had gourmet chocolate – only the bars they buy at the local gas station. The look on people’s faces when they taste what I like to call “real chocolate” always makes all the labor and hard work worth it. Yes, we’re biased about chocolate. But I’ve found that once a person tastes good artisan chocolate that they become just as biased. It’s really hard to go back to eating regular chocolate.

Because we love to get the word out about our chocolate we regularly attend chocolate shows or put on chocolate tasting events. We can then let people taste our chocolate and experience the difference for themselves. We have several of these tastings coming up this month. We’d love to see you at the stores where we are sampling our chocolate. Bring any questions you might have about the chocolate or how we make it.

Here’s the list of tasting events we’re doing this month.
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The Food Network is rebroadcasting their special on Amano Chocolate starting on Monday, February 8th. We’re very excited by this as it helps get the word out about American gourmet chocolate.

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Many of you may have noticed on your recent trip to Starbucks that we were available on the shelf. We have been selling two of our award winning chocolate bars there: our Madagascar and our Ocumare Milk. Those are the only bars of ours that Starbucks is selling. If you discovered us through Starbucks and would like to try our other varieties of chocolate you can find our other award winning chocolate either online or through your local chocolate seller.

Just a quick note. We apologize profusely for the blog being down. Unfortunately in the days leading up to Christmas the person who handles the blog (me) came down with swine flu and was hospitalized.

I was in the hospital for several weeks due to complications from swine flu and then at home in bed on oxygen for many more. As you might imagine a few months away from work — especially at Christmas — meant that some things weren’t updated as often as others.

But don’t worry. There will be regular blog posts from now on. And that you to everyone who wrote in notes about my health. I’m doing fine now. I really appreciate all the concern. I know that for many people food is a very personal thing, and especially with the kind of chocolate we make it seems like many of our customers are family. So once again thank you for everyone who asked about me.

OK, our last chocolate giveaway was very successful. But we learned a few things along the way. We’re going to let this one last about a week over the Thanksgiving holidays. So we’ll pick the winner on November 30th.

So here are the rules.

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First, thank you to everyone who came out to the Utah Chocolate Show. We had a fantastic time and I think it was by far our most successful show. We sampled all the bars we have available right now and I think converted quite a few milk chocolate lovers into dark chocolate lovers. (Although we sold quite a bit of our milk chocolate as well!)

There was a nice story in the local press about us. It was from the Provo Herald.

There’s a nice review of our two new bars at The Chocolate Note.

His description of the flavor notes in our Dos Rios bar:

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So for our first Twitter contest we have picked a winner. First thank you to everyone who entered. The feedback was wonderful. It was so popular we’ll try and do an other contest in a week.

The winner is CeiCeiH. CeiCeiH, we’ve sent you a message on Twitter. If you can email us at amano@amanochocolate.com we’d appreciate it.

We’ll be at the Utah Chocolate Show this Friday and Saturday at the South Towne Exposition Center.

9575 S State Street
Sandy, UT
(Directions here)

This was the very first chocolate show we ever went to when we had just barely got our equipment working and weren’t even selling chocolate yet. So it holds a bit of a special place in our hearts. This year we won’t be able to bring out our Melangeur as we have in past years. Primarily because we’re using it to make chocolate here at the factory for Christmas. Yes, we’ll be in production right up to the time of the show. It’s been a busy year for us. (You can check out our virtual factory tour though)

So please come out to see us there. Raymond Lammers, the award winning pastry chef at Stein Eriksen Lodge will be there. (He has an amazing desert using our chocolate you ought try) It should be a very good time for all.

We’re going to be doing several Twitter giveaways this month. The rules for the giveaway are:

1. Follow us on twitter. (Go to the Amano Chocolate Twitter page and click follow)

2. Post on your twitter account the twitter message we send out:

Win a free box of Amano Chocolate. $84 value. Tweet this message to enter. See http://bit.ly/2bNFi1.

3. We’ll do a search for that message and pick a random follower. The prize will be a 10 bar variety pack of Amano Chocolate valued at $84. We’ll give about 2 days to pick a winner. That’ll give everyone a chance to tweet the message.

4. We’ll announce the winner so check your twitter account to see if you won. If you won send us a Direct Message on Twitter or email us at amano@amanochocolate.com with your shipping address and we’ll ship your chocolate that day.

Let us know if you have any questions. We’ll tweet the contest a few times over the next two days to ensure everyone sees it. (We know what it is like to be overwhelmed by twitter feeds)

Note: The contest is only open to people in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. (Sorry – shipping to the rest of the world is very expensive)

From our focus on the science of chocolate comes a report from The Journal of Proteome Research. Chocolate appears to reduce the level of stress hormones in the body. According to the article

The study provides strong evidence that a daily consumption of 40 grams [1.4 ounces] during a period of two weeks is sufficient to modify the metabolism of healthy human volunteers,” wrote the researchers, from the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The chocolate also appeared to help correct other imbalances in the body that are related to stress.

So if you’re stressed with the holidays, order some Amano Chocolate.

One of my favorite things to cook with our chocolate is chocolate torte. It’s fantastic by itself or with ice cream. This is one of my favorite recipes for torte. I honestly have no idea who originally gave me this recipe. It’s been on 3×4 cards for quite some time. For those of you not familiar with torte it is a cake which has no flour in it.

Here’s the recipe:

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