Category Archives: News

Zoka Coffee Partners with Intrigue Chocolates

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We are excited to properly introduce you to Zoka. Coffee Roasters and Tea Proprietors of novel proportions, Zoka is a Seattle-based company that takes it’s coffee very seriously. Jeff Babcock, Prez/Founder, travels the coffee world to find the perfect bean, and roasting just right is an obsession with him. Always seeking new adventures, he looks to the world for an education in the smaller details of life, like how to perfectly blend quality chocolate into a shot of espresso.

Intrigue Chocolates and Zoka Coffee are embarking on some neat ventures together. For us, chocolate and coffee are natural partners. They come from the same range of the world, and they are both bean/seeds that are roasted to bring forth their flavor. Coffee and chocolate seem to trip similar triggers in the brain, too. On some molecular level our bodies respond to the chemical stimulus of chocolate in coffee with the same kind of earthy love.

Ta da, Zoka! Aaron pairing chocolate and coffee.

The “Specialty Coffees” of Zoka are elevated beyond the premium level, and in the artisan coffee world refer to the best in quality, from the growing of the coffee plant, to roasting. Try to tell anyone at Zoka that brewing coffee is anything less than an Art (capital ‘A’!). Really, these guys compete in barista contests, who knew? Drawing pictures on top of cappuccino. Brilliant!

You’ll find Zoka coffee in one of our chocolate truffles (Zoka Mocha Latte), and a Zoka tea-flavored truffle (Zoka Tisane). See what Julia Harrison has to say at her Sweet Travel Blog about the two of us. (Thank you, darling, for that “sexy little morsels of ganache” compliment!)

Fall in Chocolate: It’s Good for You!

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Chocolate is good for your eyes. Do your eyes get tired from spending too much time staring at a computer screen? Lots of us do, and it’s tough to avoid. Here are some things you can do to deal with eye strain:

  • Take breaks from staring into your computer screen on a regular basis, focusing at something across the room.
  • Better yet, stand up and move around even for a few seconds while looking into the distance, double duty. Get the blood flowing to your arse and unclench your eyeballs.
  • Eat some dark chocolate!

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Video Vote for Finding Chocolate

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We gotta’ have your vote! Barbie Van Horn is on a quest of the highest order, and she’s brought us along for the ride. On her website, Finding Chocolate, Barbie’s mission is “finding and sharing the best kept chocolate secrets.”

And she’s onto us at Intrigue Chocolates. Barbie has made a couple of really neat videos (we think) of our Chocolatier (Aaron) and we all want your input. Check out Aaron at the work/shop as he leads us through the finer point of making hot cocoa.

You can watch both of the short videos at Finding Chocolate, and the voting process will only take a few minutes. The first video is a sort of tutorial with “how-to” tips on making the most out of your chocolate drinks. Number two is a bit more avant garde, pairing music and subtitles with the happenings at Intrigue’s work/shop during the last Pioneer Square Artwalk.

You can vote on the Finding Chocolate website by commenting there. View both the videos and let us know which one you prefer and why. And let us all take a page from Barbie’s book and keep on experiencing chocolate whenever we can.

Chocolate, Who doesn’t love it?

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Cacao Tree with Ripe Fruit

Good question! Intrigue Chocolates may not understand non-chocolate lovers, but we will not discriminate. Lovers and historians alike will appreciate a little brush-up  on the story of chocolate.

The first harvesting and use of cacao (Theobroma cacao) was believed to be around 1100 to 1400 BC in Puerto Escondido, Honduras. White pulp surrounding the seeds (cacao beans) was probably used to make an alcoholic drink (because of its ferment-able sugars). Mayans grew cacao trees in their back yards and made a foamy, bitter drink from the cacao beans. Cacao trees need about 2000 millimeters of rain each year (78.74 inches) and 21 to 32 degrees Celsius (69.8 to 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which is why cacao trees naturally grow within 20 degrees of the equator.

Interesting chocolate fact. The Aztecs used cacao beans as currency. Hence, one turkey cost 100 cacao beans, and a fresh avocado cost 3 cacao beans. They also forced the people that they conquered to pay them in cacao beans, if they grew there. In South America and Europe people have been using cocoa to treat diarrhea for hundreds of years.

First modern chocolate bar. Created in the U.K. by Joseph Fry & Son in 1847, they mixed cocoa butter back into dutched chocolate. (Dutched chocolate is chocolate treated with an alkalizing agent, making it less acidic, increasing the solubility, enhancing the color, and smoothing the flavor). They added sugar and produced an easily mould-able paste. Bars of chocolate were born and the world became a nicer place!

Chocolate consumption worldwide didn’t start until the Industrial Revolution (18th-19th century) when new machines increased the amount and speed of chocolate able to be produced. Hard to imagine a world without chocolate! Full circle. Now we are slowing it down and making small, quality batches of Intrigue chocolate truffles.

Your Brain on Chocolate

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Chocolate is good brain food. How lucky is that? Among the many health benefits of chocolate, particularly the dark variety, is the good chance that it may protect your brain. Research at Johns Hopkins is pointing to epicatechin as a nice, friendly little chemical. Epicatechin is present in dark chocolate and just might be responsible for keeping the brain protected and healthy.

We are protective of out brains and our chocolate, so this is a beautiful relationship! Researchers first noticed that the tribal Kuna people, off the coast of Brazil, had remarkably good cardiac health. The defining difference was the chocolate based drink that they quaffed in great quantities. A report first made in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism in 2010, also indicated that that the chocolate compound epicatechin protected against stroke damage in mice, even for several hours after the event.

Disclaimer time. Friendly epicatechin is quite easily inactivated by heat, and might not make it through lots of processing. We think you should hedge your bets, though. When you are snacking go like this, celery, chocolate truffle, celery, chocolate truffle!