Chocolate coins make excellent holiday favors

If there is one food that no one can resist, adults and children alike, it’s chocolate! Bitter, sweet, milk, liquorices – whatever the flavor, color or shape, there’s always a reason to celebrate with chocolates. The allure of chocolates cannot really be described but there is something seductive about the way it melts in thick layers around the tongue and settles on the taste buds. As they say, no one can have just one!

combine the best of both worlds – money as well as taste. Their first recorded history is when Jewish children were given chocolate coins during religious holidays. These formed an important tradition in the celebration of the Hanukkah and were called ‘Gelt’, meaning money. Today, you find multicolored chocolate coins in shops round the year.

Chocolate coins are made to look like currency notes or real coins. Thus, they are a wonderful gift for occasions like weddings, baptism, bachelor parties, graduation parties, anniversaries, holiday parties, corporate events and more.

These coins could be current or they may look like antique coins. The wrappers and the chocolate inside it have the upside and downside of real coins, along with the currency, the shape and the words. Little bags of chocolate coins are found in bakery stores as well as in shops of high end chocolatiers. Therefore, it is quite obvious that the quality of chocolate coins depends on how it is made and what ingredients go into its making.

When choosing chocolate coins, it is important to keep quality in mind. The better the quality, the pricier it is going to be. Quality refers not just to the chocolate but also to the craftsmanship. After all, you don’t want a penny to look like a pound, nor would you want to offer a smudged or badly made chocolate business card to your client.

Chocolate coins have become widely popular in the twentieth century. They find a place of pride among common party favors. They are also quite commonly found in corporate events. Chocolate coins appeal to the child in each of us. Children can even use these chocolate coins to play games.

These days, chocolate coins are a great gift. You can buy readymade chocolate coins or buy custom made coins. Customized coins are a great favorite with many people and are therefore sought after by many companies for their clients.

To cater to the growing demand for customized chocolate coins, many confectioners and stores facilitate free personalization. You can add your own message to any one side of the coin. What a wonderful and delicious way of letting people know you care.

With chocolate coins made from the finest cocoa and delicious cocoa butter, it is easy to see why more and more people want to put their money where their mouth is!

Chocolate!

From rainforest treasure to a decadent treat, a gift from the gods. Chocolate, long ago, was a symbol of wealth, and luxury. An economic livelihood, bonbons, hot fudge, candy bars. For thousands of years humans have been fascinated with the delicious phenomenon that we call "chocolate". The "Chocolate Tree" originated in South America's Amazon basin with its roots in the tropical rainforest. The cocoa tree has been part of human culture for 2000 years. The official name of the cocoa tree is Theobroma cacao. ("Theobroma" is Latin for "food of the gods.") The Aztec and Mayans of Central America cultivated cocoa trees long before the arrival of European explorers. These Mesoamerican Indians were the first to create a drink from crushed cocoa beans mixed with water and flavorings such as chili peppers, vanilla, and other spices. It was a special beverage reserved for Mayan rulers and special ceremonies. Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, was said to drink up to 50 goblets of chocolate per day. Chocolate is more than just a food. Its rarity and richness have secured it a special status in history.

For hundreds of years and in many different cultures, the act of eating chocolate has taken o­n symbolic significance. Chocolate has been linked to power, religion, and romance-especially when chocolate was considered an expensive and rare luxury.
For centuries, legends from many cultures have claimed that consuming chocolate instilled strength, health, faith, and passion in those who drank it. These legends attributed magical properties to chocolate and endowed it with powerful symbolic value.

Chocolate is still revered as an icon of love and devotion today, and eating chocolate remains a part of many enduring holiday traditions. Famous names in chocolate begin to spring up around the beginning of the 1800s--Van Houten, Cadbury, Cailler, Nestle. Milton Hershey, the most famous name in American chocolate, opened a candy store in 1876 in Philadelphia, which ended in failure after six years. A factory in New York also failed. Moving to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Hershey created a recipe for milk caramels that became popular, allowing him to stay in business. Busy making caramels, he also started tinkering with chocolate, trying to create a recipe for a chocolate candy bar. He eventually sold the caramel business, and opened a chocolate factory in 1903 in the little town soon to be known as Hershey

Chocolate: A Health Food?

I'm a chocolaholic. I've been a lover of chocolate in its myriad forms from before I can remember. As a kid, it didn't get any better than a box of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk. So I was intrigued by recent articles about chocolate's newly discovered health benefits. I'd certainly like to believe that chocolate is good for me. And why not? Even Andrew Weil recommends dark chocolate.

grabbing stories in 2002 about chocolate's new-found health benefits stemmed from a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.1 The study was small, comprising only 23 subjects, and it was funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute. The abstract (summary) of the article, which is what most people read, stated that cocoa and chocolate, when added to a healthy diet, provided antioxidant benefits and increased the good HDL (high density lipoprotein) cholesterol. One antioxidant benefit was to impede the harmful, atherosclerosis-accelerating oxidation of LDL (low density lipoprotein cholesterol, the bad cholesterol). These were the findings that the media trumpeted.

But a closer look at the article wasn't quite as encouraging. The authors acknowledged that the beneficial effects from chocolate were small at best. "It is important to note that the clinical significance of these small differences in indexes of oxidation status remain to be clarified." Meaning that the small differences might have no significance at all. And regarding the so-called benefits of increasing HDL, these weren't significant, as the researchers noted: "the cocoa-chocolate diet had neutral effects on lipids and lipoproteins."

In fact, as if anticipating that this study might be over-hyped, the journal headed the issue with an editorial to put the findings in perspective. In "How good is chocolate?" nutrition expert Paul Nestel noted that plants supply many thousands of healthful substances to the human diet. It is well known that soy, grapes, tea, onions, apples, citrus and many others are rich sources of antioxidants, so it's not surprising that cocoa contains an antioxidant, too. How important is the antioxidant in chocolate? Nestel questioned the importance of chocolate's modest effects on LDL oxidation. He further asked, "Given that there are thousands of flavonoids in the foods that we eat ... should each new finding be greeted as an encouragement to eat that particular source because it contains a special flavonoid?"

from http://www.medicationsense.com/articles/july_sept_03/chocolate.html