My Stash.

Sometimes it feels like I'm doing a "how to make junk food" blog.  I assure you, we are eating lots of healthy food too...  I think right now I'm just really interested in whether it's possible to make all the fun food.  This was never really touted as a health food diet, though it does tend to cut down on snacking if you have to make it yourself (and it doesn't last for 3 years on the counter being readily available like most junk food).

Husband and I agreed early on that we would do this regardless of the actual cost.  He said "some things are going to cost more and some things less, that's part of the experiment."  So, since I've been saving us money making food from scratch, I guess he won't mind that I've spent $45 on chocolate at the local organic store.  Good Grief!

 
And I didn't even get that much.  I wonder how big a pile of snickers bars you can get for $45.  Mainly I wanted baking chocolate.  I didn't REALLY need the $5 each fancy chocolate for eating, but I figured I'd try a few brands that are made with whole ingredients so that you, the reader can find the best one.  I'm a giver, what can I say. 

The thing that IMMEDIATELY annoyed me about the $9 semi-sweet baking chocolate was that it's not wrapped in convenient one ounce chunks.  It's all wrapped up together as 2-100g bars.  How am I supposed to follow a recipe with that?  it's not even the same weight as my other baking chocolate, so I can't go "ok, I'll just divide it into 8 equal pieces and it'll be fine".  Nope, I have to get the scale out I guess.  ANNOYING!  (As a side note, I googled the company and their website says you can also buy their fair trade chocolate at Safeway and Scoop and Weigh.  It may not include baking chocolate, but I'll check it out and see if it's cheaper there than at a specialty organic market.)

I have already come up with how to stretch this chocolate.  Baker's Brand unsweetened chocolate is also "additive free", and when mixing it into cakes, I can apparently add an additional Tbsp of sugar to make it more like semisweet.  That way, I can save the expensive baking chocolate for things like chocolate chunks in brownies.

The chocolate chips were kind of a whim...  I mainly needed the baking chocolate, since I could always cut it up and use it in place of chocolate chips...  but they had them, so I figured I'd try them. 

I already know I'm not going to use these for terribly much experimentation.  Just enough to occasionally get my chocolate fix.  It's too expensive.

My brother made a good point.  If I am trying to eat like our grandparents and great grandparents did (using available whole ingredients), for them, chocolate would also be very expensive, and therefore used infrequently.  I get that.  When you can't buy 2 Aero bars for $1, chocolate seems much more like something to hoard and savour.