Truffles for the Holidays

When I was little, I didn’t like chocolate. The dark was too bitter, the milk tasted soapy. The only chocolate I could stand was white chocolate, or a thin layer of milk chocolate filled with sweetened yogurt (so all things Kinder were mine). After a while I got sick of white and yogurt chocolate and started eyeing the “real” stuff. Today I can’t get enough of bittersweet and semisweet chocolate. I’m not a fanatic about spending a lot for high-percentage chocolate (why not just eat cocoa or baking chocolate?), but I won’t touch yogurt chocolate anymore. I love the complex slightly bitter, slightly sweet, tongue-coating “real” chocolate melting in my mouth.

Everything about truffles falls into this last category:

Menu for Hope 4

It’s that time of year again: the holidays are upon us and we are all hustling and bustling for presents for loved ones. While you’re out shopping, or better yet while you’re procrastinating that shopping, hop online and join the food blogging community in its biggest fundraising event.

Menu for Hope was started by the wonderful Pim of Chez Pim after the tsunami affected millions in southeast Asia four years ago. It started as a humble effort to raise money and has turned into a major online charity event, last year raising over $60,000 for the UN World Food Program.

This year bloggers have come together again to donate cooking supplies, gourmet gift baskets, one-of-a-kind tours, meals, and interviews, cookbooks, and more. Take a look at Pim’s website to learn more about the gifts you can buy raffle tickets for.

How it works:

You look at the list of offered prizes and choose which ones you would like to buy tickets for. Each ticket costs $10. Then you go to the FirstGiving site and make your donation. Make sure to write your gift’s code in the comments line, or you don’t get your ticket (though you’ve made a donation and your money still goes to a good cause). You can buy raffle tickets from December 10^th through December 21^st. Winners will be announced January 9^th.

Long story short: please help us help others. It’s an important event. You can give as much as you can. You may even be a lucky winner of a prize!

For more information and detailed rules please visit the Menu for Hope site at Chez Pim.