One of the better decisions I've made recently was buying early-admission tickets to this year's Chocolate Lovers' Festival, the hugely successful fundraiser for the United Way of Southern Chester County. After last year's claustrophobically crowded event, the organizers were smart to offer the "connoisseur" tickets; in fact, all 200 advance tickets were snapped up ahead of time.
We got into the Kennett High School gym at 1 p.m. sharp and started looking around. The first sample I took was a chocolate "shooter" from Talula's Table -- scrumptious. Then we saw Robin Mastrippolito of Embreeville, who urged us to try her third-prize-winning chocolate cake with chocolate mousse and butterscotch mousse filling, and of course we did so.
Some of the other goodies we tried were chocolate-covered potato chips from Neuchatel; a wonderful raspberry and chocolate cake; and Jackie Maas's "groovy fudge," which was white chocolate with a psychedelic multicolored pattern. We had some problems at first figuring out how to eat the chocolate and peanut butter crepes with only a plastic fork. But we managed; oh, the sacrifices we make for this column!
My companion said his favorite of the many cookie entries was one of Carol Yetter's chocolate-drizzled oatmeal cookies. He also marveled at one chocolate cake whose icing was so smooth and glistening that it looked like glass.
We were amused by the friendly youths who were serving up the goodies: they seemed to be competing with each other to showcase their wares. One used the sales pitch that even a half of his double-chocolate cookie was the equivalent of a whole single-chocolate cookie-- which is what the fellow next to him was offering.
After eating maybe five samples, we were surprised to find ourselves sated. We went to the beverage table, snagged a bottle of water (milk was available as well) and sat on the bleachers for five minutes to recover before returning to the fray.
People-watching was fun. In addition to Robin, we saw Donna Murray, Mary Sproat, Claire Murray, Dave Salomaki, Rich Schwartzman, Corinne Sweeney, and lots of families. (In fact, we were so full at the end that we didn't redeem all our tickets and ended up giving them to the father of a little girl.)
As a special bonus, on the way out we ran into The Cranky Friend, who was on his way in.
"You paid $50 to eat chocolate?!" he asked with a measure of outrage, trying unsuccessfully to hide his envy. We waddled past the long line of eager attendees waiting outside, returned to our vehicle in the now-crowded parking lot, and headed off to the White Clay Creek Preserve to try to walk off some calories.
This year's event, the third, was a great improvement over last year's: we got to actually see all the offerings and there were no lines at all.
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