fun facts

Did you know that Will Farrell doesn't have any cavities? That wasn't what I planned on writing when I started this post, but I just found that out tonight and found it interesting. As another aside, I didn't get my first cavity until I was 20 years old and it was in my wisdom tooth and I had it pulled and I used to joke that I only got them pulled so that I could continue saying that I didn't have any cavities!

Anywho, what I was originally planning on posting about was all the fun and exciting facts that I learned while on my chocolate tour on Friday...

I learned that they sell INSANELY good french fries at the French Market. Again, nothing to do with chocolate, but good to know. With your choice of eight different dipping sauces. Yum.

Okay, chocolate facts:

Chocolate comes from cacao which is a fruit that grows on trees. The chocolate comes from the seeds inside a big pod, which can be all sorts of colors.






It used to be so valuable in ancient South/ Central America that it was used as currency! And people used to counterfeit it! How? They would carefully peel back the shell of the seeds, scoop out the chocolately stuff and replace it with dirt!

It was only consumed in LIQUID form back in the day! It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that chocolate became the stuff we know and love. The Mayans added chilies to their hot chocolate. The Spanish added cinnamon to theirs.

It only grows from 20 north of the equator to 20 degrees south of the equator!

Christopher Columbus was the first to bring chocolate to Europe. Spain had a monopoly on chocolate for a long time which is kind of weird because you don't usually associate Spain and chocolate!

And your last fun fact... where was the brownie invented?

Why, Chicago, of course! The omniscient and oh-so-always-accurate Wikipedia informs us, "The brownie first appeared in public during the 1893 Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, Illinois. A chef at the city's Palmer House Hotel created the confection after Bertha Palmer requested a dessert for ladies attending the fair; it should be, she said, smaller than a piece of cake and easily eaten from boxed lunches."