This year’s take on the Chocolate, Red Wine, and Roses theme- aka, every girls favorite indulgence for valentines days, a concept that I like to muse with on this date driven day.  Dinner for two, with all the decadence that cupid’s charm can provide.  Here, you get all those pesky whimsical factors in one delectable plate.

The Red Wine Velvet Cake- flavored and colored with a robust red wine, cut cleverly into 3 parts rhetorically inquiring how good you are at sharing, this chocolate laden cake is topped with candied cocoa nibs for added texture.

This light cake is embellished with red wine pearls,  enhancing the taste and mouth feel of sipping on a glass of your favorite red wine.

To highlight the natural dark fruit flavors and robust floral note in red wine, I added red rose petals and pomegranate juice.  The delicate wine pearls are marinated in a red rose petal and pomegranate glaze.

Light candied almonds are added to highlight the nuttiness in chocolate, to add a very subtle caramel note, to enhance the almond tasting notes found in wine.

Lastly, this red wine velvet cake is carried by a lightly toasted white chocolate mousse.

Eat your visceral hearts out.

Diving back into the icy depths of work so quickly after the plane brought me back to a place that is so utterly unlike my vacation reality, so cold and stress induced, I practically tripped over my shoes laces getting back to frontlines of the job to prepared for the holiday weekend, I am understanding a new type of fatigue, like all the sectors in my brain have been powered down, saving all my resources to funnel into the multitude of tasks that are stacked up for a weekend dedicated to celebrating love through food, more specifically embodied in one ingredient, chocolate.

Ah bravado, bubbling cheers, welcome to the sweet life.

Lush and lively, your favorite color.

Lost over the dark sea,

The pitch black swallows

Completely engulfs with its impenetrable hug

Indistinguishable with its black dimensions

Infinite circle of nothingness

Yet so close to the flickering stars

The constellations are magnified

Those once far off blinking binary dots

Seem close enough to wear on your finger like a diamond

The shores of the sea sing a strong song with its rhythmic sonic surges.

The lullaby of the waves draws you into a hypnotic daze as it pounds out its worries against the soft sandy beaches.

The force of the slashing waves sucks you in, spits you out.

Simply and surely as your breathing, this marine metronome mimics the earth’s internal clock, keeping time so you don’t have to.

Locked behind the tall cement walls that are topped with a barbed wire crown, you keep yourself in just as effectively as you keep the desperate out.  Mingling with the neighbors is not an effortless coincidence, it is a planned activity in a fortified neighborhood.

Maintaining this separation is keeping the everyone back, it is drying out the culture.  We limit ourselves by denying access to people who come from different backgrounds, with different stories, with different interests, perspectives, and forms of art.  We don’t get the full range of what this world of culture has to offer locked behind our fear, our insecurities, our greed.  Remember when drums were banned as music in the United States?  Can you even imagine what we would be missing if this law stated into effect for as long as apartheid existed in south Africa?

Being afraid of people, and being afraid of competition, being afraid to not socialize with people who share a different world view is not keeping them out, it is keeping us in the cage.