Leonidas Belgian Chocolates Vancouver – Cocoa & waffles
One of the great things about Vancouver is that there is -always- something going on.
Oh, and that Groupons make them even more accessible, of course. ;)
Last week, I got a Groupon for $5 hot chocolate and Belgian waffle from Leonidas and it just so happened to coincide with the annual Hot Chocolate Festival. Yes, these things exist, and they’re amazing. And it meant special hot cocoa flavors that were specifically for the festival, which makes it feel even more special, no?
Here’s the special ones they had:
DARK CHOCOLATE RASPBERRY – dark chocolate and raspberry cream
"TOSCA" – dark chocolate ganache and rum with a hint of pistachio flavored ice cream and white chocolate
FROZEN NOISETTE – Buche Pralinee: Milk chocolate and pure praline with milk chocolate ganache, chopped hazelnuts
RASPBERRY CHEESECAKE – white chocolate raspberry cheesecake ice cream with white chocolate; optional white chocolate with butter cream and pineapple flavor
All come with a choice of chocolate or liege waffle sample and are available every day of the festival
Even with only four choices, I still had trouble deciding. I ended up going with the raspberry and my hot cocoa buddy for the night went with Tosca. Turns out, when they said raspberry, they meant -really- raspberry which was delicious but a little more fruity than I’d normally want hot chocolate. On the flip side, the Tosca wasn’t quite their cup of tea (cocoa?) but I loved it, so we ended up trading about half. I certainly won’t argue with getting some of both!
We got our waffles first. Mine is the bottom one and obviously has the better chocolate L, but I also somehow managed to get two berries in my whipped cream.
The guy doing the plates and hot chocolates seemed slightly frazzled, so maybe he put on a berry, it fell off, and he didn’t notice, so he added another, thinking he hadn’t done it yet? That’s the totally logical and way too thought out explanation I’m going with. :P
When the hot chocolate finally came out, my L had partially sunken in. I barely got a picture while he was apologizing before he whisked it away again, insisting on redrawing it, despite me telling him it wasn’t necessary.
So sweet. He apologized yet again and told me that it probably wouldn’t last long but to enjoy.
Instead, this time, it stayed until the bottom of my cup. I think I have a way with keeping my hot chocolate drawings in place, huh?
Toward the bottom, it slightly morphed and looks more a J, no?
Now at some point, we were chatting along and the unthinkable happened. The plastic fork he was using decided it just wasn’t cut out for waffles after all.
And suddenly….weee! Waffle went flying behind him, into our pile of coats. Joking, he pretended to toss it at my plate, but uh, apparently it was the night of flying waffles instead, and it bounced on down to the floor. 
Oops!
Overall, the Leonidas visit was definitely a good one. The hot chocolates were delicious, the waffles yummy, and the service was spot on.
And I love their cups. I could still feel the warmth of the hot drink, but no risk of dropping it or burning myself either. Next time I’m there, I’ll be sure to try some of their chocolates while I’m at it, too, mmm.
Oh right, and for our pre-cocoa dinner, we stopped at Caffee Artigiano for a roast leg of lamb sandwich with red pepper pepperonata, minted goat cheese, and rosemary aioli. Their sandwiches are hearty enough that one was plenty to split and head off for cocoa right after. :)
Cleary Fresh Bags Review
A while back…well, a long while back actually….Anne contacted me about reviewing the Clearly Fresh Bags. She was awesome enough to even ship me a sample to Canada. And then even more awesome by being patient while I disappeared to BlogHer and tried to get settled back in.
On the up side, though, I put fruit into the bags before I left for the conference for a week, so I was able to give a legit review of the bags. They worked great! I took some pictures, but they didn’t really turn out that well ‘cause you can’t tell much difference. I’ll show you some from their site, though, and will try to get better pictures from the next attempt with the bags I do. I don’t want to make these guys wait any more than I already have, though.
The video above gives some really good tips on how to use them. It’s kinda sad they can’t really be used more than a few times since you can’t wash them and still keep the BreatheWay patch working, but I don’t feel so bad because each use lasts a couple weeks really.
There’s a lot more information on how the bags work on the site, too. Basically, it let’s the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. :P I don’t know the details of what’s actually in the breathe membrane, but it seems to work.
So far, I’ve only tried them with a couple different types of produce (blueberries and lettuce), but I’m looking forward to trying them out with already cut fruits and things like peaches that seem to either last a while or go bad rather quickly. I’m wondering if they’d work well on mushrooms, too….they’re not on the list and not a fruit or veggie, but still a produce that tends to go bad.
Want to try them out yourself? It looks like you can buy them straight through the site for $4 for 10 bags. Keep in mind that the bags are really big, too, so you’re not buying little rinky-dink ziplocs here.
And if you have any other questions about them, feel free to ask in the comments or email me. I know I didn’t get too detailed here, but their site has a lot of great info and I’ll likely post about them again as I try them out more. :)
Kodak Photobook + BlogHer ‘11 = One heck of a scrapbook
A couple weeks ago, Foodbuzz Tastemaker Program sent me an email saying that I had been selected by Kodak Gallery to receive a free photobook. Awesome, right?
Except I had no idea what to do the book on and the email came just days before I left for BlogHer….with a two week deadline for a review. Yikes! At first, I figured I would do pictures of my food from here, but really, my photos aren’t that high of quality and do I really need a full book of them when I have a blog for that? Not really.
But riding the high from BlogHer, I saw the opportunity to put together a memory book of sorts from BlogHer….an event I will never forget.
At first glance, Kodak Gallery website is super easy. Select the book you want to make, hit “quickstart,” and you’re ready to upload photos either from your computer or directly from Facebook. The hardest part of this process is deciding which photos you want to use!
Now I did run into a few issues. The cover concept is great in that your cover photo is actually on the first page of the book and you view it through a hole in the cover. This is great to feature a large photo with the cover showing just a snippet of it.
For me, though, I didn’t realize this initially and spent quite a while putting together a collage that I thought represented “Quirky Cookery”….and then spent a much longer amount of time, tweaking the pixel size so that it would actually fit and show correctly through the cover viewfinder. Oy. With a larger picture, you can zoom in, but there’s no option to zoom out beyond the picture to make it smaller or anything.
(Slight variations of the same picture as I edited in PhotoShop repeatedly to get it just right. )
I uploaded and uploaded, rearranged, moved, added, saved, uploaded some more, and finally reached a point where I was sick of looking at my own pictures, ha. I didn’t even take the time to edit each photo as I probably should’ve, nor did I add captions as I would with future books. I was actually expecting a more elaborate editor directly in Kodak Gallery book section, but instead, I could really only do things like zoom or make it black and white or sepia. Not even crop really or adjust location beyond it automatically centering.
But for a quickstart option, this worked really well. It did most of the work for me and I just had to tell it where I wanted the photos.
When I decided to check out finally, my code didn’t work. Wah. It claimed it had already been redeemed, which it obviously hadn’t been because I’d been gone entirely and not even played with the site yet, much less created an account and tried to check out.
Customer service live chat was really quick, though, and after a few troubleshooting ideas, it finally went through correctly. While I would rather flawless execution on something like that, I’m kinda glad mine briefly glitched out so I had the opportunity to try out their customer support. Fransisco was super nice and even when he had to be silent while he looked into the matter, he checked back a couple times to apologize for delay and thank me for my patience, hehe.
Ultimately, it went rather smoothly and while it was kind of annoying not having a few more editing options, for a quickstart book, it was awesome.
And now it’s your turn. Until August 31, the medium and large books are 40% off. Before my code worked correctly, that showed my 20 page medium *hardback* book costing only $13. That’s cheaper than most books in general so for a personalized, customized book of your own with full glossy inside paper and Kodak quality printing, you certainly can’t complain.
(In case you missed the disclosure, reread the first line of this post. I did receive a book free from Foodbuzz Tastemaker and Kodak Gallery in exchange for an honest review. )
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