The Chocolate Bar

In the olden days, chocolate was molded into clever shapes like ballerina slippers, racecars, and wine bottles.  It was this ability to present everyday items in sugary form that awed the consumer.  Truth be told, while there are still plenty of customers that revel in giving their childs teacher a red-foil coated chocolate apple, or their hair dresser an edible hair blower, the candy world has begun to follow in the footsteps of its confectionary cousin, the birthday cake.

It's what mom brought out at your seventh birthday party, eight candles aglow, with Happy Birthday Johnny scribed in bold, primary colored icing.  Like the Carvel ice cream cake of yesteryear, personalized chocolate makes its recipient feel equally and unabashedly as special.  Even the revered M&M offers its customers to trade in those highly recognizable initials in exchange for a bite-sized message or image. 

The appeal is not hard to grasp.  How many times does one find their name specifically placed on a widely loved food product (unless your name just happens to be Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, or Stacy the pita chip)?  There is a reason why tourists return from the Caribbean with personalized magnates; why celebrities wear initialed necklaces and monogrammed rings; and even why you can likely find a vendor in your local mall that will write your name on a grain of rice for just a few cents.   We are of a naturally narcissistic kind; so, naturally, the personalized chocolate bar is becoming an entity of enormous desire. 

But the real reason why the world is so enamored by the very idea of the chocolate bar (personalized or not) is because we have been indoctrinated since the early nineteen hundreds by Milton Hershey himself.  He pioneered the simple idea that has today burgeoned into a flourishing industry and that has developed a kind of chocolate-lovers cult following (I recently visited the Washington D.C. chocolate bar boutique, Biagio, featuring specialized bars of all beans from around the world).  There is no question, the chocolate bar is a foodie's playground, not only offering bars of various origins, textures, and flavors, but on an aesthetic level, giving off an artificial form of prestige that the product beneath the wrapper cannot achieve on its own.  And while perhaps you can't eat the wrapper, you can save it and its custom theme long after the chocolate has been devoured.  And that usually doesn't take long. 

By: Lazars Chocolate

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