Tag: Chocolate
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Give Your Sweetheart A Sweet Treat: Their Own Candy Bar
In the middle of Pennsylvania farmland and Amish country is a factory emitting the sweet aroma of chocolate. The town of Hershey is known as Chocolatetown, USA. Right smack dab in the center of town is Hershey’s Chocolate World, a visitor center immersing you in all things chocolate, as in all things Hershey.
Create Your Own Candy Bar
Entrance Chocolate wonks, or “Wonkas”, rejoice! Milton Hershey’s famed chocolate company opened in 1900. An entire community developed around the factory that produces the iconic Hershey’s Chocolate Bar and other confections.
Still, the Hershey Bar is king here, and you get to see the process of making one up close. Not just any chocolate bar, but one reflecting your personality, where you choose the ingredients and design your own chocolate wrapper. The Create Your Own Candy Bar experience is $26.95 per person, free for children under age 2. It’s fun, interactive, entertaining, and, of course, sweet tasting. The final product comes in a keepsake tin box with personalized wrapper. Your bar is thicker and bigger than the traditional Hershey Bar sold in stores.
Follow The Production Line
The journey begins at the entrance where you put on a sanitary apron, hair net, and face mask. Then you proceed to a computer screen. Type your name and choose your bar, milk or dark chocolate. Plus, add any two of seven choices of ingredients. I chose dark with pretzel bits and sprinkles. Or, you can go with a chocolate-only bar, but what fun would that be? Then follow your bar on the production line through every step of creation. The entire experience takes about 45-minutes. However, if you spend too much time at a second computer kiosk to design your bar’s wrapper, you can miss the final stages of production. There are so many design choices and layouts to choose from!
Candy Bar Start To Finish I ate my chocolate bar, but I can see making another to give as a gift to a special person with their favorite ingredients. That would be cool. In fact, you can order personalized chocolate bars from Hershey if you can’t make it to any of the Chocolate World locations. If you do go to the Hershey location for Create Your Own Candy Bar, an advanced reservation is required. There are a limited number of spaces available every day.
Chocolate World Concourse 
Ticket Booth Chocolate World has several attractions. Each priced separately, or can be bundled together to save some money. Create Your Own Candy Bar is the most popular and the sweetest of all.
Step-By-Step Candy Bar Making Video
Susan and Steve Geiger (The Mellow Wanderer) Steve and Susan Geiger visited Hershey, PA in August 2021. The retired couple live in Tampa, FL. They travel the USA and the world in search of interesting and fun destinations.
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Alluring Paris Sweets Almost Too Pretty To Eat
To this American tourist, walking into swank 86Champs, the Champs Elysees L’Occitane-Pierre Hermé shop, was beyond anything I expected. Who pairs skincare cream products with pastry? An unlikely marriage for sure, though it appears to be a relationship that is working.
Visiting a pastry shop was on the “to-do list” we emailed to our Paris guide before meeting her for a city tour. She picked a delightful place for a late afternoon guilty pleasure. In fact, for Parisians, it seems to be the norm. The shop was bustling as the workday ended during our visit. Pierre Hermé is a renowned award-winning French pastry chef who has several shops in Paris and around the world. After the hostess seated us, my wife and I scanned the elegant glass showcase of pastries, displayed like expensive fine art or prized jewelry. 
The decor was fashionable but not snooty, with friendly, attentive service. We felt very comfortable in our casual attire, but a bit ruffled and weary from a long day of touring. We had also just navigated our way through a labyrinth of demonstrators near the Arc de Triomphe, in what we later learned are weekly scheduled public worker strikes. I honestly don’t know exactly what I ordered, except I know chocolate was involved, and it was extraordinarily light and smooth; the natural pure taste of goodness unpolluted by additives or preservatives. 
Chocolate is also a French delicacy. Paris has more chocolate shops than any other city in the world- more than 300- according to ChocoParis, an internet blog dedicated to articles on Paris chocolate, ice cream, and pastry shops. Almost everywhere we walked in Paris we came to a chocolate shop. About a block away from our rented Saint-Germain one-room flat, we discovered Pralus, a small corner pâtisserie specializing in on-site fresh-baked pralines and fine chocolate. 
François Pralus began his career as a pastry chef and then became a master chocolatier. Pralus’ website says he fell in love with Madagascar and has owned a cocoa plantation there since 2000. Then there’s chocolate with a flair of fun and humor at the shops of Maison Georges Larnicol.The chocolatier builds towering structures, statues, and playful characters to the delight of children and adults. Larnicol even built a one-ton sailboat from chocolate, including chocolate sails, and launched it into a French harbor, powered by an outboard motor. Surprisingly, it did not sink. Chocolate is a symbol of French indulgence, a mainstay of the national palate like champagne and the croissant. A sweet experience to savor and remember.86CHAMPS
86Champs Cloth Napkin & L’Occitane Perfume Ribbon François Pralus
Pralus Tropical Pyramid Of Chocolate (Papua, Indonesia, Sao Tome, Trinidad, Venezuela, Tanzania, Ghana, Madagascar, Colombia, and Ecuador) Maison Georges Larnicol
Maison Georges Larnicol 
Maison Georges Larnicol 
Steve (Mellow Wander) and Susan Geiger traveled to Paris in June 2018 when they experienced this adventure in chocolate.
