Gosh, Ellen and Ben, what a big pile of chocolate bars you have!

Yes, we know. The ladybug is chocolate, too!

This weekend we went to Cologne, Germany to visit the Schokoladen Museum. Oh yes, a museum all about chocolate. It has the typical museum-y part, explaining things like cocoa production and the history of chocolate. And that's nice, I guess. But even cooler than that, it has a scaled down factory showing how the chocolate is actually made and formed into little bars, truffles, and stuff.



It was very neat.

And, also, there was a chocolate fountain!

With a woman standing there continuously dipping wafers into chocolate and giving them out to everyone. Very very neat.

The museum was very fun and educational and all that. And I do admit that I stared at all the machines mixing, dispensing, molding, sorting, and wrapping for quite a while. But we both agreed that the restaurant at the museum was more fun than the museum itself. The menu had, of course, about 50 kinds of chocolate cake (okay, maybe I'm exaggerating), but it also had a large selection of different kinds of hot chocolate. Ben had ordered a beer to drink with lunch, but when he saw the hot chocolate called "Spirit of the Aztecs", he changed his order. Spirit of the Aztecs is hot cocoa with rum, tequila, tabasco sauce, red pepper flakes, and possibly something else, but we can't remember. Sounds dangerous, yes? Ben, not being able to look danger in the face and walk away, had to have it. So we got that, a slab o'chocolate cake, and a pizza-like "tarte" that was really really delicious.



The Spirit of the Aztecs proved to be too potent for Ben's delicate tastebuds, so I took over the chocolate drinking duties and found it to be surprisingly delicious, at least until I got to the bottom of the glass and kept sucking up little bits of red pepper through the straw. That was a little icky. But the food was absolutely delicious, even the tarte which had not even a trace of chocolate on it.

My very favorite picture from the day is this one:

Because I look like the CEO of the Chocolate Museum, which is like one step away from being Queen of Chocolatopia.