Alchemy

I read somewhere that alchemy started in the kitchen.

Yesterday, my Czech friend and I made chocolate covered strawberries to take to a birthday party:
1. three boxes of strawberries, fresh from the grocery store
2. melty dark chocolate
3. cheap, Euro-saver white chocolate.

They were beautiful. Where by beautiful, I mean they were chocolate and strawberry, so it's pretty much in the definition. As for what they looked like . . . let's just say that randomly chosen chocolate at the grocery store doesn't necessarily like to spread smoothly on just-washed, slippery strawberries, so you have to be a little creative.

But I was talking about alchemy. We discovered a way to turn white chocolate and cream into caramel! Not gold, exactly, but it was gold-colored. And had nothing to do with chocolate. But there is was, covering our strawberries, exactly the way caramel would. Tasted the same. Looked the same.

Maybe the store-bought white chocolate was so cheap, it was really just sugar, so that when you boiled it with cream, it caramelized . . . But no one said alchemy was supposed to be scientific. So, that was yesterday evening. Very delicious.