Sunday, January 25, 2004


regional coffee culture, part xvi

or maybe i should call this global youth culture, part i.

""tea is boring, and a drink more for the older folks," says a 19-year old law student. . . in sri lanka. that's right, sri lanka, formerly land of tea.

hey, she said it, i didn't! if this hip young legal eagle is like the rest of her global student compatriots, she's drinking at least one vanilla latte a day.

what's happening is that asia is turning to coffee. you can see this not only by googling the news, but also by going to coffee.meetup.com and looking at the members tab to size of the coffee groups in various cities around the world.

many of the larger groups meet in asian cosmopolitan areas: hong kong, singapore. this is a very interesting development and encourages me to consider talking to my coffee friends about aggressively expanding the scaa consumer membership program. . .

as for those truffles: umm, they are all rough, knobby, and lovely looking. i think truffles are most attractive when they look like the real ones. i roll my in cocoa to emulate black truffles, and in powdered sugar to emulate white.

some people like a little crunch, so i also sometimes roll the truffle in superfine cinnamon sugar and then in cocoa. if you like cinnamon but no crunch, mix some in with the cocoa you're dusting the truffles in.

either way, i made up about 55-60 truffles yesterday, and put some away in the freezer, the rest in the fridge.

the problem i had i thought was how to attractively package these to give away as gifts. following the truffle theme, i wanted a brown, rough, country-sort-of-looking brown box, lined with mocha or beige paper. these handmade truffles usually don't fit well in commercial fluted candy-cup papers.

so how to wrap them? real truffles are often sold or displayed on straw. how to mimic that? and still be hygenic of course.

i'd wrap the box with colored and braided twine to keep up the rustic theme. but how to wrap the truffles themselves? hmmm. . .

as i pondered these presentation issues i noticed the truffles were disappearing over the course of the afternoon from their little tupperware in the fridge. aha! the culprit. . .could it be mr. right?

thus while i worried over my supposed gift-giving problem, i failed to notice that i actually had a truffle-supply problem. . .suddenly i realized i had gone from truffle surplus to truffle deficit.

problem solved!

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