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For my next blend, I wanted to use bananas.  I think bananas and chocolate are a great combo.  Peanut Butter + Chocolate was blend in my mind, but I have too many nutty blends at the moment.   I wanted to work with a unique spice, thus cardamom.

Cardamom is a very difficult spice to incorporate into foods.   It’s super strong and it can be overpowering as I found out the past couple of weeks.  It’s not like I can use milk or flour to help spread the intensity.  You put 2 intense ingredients together and things can go array quickly.  So I put 2 little pods in a 13# batch of chocolate and it was STRONG!  I kept adding 5 # increments of chocolate and after being in the kitchen until 2:00 AM last week, I decided that I needed to let this puppy sit so I could muster up enough energy to tackle this again.

Was in the kitchen last night and made it my mission to win this fight.  So I took about 1/4 of the original batch I made last week and stone ground it with more chocolate.  But I thought I’d make the blend a bit sweeter to about a 58% cacao.  It was too sweet!  So I ground 75% cacao and mixed it with the 58% cacao and WaLa!  It turned out perfectly!  The bits of chewy bananas with a hint of the cardamom is just right!  TKO!  Now I just have about 20# of chocolate + cardamom.  Well, you know what kind of chocolate I’ll be selling at the market for the next few weeks.  But Banana is the theme for the next month.