Missing: One Sweet Tooth

For the past few years, I've pretty much revamped my mode o' eating, cutting out the masses of prepaired and highly processed foods that I used to live on (aside: I really believe that the chemical preservatives that I used to down with abandon have severely slowed down my own aging process. Really). In return, my palate has become more sensitive, and it allows me to actually taste the food that I eat. And until you make a major eating-style change like that, you really can't understand what that's like, but trust me, when I say taste, I really mean taste. Flavours explode. And sometimes overwhelm. Which brings me to last week.

I used to adore super-sweet things, and milk chocolate was my favourite type of snack. I avoided dark chocolate assiduously, as I found it far to bitter to enjoy.

These days, I adore dark chocolate and can't stand it's milky sister because all I can taste when I bite into it is sugar and milk fats, and nothing of the cocoa bean at all.

I bring this up because last week I gots me some Nutella, remembering how I loved to eat it directly from a spoon, and on top of things like ice cream. I loaded up a spoon, turned it over and, in turn, loaded up my taste buds. And pretty much gagged. Sugar - check. Milk - check. Fake vanilla - check. Where was the cocoa? Where were the hazelnuts? Overpowered by everything else, they were! And it made me sad. And it made me start to plot, and consider just what I would need to make my own, less sweet, less fake version of the spread. And then I pondered that since I already make an organic dark chocolate cinnamon peanut butter, how easy a cobbling a Nutella-like spread together would be.

Kitchen experiment ahead!