Umami Mart

We’re in Japan at the moment and there are luxurious, sparkling boxes of chocolates everywhere being sold for “White Day”. Huh? Oh yah, that’s right, it’s the day, one month after Valentine’s Day, when men give women chocolates. HUH??!?!? It’s true. In Japan, it is tradition for the ladies to gift chocolates to the men […]

Brazil has a serious love for condensed milk in their desserts and brigadeiro is the #1 most commonly made of them all. It is the holy grail of condensed milk, butter, and cocoa powdered chocolate. They make for a seriously awesome ball of thick chocolate, covered in sprinkles. The chocolate sweet is named after the […]

*Nahoko Morimoto is a Tokyo-based photographer. Her work has been featured in Brutus and Vogue Japan.

There’s a big financial crisis pillaging through the poor, run down viking villages of Denmark. It’s the revisiting ghost from 2008. Even though we’re still doing better than many of the South European countries, a lot of people are being laid off work and therefore no one’s shopping. At all. All my self-employed friends who […]

Brownies come many a kind — I like these particular ones because they’re very light and discrete in flavour which means you can eat the whole cake and not feel overstuffed (even though you most certainly will be). To me, brownies should be heavy, soggy, small bricks of chocolate. This is a recipe I’ve been playing […]

Photos by Travis LoDolce. The history of chocolate-making in the Bay Area runs deep. Ghiradelli, Scharffen Berger, and Guittard are some of the big names in chocolate that started here, and the community of smaller, more artisinal chocolatiers continues to grow. Clearly, San Francisco is a place for chocolate-lovers; and for the die-hards, a thriving […]

My first introduction to TCHO chocolates was in 2007, working in New York City. My friend Fumiko, who worked closely with Silicon Valley techie innovators, handed me a bar and told me that it was the next big thing in chocolate. She was right. Started by the founders of Wired magazine, TCHO is the only […]

I really wanted to do a special Christmassey cocktail for you all but in the end I couldn’t really get my mental mojo into it– sorry, folks. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always enjoyed the special feeling the season invokes despite being an avowed atheist. I think I’m like most people in that sense, who […]

This weekend two designer friends Louise Gaarmann, Tina Ratzer and I threw a “julestue” (directly translated: “christmas livingroom”) which is sort of a Christmas market with things to buy and stuff to snack on– but in my apartment and not in a local store. It was an experiment and I was biting my teeth beforehand. […]

I love food with personality. And I have the feeling it loves me back– especially in Japan. Working as a character designer, I’m a junkie for Japanese packaging which more than usual sports a happy face, a friendly helper or just an enormous surplus of humour and fun which we boring, sad people of the […]