I was lucky enough to get to re visit the wonderful Coombe Abbey Hotel in Coventry to do a chocolate fountain for newly weds and Andy Kerrie. It had been a perfect April day, warm, blue skies and a beautiful balmy evening. The whole hotel is stunning and steeped in history, with antique paintings at every turn. The room I set up the chocolate fountain  in was lovely, lit with silver candelabras, with just the light from our illumated base and the disco, it created a very ambient mood. The chocolate fountain was used steadily all evening by guests having a break from dancing to the music and chatting. It was a great evening and the bride and groom looked to be having a great time. As I was packing up to leave they came over to thank me for coming, but it is always a privilege to be involved in something as special as a wedding day, a day to treasure for always.

We provided a large 48″ 5 tier chocolate fountain for the Annual General Meeting for our local Waitrose in Salisbury. The meeting was held in The Salisbury Guildhall, which is a wonderful historic building. it used to hold the Magistrates courts but after extensive refurbishment in 2011, Salisbury District Council moved some of its offices into the building, and it is used as a venue for parties, weddings, all sorts of functions in fact. The partners listened to a talk and then the fun began! The doors opened and everyone flooded to the bar and the Buffet which had been provided. The disco then started up and the chocolate fountain was swamped with guests all eager to sample the delicious Belgium chocolate and fresh drippings items, which Included mini sugared donuts and cream filled profiteroles, yummy! We left the party with still an hour to go as the guests were bopping and having fun. This is something we can do very discreetly, as people very rarely want chocolate much past ten o’clock, then it’s all about the dancing!!!

The trees are made by coring out whole pineapples and threading them onto a catering steel pole which is firmly fixed into a large catering steel base so it won’t fall over. We then carefully, using a selection of yummy sweets, skewer each sweet with a cocktail stick into the pineapple cores in a circle. We then put another layer of different sweeties on top of them, making a pretty pattern going up the pineapples until we reach the top! Magnificent! Each Candy Fruit Palm Tree contains over 500 sweeties making it a great treat for all of your guests! if you are interested  in  more information or to book Fruit or candy palm trees  in London or any other part of the country click here.

Are you looking for something sweet for you and your guests at your next event?  Then our waffle station hire  might be what your looking for.

When you hire the  Waffle Station our experienced staff arrive with all the ingredients needed to make the waffles along with paper trays which catch all the tasty drips and dips!

We also supply  a selection of toppings such as chocolate,  nuts,  sprinkles and  cream. Your guests will be able to smell the waffles being freshly made and delight at the taste!

If you are interested in more information or to book  waffle station hire  contact us by clicking here

The study’s author, Franz Messerli of Columbia University, started wondering about the power of chocolate after reading that cocoa was good for you.

One paper suggested regular cocoa intake led to improved mental function in elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment, a condition which is often a precursor to dementia, he recalls.

“There is data in rats showing that they live longer and have better cognitive function when they eat chocolate, and even in snails you can show that the snail memory is actually improved,” he says.

So Messerli took the number of Nobel Prize winners in a country as an indicator of general national intelligence and compared that with the nation’s chocolate consumption. The results – published in the New England Journal of Medicine – were striking.

Chocolate consumption and Nobel laureates

“When you correlate the two – the chocolate consumption with the number of Nobel prize laureates per capita – there is an incredibly close relationship,” he says.

“This correlation has a ‘P value’ of 0.0001.” says Messerli. This means there is a less than one-in-10,000 probability of getting results like these if no correlation exists.

It might not surprise you that Switzerland came top of the chocolate-fuelled league of intelligence, having both the highest chocolate consumption per head and also the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita.

Sweden, however, was an anomaly. It had a very high number of Nobel laureates but its people consumed much less chocolate on average.

Messerli has a theory: “The Nobel prize obviously is donated or evaluated in Sweden [apart from the Peace Prize] so I thought that the Swedes might have a slightly patriotic bias.

The Swiss eat the most chocolate… and have been rewarded with the most Nobel Prizes, per head of population

“Or the other option is that the Swedes are excessively sensitive and only small amounts stimulate greatly their intelligence, so that might be the reason that they have so many Nobel Prize laureates.”

We conducted our own, entirely unscientific, survey to ascertain just how much chocolate Nobel laureates ate.

Christopher Pissarides, from the London School of Economics, reckons his chocolate consumption laid the foundations for his Nobel Prize for Economics in 2010.

“Throughout my life, ever since I was a young boy, chocolate was part of my diet. I would eat it on a daily basis. It’s one of the things I eat to cheer me up.

“To win a Nobel Prize you have to produce something that others haven’t thought about – chocolate that makes you feel good might contribute a little bit. Of course it’s not the main factor but… anything that contributes to a better life and a better outlook in your life then contributes to the quality of your work.”

However, Rolf Zinkernagel – the largely Swiss-educated 1996 Nobel Prize winner for medicine – bucks his national trend.

Swedes eat only half as much chocolate as Germans but the country has twice as many Nobel laureates per head… perhaps it’s down to the meatballs?

“I am an outlier, because I don’t eat more than – and never have eaten more than – half a kilogram of chocolate per year,” he says.

Robert Grubbs, an American who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2005, says he eats chocolate whenever possible.

“I had a friend who introduced me to chocolate and beer when we were younger. I have transferred that now to chocolate and red wine.

“I like to hike and I eat chocolate then, I eat chocolate whenever I can.”

But this is a controversial subject.

Grubbs’ countryman, Eric Cornell, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, told Reuters: “I attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount of chocolate that I consume. Personally I feel that milk chocolate makes you stupid… dark chocolate is the way to go. It’s one thing if you want a medicine or chemistry Nobel Prize but if you want a physics Nobel Prize it pretty much has got to be dark chocolate.”

But when More or Less contacted him to elaborate on this comment, he changed his tune.

“I deeply regret the rash remarks I made to the media. We scientists should strive to maintain objective neutrality and refrain from declaring our affiliation either with milk chocolate or with dark chocolate,” he said.

“Now I ask that the media kindly respect my family’s privacy in this difficult time.”

But while the Japanese clearly enjoy a cocoa-based snack, their chocolate consumption is relatively low – as is their Nobel Prize haul

It might surprise you that we are trying to make a serious point. This is a classic case where correlation, however strong, does not mean causation.

Messerli gave us another example. In post-war Germany, the human birth rate fell along with the stork population. Were fewer storks bringing fewer babies?

The answer was that more homes were being built, destroying the storks’ habitat. And the homes were small – not the sort of places you could raise a large family in.

“This is a very, very common way of thinking,” he says.

“When you see a correlation, you do think there is causation in one way or another. And in general it’s absolutely true. But here we have a classic example where we cannot find a good reason why these two correlate so closely.”

Low-fat preparations of chocolate are well known, but their textures tend not to match the real thing.

A report at an American Chemical Society meeting described a method using the popular gelling agent agar to make tiny “sponges” that displace fat.

University of Warwick researchers said water, fruit juice or even alcohol could replace up to half the fat.

When used with alcohol, Stefan Bon said they were like “tiny vodka jellies”.

What has held up such chemistry is making what is known as an emulsion – a thorough blend of materials that do not tend to mix, such as oil and water.

Normal chocolate gets much of its velvety feel from an emulsion of fat globules suspended within the solid.

Replacing those is tricky – any substitutes have to remain dispersed throughout the chocolate as it is heated and cooled to a solid, and they have to remain small.

Dr Bon said that the smooth texture of chocolate requires that the globules be smaller than about 30 millionths of a metre across – about half the width of a human hair.

The Warwick team first published an attempt to crack the problem in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.

That formulation made “armoured” spheres of liquid, using two materials – fumed silica, a form of the same material from which sand is made, and chitosan, a compound derived from shellfish.

‘Not healthy, but exciting’

That solution required that the liquid be slightly acidic, so the team used fruit juices.

“That was exciting because it had the combination of fruit juice and chocolate, and everybody went wild on it,” Dr Bon told BBC News.

“Then some people – especially in the UK – said: ‘but can we do alcohol?’

“We’ve been working very hard in the lab to make a system that can do that – instead of these armoured systems we then thought we could make tiny little vodka jellies.”

The new approach is simpler to carry out and more versatile in the replacements it can employ.

It also avoids any concerns consumers may have with the nano-structured fumed silica, or dietary restrictions on eating shellfish products.

“So you can stick to your fruit juice if you want, but you can also make a vodka-based chocolate bar, which is exciting – obviously not very healthy, but exciting,” Dr Bon said.

On a healthier note, he added that using the method with other liquids could lead to significantly reduced sugar content as well.

“It opens the route to different types of confectionery candy that can be placed on the shelf next to everything else that’s out there already,” he said.