Need to keep an eye on your health? How about some chocolate? Not only is chocolate a delicious treat, but it's actually very healthy for you – if you have the real stuff that is, not candy. Here are some of the major benefits to consuming chocolate regularly.

There are few things as comforting as a cup of hot chocolate, and with Legacy’s Gourmet Hot Cocoa Mix you are guaranteed quality along with taste. Unlike many mass-produced brands that list a paragraph of chemicals you cannot pronounce as their ingredients, our Hot Cocoa Mix only contains two ingredients – cocoa rouge cocoa powder and evaporated cane juice sugar. Looking to jazz-up your hot cocoa? Here are a few suggestions to experiment with the next time you're preparing a cup.

Look in any bookstore and you will discover dozens of books to teach you the best way to pair wine and food. Ask the bartender at your local pub for the perfect beer to match your meal and you are sure to find a new favorite. But what if your favorite drink is coffee? Is the perfect culinary pairing for coffee a donut, bagel or bran muffin? No. It is chocolate.

In our last post, we talked about some common chocolate-related vocabulary words. Today we've added some additional chocolate terms to our reference list. Couverture: high-quality, glossy chocolate used by professional chocolatiers for dipping handmade confections, though it can be used for eating or baking. Couverture (French for 'covering') has a higher percentage of cocoa butter than other chocolates, enabling it to form a thinner shell.

Have you ever wondered what certain chocolate terms you have heard mean or what the chocolate product you purchased contains? Here is a listing of popular chocolate terms to reference.

Chocolate should be kept in a cool, dry place. Heat can cause bloom, which is a grayish-white coating formed from the cocoa butter compounds separating and crystallizing on the surface. If the chocolate is used for baking, the bloom will disappear once the chocolate melts. Bloom can also arise from humidity. Sugar bloom, as this type is known, results when moist air draws the sugar to the surface, where it recrystallizes to form a gray substance. Unlike heat bloom, sugar bloom does affect taste ...

Many of you have already seen the piles are colorfully packaged mini treats in your local grocery store, hardware store, heck - even the farm supply store. The impulse reaction is to not only pick some up for the cute kids who will be knocking on your door, but to have a small stash for your household (or perhaps a secret one for yourself). Instead of opting for stale chocolate "candy" made months ago and that contains preservatives, serve up some homemade treats made with real chocolate for you...

I was making my way through the skyway system in St Paul from near Rice Park to Union Depot when something caught my eye. Well, it caught my nose first: a blend of freshly ground coffee beans and chocolate. It wasn't hard to find the source. Just to my left was Legacy Chocolates, a coffee and artisan chocolate shop located in the Pioneer-Endicott building. Drawn in by the wonderful aroma, I looked around, not knowing what to get. At the front the proprietors had set out some samples of their cho...

The dog days of summer are behind us, and warm days bring the summer's bounty into view while cool nights let us sleep comfortably. It's a great time of year to experiment with new recipes. Why not combine some of the fall harvest with our famous artesanal chocolates.

Cocoa beans don’t grow in the United States, do they? After all, one normally associates them more with the tropics than the snow-choked plains of the US. In fact, this holds true for our country, too. Cocoa beans do indeed grow in the USA, but only in very limited areas. There is a narrow band known as the Cocoa Bet or the Chocolate Belt. That sounds more enticing that the Rust Belt or the Snow Belt! The Cocoa Belt essentially follows the tropics, extending twenty degrees north and south of th...