It's December 26, which means it's Boxing Day.
Poor Boxing Day: obscure, misunderstood, overshadowed by the day before. One vaguely senses that Boxing Day may have to do with British servants celebrating Christmas a day later than their masters. Or maybe it has to do with boxing up all the gifts you didn't like and exchanging them? Perhaps Boxing Day is just a shopping holiday, when retailers discount boxes and boxes of things they didn't sell before Christmas.
We at Voilà Chocolat humbly submit that Boxing Day should celebrate incredible Orangettes in adorable wooden boxes.
What are Orangettes? They are an ecstatic union of sweet candied orange peel and bittersweet crunchy silken chocolate. The simplest foods are often the most satisfying yet the hardest to get just right, like the perfect scrambled egg or al dente pasta. And what could be simpler than a mere three-ingredient confection: orange peel, natural sugar, fine tempered chocolate? That's all it is. And that's what makes it so hard to get right.
With his usual talent and aplomb, our Master Chocolatier has achieved the perfect balance of these three basic ingredients. Our Orangettes are nothing short of a triumph (if you're into chocolatey-orangey triumphs).
And yet, pity the poor Orangettes: since the boxes don't reveal their glorious contents at a glance, and since many people may not know what an "orangette" is just from the name, our Orangettes feel obscure, misunderstood, and overshadowed by the see-through boxes of decadent truffles and striking eco-tubes of housemade hot chocolate mixes on our shelves around them.
So we would like Boxing Day to become a day for boxes of Orangettes. We present our Orangettes to you swaddled in parchment paper inside unique balsa wood boxes. The boxes alone are pretty cool, and no doubt you will find other uses for them once you've consumed the contents (which we predict will take 48 hours or less, since they're that hard to resist).
Visit our chocolatiering atelier and store at 221 West 79th Street any time between 10am and 10pm on Boxing Day -- Friday December 26. Request a "Boxing Day Sample." And from behind the counter, we'll reveal our secret stash of samples of these chocolate-covered jewels for you to try.
We bet you'll leave with a box.
