What can I say? I love chocolate. And chocolate festivals are right up my alley. I must admit that I was pining for all those amazing Melbourne chocolate cafés that I reviewed here some months back so it was a happy surprise to find out about a local-ish outpouring of chocolate love for the public at the annual Chocolate Lovers Festival in Fairfax, VA.
I snagged a friend and we drove down for this lovely weekend event and was absolutely flabbergasted at how long the line was! It’s long. Located in Old Town Fairfax there was a line 30 minutes long wrapping around the side of the building to get to all the chocolate vendors.
Was the wait worth it? Hrm, I suppose if for no other reason than to be surrounded by booths of good chocolate. Once ushered inside we exchanged our dollars for the local currency – paper pogs with the chocolate logo – as the vendors do not accept cash or cards. Apparently this is so vendors don’t have to worry about making change due to the high volume of people but it was a minor annoyance for me as I only brought limited cash on my person so I had to be very choosy about what I purchased. Bummer.
The inside of the first floor was absolutely jam-packed with people meandering around and looking at all the chocolate booths. Most were selling a variety of chocolate truffles and candy bars with some chocolate-dipped fruit and chocolate cakes and pastries floating around as well. There was also a wrap-around line interrupting some of the booths to get upstairs which held the much-coveted chocolate fondue fountain where for a pog or two skewers of fruit, marshmallows, or crispy treats were on hand for dipping into either dark or milk chocolate.
I ended up with a slice of German chocolate cake, a chocolate-marzipan pastry, two bits of Belgium milk chocolate, and a variety of assorted milk and dark truffles with my limited pogs. The cake was moist but not super chocolate-y which was a bit sad, the marzipan pastry was quite good and I was a huge fan of the marzipan-crème filling, the larger truffles were pretty decent (rose-cardamom and dark chocolate banana), the small 3-for-1-pog truffles were ok as well but nothing to write home about. The winner of the day was (surprisingly) the simple Belgium chocolate squares with a cute little robot on the front. Sometimes simplicity is a good thing.
Sweet, sweet munchies acquired my friend and I headed back for the drive home, most of the afternoon gone to the chocolate gods. All in all it was fun to have the opportunity to check out some local chocolate vendors but the room it was held in was rather stifling. My hope for any future events would be that a new venue is chosen, one that can handle the large influx of people to this very popular event.
Well, I got to nibble on decent chocolate for the next couple of days so it couldn’t have been all that bad, right?!
To anyone who goes next year be forewarned of the long lines and make sure to bring enough cash for all your chocolate purchases.
Happy chocolating!
