EMPS: Strange Brew - Electric Chocolate!

Generic hot cocoa from an office Christmas gift, weird Disney cocoa and the good stuff.

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #12, Carly wants to see pictures of hot beverages. We have a number of boxes of tea floating around the Kitchen of the Museum of the Weird, and John probably has some coffee. But none of that is remotely as visually interesting as our stash of hot cocoa. In fact, our hot chocolate is more for the eyes than the taste buds, as we shall see.

The exceedingly generic-looking cocoa tin on the left was part of an office gift from one of my supervisors last Christmas. I've never been able to make myself try this off-brand cocoa, but I like the packaging. The three tins in the middle are from a sample pack we got at Downtown Disney's World of Disney store in Anaheim a couple of years ago. This Disney hot chocolate comes in Sorcerer Blue, Galaxy Green and Rock 'N' Roll Red. And I don't mean just the tins. The hot chocolate itself comes in those colors!

Handmade rabbit cup from Mount Lemmon, classic green mug

To show these to you, I pulled out two of our more interesting cups to hold the cocoa. The one on the left is a handmade pottery cup I bought on Mount Lemmon many years ago. It's dated 1987. The green mug is more recent. It reminds my of Giles's cup on Buffy, and of classic Jadite.

But you want to see the actual hot beverage, don't you? Very well, then. Check out Mickey's favorite, the blue hot chocolate!

This is the actual color.

I did not tweak the color at all on the photo above. It really looks like that.

Buzz Lightyear's fave: Galaxy Green

And here is the green. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough green cocoa left to get it as dark as it can be, or to make it worth drinking.

I drank only a sip of the green cocoa tonight, and none of the blue. I cloned the evidence out of the blue cocoa photo, but the fact is that my three year old cocoa was, well, infested. So now the blue and green tins are empty, but we'll keep 'em for display as souvenirs. As for the red, well, somehow that color never appealed to me as a color for hot chocolate. I don't even want to open that tin at this point.

Psychedelic cocoa!

But as long as we're having fun with hot chocolate in odd colors, let's play with the concept a little more. This is the green cocoa, solarized, with a second layer added using the neon edges effect and I forget what else. It's the Electric Cocoa Acid Test!

Be sure to check Ellipsis every Monday for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, and for links to the previous week's entries.

Karen

P.S. Jama asks what the oddly colored hot chocolate tastes like. It tastes like hot chocolate. Not the best, richest, most wonderful and flavorful hot chocolate ever, but sort of run of the mill, not too sweet, not quite chocolately enough hot chocolate. On the other hand, mediocre hot chocolate doesn't give you that unpleasant feeling of cocoa overload midway through the second cup. Oh, and no dehydrated marshmallows.