Cooks show creativity with chocolate at Naperville fest
At the corner of Fudge Street and Truffle Way, hundreds sampled chocolate creations and learned sweet treat cooking tips Saturday during the ninth annual Chocolate Festival supporting 360 Youth Services.
Actually held at the Neuqua Valley High School Freshman Center in Naperville, the festival featured cooking demonstrations for kids and adults, baking competitions and more than a dozen companies vending chocolate desserts.
“You don’t really see a chocolate festival around a lot,” said festival volunteer Carolyn Portner. “That’s what I think is the best part of it — it’s very unique.”
Even the decor was one-of-a-kind, and all about candy. Festival volunteers adorned the school’s hallways, multipurpose rooms and classrooms with street signs like Fudge Street, Truffle Way and Chocolate Avenue, waist-high decorations made to look like lollipops and plate-sized mint decorations hanging from the ceilings.
Before the festival’s main event — judging of the baking competitions — attendees feasted their eyes on entries such as caramelicious brownies, an Oreo explosion cake and a chocolate cake made to look like a cheeseburger.
“It looks amazing, especially that cheeseburger,” said Hasina Thomas of Oswego, who attended the festival to support a member of her stay-at-home parents’ group who entered the contest. “They’re so creative.”
Desserts made by three members of the Killips family of Naperville — including Himalayan pink sea salt caramels and cupcake-shaped brownies with two layers of caramel — were part of the culinary creativity.
The family attended the festival so 13-year-old Nate and 9-year-old Michael could defend their first and second place finishes in last year’s kids’ division of the baking competition. And this year, their brother Alex, 11, also entered with a creation he called buncha cruncha fudge.
“I made fudge and then I added sugar cookie dough raw and granola bars,” Alex said.
And he had fun taste-testing the fudge with different sizes of granola bar pieces and cookie dough chunks until he got it just right.
While waiting for the judging to get started, the Killips brothers tried caramel sauce from GrownUp KidStuff, one of more than a dozen vendors offering samples and selling delicacies in the cafeteria. Other families took their kids to the youth cooking demonstration room where they could decorate cupcakes or make a chocolate pizza.
“It’s just very cute, creative things you can do with the demonstrations for kids,” Portner said.