For my daughter’s 7th birthday party, we chose a chocolate theme. Along with other activities, we conducted a chocolate tasting.
These tastings, like wine tastings, are often pretty sophisticated events, and the materials that are readily available are so complex and nuanced I thought they might be a bit much for elementary children, so I made a kit of our own.
The Chocolate Tasting Kit
This kit contains three, or four, elements, depending on how you look at it.
1) There’s a set of printable instructions for “how to be a chocolate connoisseur.” This is an explanation of what a connoisseur is, and how to conduct a chocolate tasting. It’s put in simple language so kids can understand it, but this could be very useful for adults who are new to the process, too.
2) There are simplified chocolate flavor wheels. This is the most “child-oriented” part of the kit. There’s a full-page version and there’s a 4-up version so you can print smaller cards to put in favors.
3) The final piece of the kit is chocolate tasting mats. These each have six squares for holding the different chocolate selections, and have a border strip where you can put your own decorations to coordinate with your party theme. I recommend laminating these (after decorating) so they can be wiped clean.
If you’re wanting to use this with adults, I recommend finding a more typical chocolate flavor wheel. Unfortunately, the one I prefer seems to no longer be available. You can buy a whole curated tasting kit from them, but as far as I can tell, you can’t access only the flavor wheel.
[…] make a healthy, allergy-friendly alternative to more common “tastings,” like wine and chocolate, so I pulled together all the information I could scrounge up on the […]