Chocolate!

Short Story & Playlist by Colin Herd, Essay & recipe by Claire Reynolds

Hi friends, I hope you all enjoyed this week’s chocolate episode and if you’ve not listened yet please do listen accompanied by your favourite cocoa creation. As soon as I’ve posted this I’m off for a bubble bath and a glass of wine, and as I’m home alone tonight I’m planning on having chocolate and cherries for dinner. I think it’s called a girl dinner, but I like to think of it as my brand of intuitive eating.

I’ve included my recipe for Chocolate Brownies, they are perfectly fudgy and delicious, I hope you make them and enjoy them.

Claire’s Super Chocolately Brownies 💝

Ingredients 
160g dark chocolate
5 medium or 4 large eggs
120g plain flour
230g butter - I like salted 🙌🏻 
450g caster sugar - just white caster sugar, the golden doesn’t quite work
60g cocoa powder - good quality dark one I like the green & blacks 

Preheat oven  to 180 C  

Line 20-30cm tin with baking parchment

Melt sugar with the butter in a large pan over a very low heat together. Once it’s melted and well combined incorporate the chocolate. Take off the heat when you add chocolate.

Beat the eggs separately then beat into chocolate mixture then stir in the flour and the cocoa powder.

Pour mixture into tin and bake for 30i-ish minutes. Should be ‘just’ firm but still wobble.
Leave to cool in tin.

These are amazing if stored in fridge - take on a really fudgy consistency, but this is a totally personal preference so don’t refrigerate them all! 

Here’s the playlist you’ve all been waiting for, DJ MilkyBarKid has worked tirelessly on this mix, so please comment below your favourite track.

Be Fitter and Meaner by Colin Herd

The man standing above me was wearing shorts. 

“That feel OK?”, he asked. 

I put a cork in the strenuous panting. A little suddenly. 

“Do you feel any improvement?” he said. 

The slogan on the shorts was Be Fitter & Meaner. 

“Is that new?” I asked, pointing. 
“Newish. We used to be called, Suck It Up, Don’t Suck It In, but people didn’t seem to get it.” 

I thought of the man (his name’s Jake) sitting over a pad with a pen and a mug of peppermint tea. The page was filled with scribbles and crossings out. In the margins there were doodles of topless men standing straight up with arms stretched out and angular six-packs drawn in. I thought of him chewing beef jerky. 

“Were you called that when I started?” 
I had been coming here every second day for seven months. I hadn’t realised it was called anything other than Jake. 

We were in his dad’s garage, which had been converted into a gym. There was a treadmill, some mats, free-standing weights and a post in either corner with elastic which we sometimes used for chest exercises. 
Most of the work was skipping, because the treadmill was broken. Jake was trying to sell it on Ebay because everyone was skipping now anyway. It would be summer soon and then we could run outside if we wanted to run but skipping works more of the core muscles. 

It was a confidence thing, to begin with. And revenge. My boyfriend got really nasty about my weight gain and then left. I felt better as soon as I started. 

The garage was connected to the house via a basement, so Jake’s wife and son often came and went during our sessions. His sister too. I never met the patriarch but I gathered he was in either taxis or taxes. It can be hard to distinguish those words without saying, “you mean taxis as in vroom vroom or taxes as in pay up please for the benefit of the state?” 

As I’d missed that chance for clarification, I tried to remain open to either possibility and just waited for a decisive clue. It rarely came up. We mostly talked about Jake’s other clients, local personal trainers, what chocolate and / or cakes and biscuits he’d eaten recently and divorce. 

“Must have been – that’s all we’ve ever been called.” 

It was Friday morning and that meant we trained together, for motivation. Mine, I think. So after Jake spotted me, it’d be my turn to watch him sweat his breakfast off. If he was a breakfast person. Which he told me on and on that he was. No Pain o Chocolate No Gain he said, pretty much rubbing it in my face.  

“I wonder if I knew that,” I said. 
“Which do you think is better?” Jake countered. 
“The new one’s way better.” 
“OK, get some water on board and then spot me.” 

Jake was increasing the weights on either side of the pole. About ten-fold. 
The rut I had got in before starting PT with Suck It Up, Don’t Suck It In wasn’t just weight-related. It was everything. I bought flowers all the time because I was too lazy to tidy the house but still wanted to spruce it up. Financially, I made what I’ve come to recognise as strange choices. 

When I started, I trained at 3pm but I got promoted to the 8am slot after 3 months when one of Jake’s clients went to jail. Neil had been training for a year when he went a bit loopy. Jake’ words. Don’t shoot the body-anxious. It came to a head on a public holiday for a royal wedding. 

As Jake puts it, Neil was on the treadmill when he suddenly flipped, smashing an elbow into the control panel before driving his car straight into the window of a nearby cake decorating shop. When they found him, his mouth was covered in yellow icing because Minions were all the rage. 

Jake’s cheeks and arms were shiny. His legs vibrated and his teeth chattered. He didn’t pant as much as me but he certainly grunted. 

The light in the garage was blue. There were two ginger aromatherapy diffusers that stung the eyes even before you started sweating. Jake blared pop dance from his iphone except when his wife called and it cut out. I appreciated those moments. 
The half of their conversation I heard was usually stilted and intriguing. I don’t think she believed he was always training people when he said he was. Sometimes Jake would put the phone to my ear and I’d have to say yes I’m training and I’m a man and grunt but not in that way. 

Jake started counting down from ten. His whole body wobbled with the effort. 

“Feel OK?”, I asked. 
It was times like this that I regretted not fully having clarified what my role as “spotter” entailed. 
His head wobbled up and down. He said the word “six” and grunted loudly. 

Technically, I was out of work, so 8am or 3pm was tomato tomato, hot chocolate chocolat chaud to me, but it was in recognition of my dedication. I had never cancelled a session or slept in. 

Neither had I broken down in tears, which was pretty common. Always the men, Jake said, and almost always about impotence and/or financial pressures. He had a bench outside that he called the Memorial Bench for when people needed to what did Mike Skinner call it again?

He had gradually cut down calling me “big one” and “big man”. I didn’t weigh myself so this had to do as a progress report. 

It didn’t seem likely I would cry in front of Jake. I saved my tears for television, where even cookery programmes set me off, a total sucker for anything where people triumph over adversity. Even the new series where the judges have been revealed as racist sex pests would likely have me blubbering into my memorial sofa. 
“Three,” Jake squawked, and veins popped all over his neck and chest. 
“Nearly there, buddy,” I offered. 
Two months into our training, when I went for a job teaching at a college, Jake had tried to motivate and encourage me. He showed me a photo of what I looked like when I first started and had me stand in front of a mirror. 

“That’s what you can do when you put your mind to it,” he said. 

On my C.V, I added Weight Training to my hobbies but they didn’t bring it up at the interview. 

After he gasped “One”, Jake finished the set and I did 20 push-ups while he got his breath back over by the aromatherapy station. 

There were A3 posters of him flexing on the walls all over the gym and I stared at one while I finished off with a plank. 

“Why meaner?” I asked 
I timed myself on the plank. 
Jake’s sister came up through the basement with 4 plastic tubs of chicken, spinach and quinoa. As well as two choco protein balls. This was a new scheme I was guinea pigging where Jake and/or his family provided me with nutritionally balanced meals for £25 a week extra on top of the training. It was working out but you had to like chicken, spinach and quinoa because Jake didn’t like cooking salmon. 

She laid them on the bench Jake had just got up off and I nodded thanks as best I could then hauled myself up. 
“You could say ‘Fitter and Nicer’ or ‘Fitter and Kinder’. Would people rather be mean?” 

Jake laughed or coughed, his head between his legs. 

“My arms are completely numb. I worked to the brink – that’s how you improve.” 

“You look wiped.” 

The bottoms of the tubs were warm and I could smell the iron of the spinach. It’s amazing how good I’d got at stilted, admiring convos. The music was Shakira. The balls bore no resemblance to any chocolate I’d ever tasted before.

“I don’t honestly know the reason you don’t make me cry,” I said. 

Jake had really worked his socks off on the weights and his silence was breathy. He always got carried away when we trained together which is why I was pleased this treat was only once per week. 

The tupperwares reminded me of school. 

Jake managed a too-perfectly-toothed smile in between pants and I took it to mean my hour was up.

Chocolate & Painted Eggs by Claire Reynolds

Like most mothers, mine wanted us to have good, strong, teeth and about once a month on a Friday night (of all the nights to pick) she would take us to the bathroom with a disclosing tablet. A wee sour tasting purple tablet that you’d crush down in your mouth and use a little water to swirl it around, then spit. It left purple stains where there was any trace of debris or plaque. I’d always have the least amount of staining. Probably the only game I came first at growing up. None of us had any tooth cavities as children, and mum was and is still really proud of that. I have one small filling now; I got it when I was thirty-two and put off telling her for a week. I do realise I didn’t have to tell her, but the complexity of our relationship means I tend to tell her everything. I’m an oversharer in general. 

          My mum preferred we have chocolate as a treat over candy, she particularly frowned on lollypops, which were my favourite sweet to have. Luckily my best friend would bring me back a small plastic tin filled with Chupa Chups from her holiday in Benidorm every summer which would last me until around Christmas when she’d go back to Benidorm and bring back more. My favourite was the coco cream flavoured Chupa Chup that almost tasted like coffee. One year she also gave me an unopened condom. She told me a condom was like an oyster wrapped in foil that a man gave to a woman when he wanted to have a baby with her. I believe her for the longest time because of my lack of sex education. 

          Chocolate always felt like such a treat because we’d only really get it at home on Friday nights after my mum and dad did the big shop. I’d choose a Bounty or Fry’s Cream. My best friend’s dad would get us chocolate from the shop on the way home from mass on a Saturday night, so we’d try to wangle it so she would be at my house on a Friday, and I’d be at her on a Saturday for double chocolate exposure. Easter, after a long chocolateless Lent always felt sacred to me, but my worship was all for chocolate and less for Big JC. I'd count down the days and was entirely too excited about Easter morning. My mum and dad would have laid the breakfast table the night before with flowers and in each of our placemats would be our Easter Egg, and in an eggcup a beautiful hand painted egg by my dad. I look back most fondly at the hand painted eggs. The care he took to include our favourite colours, the precision with which they were painted.Mine was always especially feminine and pretty, florals and birds and horses. My brother's were bolder and boyish. At the time though, my focus was on the chocolate. After mass we’d take our eggs to the park and roll them down the hill. Then, finally, we’d get to open and eat as much as we wanted. In theory. Mostly I’d be acting out because of all the sugar which would give them an excuse to take it from me. 

          I worked with a woman in the bank who always kept dark chocolate in her desk drawer in case any of us needed it. Needed it. If our asshole of a boss shouted at us, if a customer went radge over a fiver, if we were all made to stay an hour after closing because a teller’s float wouldn’t balance. Or the time all of our menstrual cycles synced up, wee Jeanie was prepared with her drawer full of Bournville, Twirls and Flakes. 
Even my mum, who raises an eye at most things I eat, didn’t raise an eye if I was eating chocolate when I had my period. My craving for it manifests towards the end of the luteal phase and heralds the time that feels sweetly cursed for more reasons than chocolate and cramps.

          Thirty years of this monthly ritual and it’s always been sponsored by chocolate. The ritual is refined now that I can afford the time for self-care and not have to mask through a day or two of pain. Recent refinements now include fresh bedsheets. Two hot water bottles. Ibuprofen. Co-codamol. No stupid questions. Minimal exposure to the male species. Bubble baths. Bougie candles and early nights. The chocolate is always dark. Thin and crisp and yes, with sea salt, or mint, or orange peel. Dark chocolate is higher in magnesium which can help relax muscles. It doesn’t put a dent in my pain but helps in its own tender way. None of this is necessary, I managed perfectly without it for years, but it feels like the last hoorah, these next ten, twenty, who knows, periods. When you’ve spent years crying over having them, over not having them, over them being a monthly reminder of an empty womb, let’s just kid on as the whole thing starts the slow grind to a halt, that it was like a Tampax add. You ran on the beach in white jeans. You swam, you cartwheeled, you smiled a genuine smile at your husband, you laughed at his jokes. No you didn’t. In truth the only good thing about it is the chocolate. 

          I’ve always been really good at toxic relationships. So, no surprise that I seem to be holding on to these last years of shedding the lining of the womb with sentiment. The more irrational and painful my cycles have become, the more I’ve tried to personify the symptoms, reasoning that they’re going out with a bang, making themselves heard and felt across my body so I won’t forget them. I don’t know if it’s the amped up decadence with which I’m ritualising them, or a feeling of wanting to remember the dull aching of my body doing what it’s ‘supposed to’. Trying to relish in a feeling of the ultimate feminine before it departs and hopefully I get to live another couple of decades. Or maybe I’m just trying to paint blue skies over what’s really another month where my childlessness bleeds all over my life. In the jokes I make to my friends about not having to go to soft play, sleeping as late as I want in the day, not having to spend my holidays in euro camp. The my life’s so great without kids often feels Oscar worthy.  I’m interested in why I’m trying to romanticise this monthly reminder of loss. Surely I should be bounding towards menopause with abandon?  Maybe I can go back to a simpler relationship with chocolate, not bound up in pain.Have chocolate breakfasts like a childhood Easters every month, with flowers and chocolate and painted eggs. 

Thanks for reading, do let us know your favourite tracks from the playlist!

More next week on Hot Chocolate!

Claire & Colin xoxo