Death By Chocolate

When Augustus Gloop, the obnoxious and greedy dolt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, drowned in a river of chocolate, families all over the world nodded in unison: If it’s my time, they all agreed, death by chocolate sure as hell beats getting flattened by a semi or dying of...

By Lori Midson

May 6, 2010

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When Augustus Gloop, the obnoxious and greedy dolt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, drowned in a river of chocolate, families all over the world nodded in unison: If it’s my time, they all agreed, death by chocolate sure as hell beats getting flattened by a semi or dying of suffocation at the hands of an Oompa-Loompa.

This weekend’s Colorado Chocolate Festival, a sugar stomp that’ll leave you high on cocoa, presents booth after booth after booth of intoxicating chocolates from virginal white and the darkest ebony to sweet and bitter, with nuts and candy, wine and liqueurs, elaborately decorated with flowers, woven into wedding cakes, chipped into cookies, iced with dots, squiggles and stripes, smeared onto human bodies and massaged into shoulders. The hedonistic festival — all 30,000-square-feet of it — also includes a Colorado Chocolate Queen contest, a no-hands-allowed chocolate pudding-eating contest, a chocolate spa, a chocolate wedding cake competition and a Mother’s Day market that peddles both chocolate and non-chocolate gifts.

It all goes down between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. at the Denver Merchandise Mart, 451 East 58th Avenue. Tickets are $7 for adults and $3 for kids ages five to twelve; kids under five get in free. Get tickets at www.chocolate-festival.org or at the door.
Fri., May 7, 6-10 p.m.; Sat., May 8, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., 2010

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