Yummm!!! $50 gift certificate from top-notch Black Dinah Chocolatiers of Isle au Haut (Maine), featured by Martha Stewart, no less!

"Here, on a remote Maine island, nestled into the long shadows of Black Dinah Mountain, we craft beautiful chocolates completely by hand. Inspired by fresh, local ingredients and our love of flavors from the tiny corners of the world, our imagination explores the seven seas, right here in our kitchen.

About Our Chocolate

What the heck is ganache?... and other good things to know about our chocolates...

In its most basic form, ganache—[guh-nahsh]—is a silky smooth emulsion of chocolate and cream that makes up the center of a chocolate truffle. Sometimes truffles are simply balls or squares of ganache dusted with cocoa powder, sometimes they are enrobed in a thin chocolate shell (called couverture), and sometimes the ganache truffle centers are encased in beautiful molds of pure chocolate (often called pralines).

At Black Dinah, we make our ganache by infusing locally produced cream with a wide variety of locally grown, organic herbs, flowers and fruits, and whole spices. After carefully straining these out, we add locally produced butter and the very best Belgian, Venezuelan, and rare Peruvian chocolates. The result is a very smooth, appealingly firm ganache that we then enrobe or mold with hand-tempered chocolate into beautiful shapes.

Because the very best chocolates deserve the very freshest, tastiest ingredients, we buy from local farmers and producers whenever we can. And because we believe in sustainable agriculture and feel strongly that farmers of the best cacao in the world should get an above market price for their products, we use single-origin Venezuelan couverture that has been fairly traded and grown with respect for the land and the human and animal communities that live there."