“It’s something that we can control in a place during the pandemic when we have been out of control,” she said. “We don’t know when it’s going to end.” The hot chocolate bomb offers a gratification that we can wrap our hands and minds around. “We know something’s going to happen instantaneously. And so, that’s exciting, and we get to master it.”
For Julie Dugdale, 41, a freelance writer in Denver, who was recently given a set of the hot chocolate bombs, the treats feel, indeed, like an antidote to the world’s current chaos.
“It’s this huge, fun, bursty, melty glob of — you don’t even know what’s going to happen,” she said. “But you don’t have to worry about it going anywhere, or spilling anywhere, or being something that you didn’t realize was going to happen and not being able to clean it up or deal with it.”
Ms. Dugdale, who has two sons (an 18-month-old and a 3-year-old), said that her world is “very small” right now and that she is “constantly looking for new things” to deliver “surprise and delight.” Her youngest child has spent half of his life amid the pandemic.
“He doesn’t know any different,” she said. With that in mind, the simple melting of a chocolate bomb in a sea of hot milk, marshmallows afloat for mere seconds before their inevitable dissolution, can feel like this year’s necessary magic.
In the end, the hot chocolate bomb may be the ultimate memorial to 2020, the jettisoning of emotion in a year where it has previously been bottled up. Under pressure, everything was bound to crack open. Call it the perfect metaphor for the moment, held together by a fragile chocolate shell.