So asks reader Konrad in Poland. And he’s not talking about what happens when you store bar chocolate improperly and you get that powdery film on it. He’s referring to the process of combining cocoa powder with boiling water. It’s a step that’s used in many cake and brownie recipes to boost chocolate flavor.

Konrad, thanks for a fun question. “Blooming” does a couple of things to cocoa powder. Firstly and most importantly, it frees up bits of cocoa solids to disperse in the batter. Cocoa powder appears uniform when you look at it, but it isn’t. If you were to examine it under a microscope you’d see that, like flour, it is composed of many different-sized bits of ground endosperm, a large number of which are at least partially sheathed in pieces of membrane, which is found in abundance throughout the endosperm itself. Those pieces of membrane don’t have much flavor. Which means that any bit of surface area they occupy on the endosperm particle is that much cocoa we don’t get to taste, because the membrane prevents the cocoa from contacting our taste buds. Boiling water helps those bits of seed coat and membrane to release, and as a result the chocolate flavor is enhanced. Some claim that combining cocoa with boiling water doubles the chocolate flavor. That seems overly optimistic to me, but it might well be true.

So where were we? Ah yes, the xuixo. This one’s great for 2020, as it’s connected to a plague outbreak in Girona, Catalonia. As the story goes, several cases of plague occurred along the Carrer de l’Argenteria, a street in the city’s mercantile district, where local silversmiths were known to live and work. It wasn’t long before the locals found out about them and decided to barricade the ends of the street, then board up the back doors and windows of the row houses to keep the infected in their homes. This had something of a negative effect on morale in the neighborhood.

To help relieve the boredom and despair along the Argenteria, a young fellow who called himself El Tarlá began to cavort and caper about the center of the street, doing tricks and telling jokes in an attempt to keep the locals entertained for the duration of the outbreak. He became something of a local celebrity. Indeed to this day his antics are commemorated in Girona, where a large life-size likeness of him is suspended from a pole and made to flip and tumble with the turn of a crank.

Reader György is the latest in a long line of readers to ask me if I know of any cheap/easy alternatives to pie weights or pie beads. I wrote about this recently in a tutorial, but it seemed to me that a separate post was warranted. Because let’s face it: a lot of bakers waste money on these sorts of things. Or worse, pantry space, with big containers of “baking” rice or beans that hardly ever get used.

I’ve pretty much tried every crust-weighting solution known to bakingkind over the years: the shiny chrome chains (which always get lost or tangled up), the charming ceramic peas (which soak up grease and end up smelling like a wet yak), the uncooked rice (which spills everywhere), dried beans (ditto), even those weird little Matfer aluminum pellets, which look very cool but cost fifty bucks!