Can You Resist the Temptation? just LOOK at that chocolate rose..

Sunny Kim, Ben Espejo, Kyle Lu!

Chooocolattee

Chocolate. The delicious, thick and creamy sweet chocolate. Did you know that the cacao beans to produce your favorite candy are the seeds of the Theobroma cacao tree?

The ancient Mayan civilization believed that they were give chocolate after being created out of maize, a type of corn. The Mayans honored the "God of Cocoa" called Ek Chuah by sacrificing a cocoa colored dog in the month of April. But before the Mayans, the Olmec civilization first used cocoa from around 19000 B.C. to about 400 B.C. This was because the Olmecs were the mother culture for the Mayans, which means that they influenced many later civilizations.

In the Mayan language, chocolate is called xocoatl and the tree is called cacahuatquchtl, the only tree that the Mayans said that was worth naming. The Maya drank chocolate drinks made out of roasted cocoa beans, water, and spice. They also used it as currency back then. 100 cocoa beans could even buy a slave! Also, ancient Mayan pottery shows that a god is fighting over cacao. The cacao tree was so important to the Mayans that they said that in the Bible, the tree in the middle of the garden was a cacao tree.