I'll agree with you about the Grosso and the Provence being more bitter and not as recommended. However, for the most part they are far more available and at least people won't be eating decorative lavender :)
I prever the Royal Velvet, it's very much the least camphor, at least in my humble opinion. I have tasted other foods made with lavender and I don't know if it's because people used the whole flower and I ground and sifted the flowers or what the reason was, but I barely tasted any of the camphor at all in my icing and I was quite able to enjoy the taste of the lavender in the cream.
I've never been able to do that before. In the past the camphor over-rode every thing in my taste palate and made me want to cringe.

Thanks for posting the latin name! Now people can go and look it up. :)

Amen to that ! At least it was Halloween appropriate ;)

Heya, So I'm reading Fergus Henderson's 'The Whole Beast' and he's got several recipes in the book that call for using fresh garlic. He apparently throws the whole clove in, skins and all. The several I've read so far are in the soups/salads arena whereby he's adding the whole bulb to the liquid before cooking whatever. (In one case whole pigs head) YUM. Just thought you might like to know for next year, I'm sure you've picked and dried your garlic by now. :)

I wish there were more of them available, when I went back for seconds they were gone ;( Oh well. Next year! :)

So I got unlazy ;) I set up an OpenID account so I should show up cross posted everywhere from now on, although it's currently importing my blog.

There were things I forgot to add. The first is that there are FAR more people that won't try a new *anything* without a friend/coworker/family first saying to them, "hey I tried out XXX and it was great!" Whether that's for food or a place to buy shoes, it doesn't matter. Far too many people are in 'herd mentality' and will only go where it has been deemed 'safe' in advance of their arrival. I know far too many people like that. These are the same individuals who will order the same thing from the menu every time they visit instead of trying something new.

So in that respect I can see why people would like to hear about the TC's as it lets them know what a place is like. (Although it's not necessarily the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.) The thing is, I'm not saying the tastecasters themselves are lying because I'm sure for those that are tweeting what they are seeing (not on scripts), it IS good food and service because they ARE being catered to for their every whim. I think I'd be more mad if I showed up and didn't receive the same 'treatment' that the TC's received, I'd feel like I was lied to, or swindled.
I think in the end, it will likely be by their own abuse of the service, whether through massive spam tweets, script tweets, or other pitfalls that the TC's will be shunned in the end.