Festival gets high on sugar

It was every chocoholic's dream at The World Famous Lexington Market's 23rd Annual Chocolate Festival this Saturday. The dedicated chocolate-lover could sample any kind of chocolate.

Truly, every kind. Berger's Bakery sold innumberably varied slices of chocolate cake, including Oreo cake and chocolate cheesecake.

They also had trays heaped with their famous chocolate icing-covered Berger Cookies -- familiar to any Baltimorean. Konstant's Kandies offered every variety of luscious fudge.

Rheb's candies displayed tempting chocolate truffles. The Harbor City Bake Shop sold huge pieces of cr5fme de menthe cake with bright green icing and Andes mints.

The life of the festival was its talkative and engaging host, Koli Tengella. A local actor and standup comic, Tengella has hosted the Chocolate Festival for the past four years.

He enjoys hosting the Festival, he said, because it gives him a chance to "tease folks, eat great chocolate and have a good time. It's been great."

In a running monologue, like the voice of temptation itself, Tengella urged festival guests to give up their guilt and satisfy their cravings.

"This weekend," he crooned into his microphone, "Stairmaster baaaaaaaad, chocolate fudge gooooood. Be hypnotized by the power of chocolate. Forget about your diet. Forget about Atkins. Who cares about a carb? What's a carb? Today, it's all about you and your love of chocolate. There is a lonely piece of chocolate that needs to be adopted. So have a piece of chocolate cheesecake. All it means is that, in a few days, there'll be more of you to love."

Customers didn't need much convincing. People thronged the tables. Vendors couldn't sell their wares fast enough, and lines snaked around the room.

Music was provided by the mostly gray-haired band Appaloosa, who performed covers of soft-rock hits ranging from oldies like Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl" to more recent fare such as Edwin McCain's "I'll Be." Kids were treated to "The Not-So-Little Pigs" by the Blue Sky Puppet Theater. Later, a magician wandered around the hall doing tricks.

But the highlight of the day was the final round of the festival's chocolate-eating contest.

Here, the victor of Thursday's contest, a young man named Jacob, faced off against Friday's winner, a hefty young woman named Sierra, to see who could eat the most chocolate in three minutes.

The stakes were high: The champion would win two plane tickets to anywhere in the world.

Tengella stood them on opposite sides of a table and had them put their hands behind their backs -- they could eat with anything they wanted, he said, except for utensils or their hands.

Placed in a row in front of each of them were a chocolate-covered pineapple candy, a cupcake with chocolate frosting, a chocolate-covered apple, and a coconut-covered chocolate cake. At Tengella's signal, they were off.

The crowd jostled for a better view. Both contestants inhaled the pineapple candy and moved on to the cupcakes.

Those took a little longer, but in a few moments both of them, their mouths ringed with chocolate icing, moved on to their apples. "Go Jacob!  Go Sierra!" a spectator started to chant.

The apples were harder, but Jacob and Sierra plunged in with a will.

Sierra took the lead, finishing her apple and moving on while Jacob struggled to get the apple into his mouth without his hands. Both of them were slowing down. "She's watching him like a dog!" a woman cried.

Indeed, Sierra had raised her eyes and was watching Jacob carefully as she crammed her mouth full ofcake, eating just quickly enough to keep her lead. Sierra's cake was almost gone and Jacob hadn't been far behind.

When the bell rang, they both stood back gratefully and were handed napkins to clean their faces. Sierra's cheeks were stuffed with unswallowed cake.

With their stomachs churning, they both smiled more bravely than they must have felt. In the space of a few minutes they had both eaten an impossible amount of food.

Tengella made a show of carefully inspecting the amount remaining on the contestants' plates, then raised Sierra's arm in victory as if she were a champion boxer.

He then gave the scowling Jacob an envelope with an unspecified consolation prize.

Sierra had won two tickets to anywhere. She grinned, but carefully; her cheeks were still full of food.

After the competition, many festival-goers drifted away into other parts of the market or into the torrential rain outside.

But not all. Tengella's voice was still calling to his listeners' weaker natures: "Surrender to the power of chocolate! Nautilus baaaaad, chocolate cheesecake goooood!"

Vendors were doing a brisk business as the festival wound to a close.