Cindy Stokes, age 11, of Santa Maria, California, for her question:

Is chocolate related to cocoa?

Both chocolate and cocoa are made from the beans of the generous cacao tree. This large tropical evergreen has ripe pods to offer through all seasons of the year. The beans are seeds taken from the pod, dried and slightly fermented. They are skinned, sifted and cracked into dark brown chocolate nibs    which have a very bitter flavor. Though hard, they contain more than 50 per cent of fatty cocoa butter, then crushed through heavy rollers, they form a thick dark liquid called chocolate liquor. This bitter syrup is mixed with vanilla, sweetners and various other ingredients to make all the forms of usable chocolate. However, some of the plain syrup is heated and squeezed by enormous presses to extract the cocoa butter. What remains becomes the lightish brown powder used to make cocoa. As in the raw chocolate, its bitter flavor is tamed with sugar and vanilla