As the season for mailing chocolates has come to an end (darn that hot weather!), I thought I'd look back over the year and think about what's to come.
This season has been a journey, interrupted by two actual journeys when my chocolate making was spread out by trips to Chile and Egypt--thanks for your patience on that!
The big change this year, though, came from my experiment a year ago with creating stencils for making the transfer sheets used to decorate chocolates. And from dramatically improving some of my equipment.
Ultimately, I committed to making all of my own chocolate designs, rather than buying commercially produced transfer sheets. You can purchase some beautiful ones, but the creativity involved in making my own feels well worth the extra commitment of time.
I started out the Fall with a box celebrating the Columbia River Gorge, where we lived for 7 years in the 1990s. It's a landscape close to my heart and I tried to capture it in both the designs and the flavors.
How do you convey a vast scenic treasure that stretches for 85 miles on a 1 inch square? Well, I tried to illustrate a few vistas and some iconic elements of the Gorge. And it seemed to turn out pretty well.
The next edition took an entirely different track! What fun to work with my friend Liza Donnelly, a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine. Accurately translating "her people" onto chocolate felt like a responsibility. It took some repeated attempts at cutting stencils that matched Liza's drawings! But they turned out well and people are still asking how they can get some, long after they sold out.
I think it was during our birding trip in Chile that the idea of chocolates with a bird theme came up. I knew the chocolates were too small to illustrate a whole bird, so I began toying with drawing the heads of several birds. The pictures below show the original drawing I did on an iPad and then the final chocolate.
Each color on the bird became a different stencil. These two birds each used 4 stencils; for example, on the Blackburnian Warbler there was one for black, one for yellow, one for orange, and one for white. So, each transfer sheet was sprayed with colored cocoa butter 5 times--one for each stencil plus one for the background color.
For an edition of 200 plus boxes of chocolates, which means over 2,400 total chocolates, I make 11 sheets with 49 images each for each of the six birds ... that means spraying 66 sheets with 49 images, each 5 or 6 times. But I'd rather not think about that!!
It's fun when the sheets start coming together and you can begin to see how the end result might look. Here's a finished transfer sheet of the hummingbirds and a tray of the finished chocolate just after the transfer sheet squares were removed. The difference in color is partly the lighting, but it's also hard to fully anticipate how a color will work over dark chocolate!
In the end, I was thrilled with how the birds came out, almost exactly as I hoped. And, it seemed too, that I had finally figured out how to do the original drawings so the stencils cut properly the first time around!
Over the years, I've followed a lot of chocolatiers doing remarkably beautiful work. And I've tried many of their techniques. But, it felt a bit like trying to imitate or repeat something, rather than doing my own thing.
With this year's chocolates, I finally feel as if I'm creating something entirely unique--that no one else is doing. And I like that each edition is one of a kind, not likely to be repeated in the same form again.
The creativity extends to the flavors, too. I do repeat some, because they are hard to improve on. And there have been ... let's say "polite demands" for more passion fruit. But trying out new flavorings and chocolates is fun, though it sometimes feels like a tight-rope walk when making a large volume of ganache in an entirely new flavor!
The riskiest varieties of the year were probably the ones flavored with spruce or fir tips and Old Bay Seasoning. Funny, the Old Bay label doesn't seem to include chocolate along with its other uses! I actually quite liked it, and it fit with the Osprey/Chesapeake Bay theme. How about you?
One great development this year is that I'm finally able to get local cream! And by local, I mean 2.5 miles away.
Contoocook Creamery at Bohannan Farm is a fifth generation dairy farm, operated by the Robertsons. I got in touch with Jamie Robertson to ask about cream, which they only sell in bulk. He was happy to sell me some, but in 2.5 or 5 gallon bags! That's a lot of cream for me. But, I went for it and even split one 5 gallon bag with a great chocolatier 25 minutes away in Manchester.
The cream is super fresh and delicious. I'm thrilled to use it from here on out.
There's another thing I feel good about and I hope you do, too--dedicating a portion of the proceeds of each edition to a fitting charitable cause. That began last year with the Grand Canyon chocolates and has continued ever since benefitting institutions doing important work. Here's the list so far.
So, as the warm weather starts up I'll be getting ready for the next chocolate season. I'm excited about several things and hope they pan out.
For one thing, I've been trying to get rid of single use plastic. I switched to paper packing tape a year ago, which is not only better, but way easier to use. Now it's time to get rid of the plastic trays that hold my chocolates. So, I'm hoping to have a new box system next fall that is plastic-free. Fingers crossed.
As I spend countless hours dipping chocolates, I fantasize about an enrobing machine. I'm investigating whether there's one out there that could meet my needs, but we shall see.
I already have some ideas about themes for next year. Liza and I may do another, but different, cartoon edition. There may need to be more birds next spring, and there are lots to choose from. Plus, a lot of other theme options; the possibilities seem endless.
Thank you all for your support and enthusiasm about my chocolates! I feel honored to write out notes for you when you send chocolates to a friend or your family. It's deeply rewarding to have so many of you preorder my chocolates each time. And it's always fun to see who puts in the first order, just minutes after an email goes out!
I'll share an update or two over the summer, and then look forward to the first preorder notice sometime in September.
Thanks again!
Jonathan Doherty
Chocolatier