When I was shipping out the last collection of the season in late April, the temperatures in several parts of the country were not helpful! Heat and chocolates are not friends. After many, many visits to weather.com, all eventually went out, with only one casualty. And now what happens? It has been in the 40s and 50s here in New Hampshire for the past week. Last Saturday, it snowed 10 inches on Mount Washington. Go figure.
At the end of each chocolate season (not that I won't be eating chocolate for the next few months!), I share a review like this reflecting back and looking ahead. Here goes.
Design
I'm not sure exactly what triggered my first attempt at using the surfaces of 12 separate chocolates to paint a single cohesive image. I definitely wasn't fully confident it would work, but one might as was well try!
The challenge is that the design for each individual bonbon is created and applied separately. Hundreds of each of the 12 designs are all finished before a single box of bonbons is put together to see if it all works. Just a little nerve-wracking. Here's a video I posted on Instagram last month showing the separate sheets for the Spring Migration collection.
Overall, the three collections done in this way have worked out pretty well, with only a few minor misalignments. I'm not sure all future collections will be whole scenes, but it is fun to create them, despite the extra time involved. It also further supports telling a cohesive story with each collection, which is something that feels more interesting and meaningful.
Sourcing Chocolate and Unique Ingredients
I have often used different chocolate couvertures to go with whatever theme or flavor I wanted to advance. But this past season almost exclusively incorporated couvertures made from heirloom cacaos, mostly from cacao grown in Bolivia and Ecuador. These are ancestral or traditional cacao trees growing in semi-wild conditions or propagated on small farms. The beans and resulting chocolate made from them have exceptionally complex flavor profiles.
My education on these cacaos is largely due to Rich Tango-Lowy, master chocolatier and owner of Dancing Lion Chocolate and also President of Heirloom Cacao Preservation. Rich's enthusiasm and knowledge are infectious and he's always sharing a taste of the latest couverture he and his team have made with heirloom cacao.
The depth of heirloom chocolate is a further incentive to pair it with other interesting flavors, tying them all to fit a theme. It adds more complexity and creativity, which I enjoy, but it also adds challenge. What are indigenous Australian ingredients that would work with chocolate, and can I find them? Or, the tropical fruit soursop sounds good, but how will it work in a pâte de fruit? Or, I think New Mexico piñons sound interesting in a gianduja, but how will it actually taste?
Always an experiment. Hope you enjoy the results!
Supporting the Greater Good
By now, most of you know ten percent of the proceeds of sales of each Clandestine Chocolates collection goes to supporting the good work of others. This season the organizations were Heirloom Cacao Preservation, the Mount Washington Observatory, the Clean Air Task Force, Common Cause, Democracy Forward, and Earlham College.
These are all great organizations doing work that makes our world a better place. I've collected several short videos giving glimpses of some of this work and they are each worth a few minutes of your time. So, depending on how warm it is where you are, grab some really good chocolate ice cream or hot chocolate and watch. Given the weather here, I'll be having hot chocolate with a bit of cinnamon and chipotle chili.
Heirloom Cacao Preservation (HCP)
I mentioned heirloom cacao above and at some point I should probably do a whole newsletter just on the subject, but here's a quick look. The fall Biodiversity collection benefitted HCP, the organization that works to identify heirloom cacaos and support small farmers in conserving the trees and developing their businesses. Here's a short video story of on-going work in Guatemala to discover and cultivate heirloom cacaos.
Mt. Washington Observatory
The December collection "A Window on Winter" supported organizations doing important work related to climate change. In New Hampshire's White Mountains, the summit of Mount Washington (6,289' above sea level) holds one of the oldest permanently staffed alpine weather observatories. Mount Washington Observatory, founded in 1932, carries out a wide range of monitoring and research and has the record of documenting the highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth -- 231 mph in 1934. Here's a quick, fun look at a day in the life of a Mt. Washington weather observer.
Clean Air Task Force
Like the majority of Americans, I'm concerned about our changing climate. Clean Air Task Force works on innovative and effective problem-solving to decarbonize our energy system, especially in the developing world. Here's their description of the issue and how they approach solutions.
Earlham College
Most of you have seen Earlham College mentioned while reading some of the booklets that come with the chocolate collections. Many of the collections are inspired by experiences I've had with fellow alumni of the college. And my interest in birds--which you saw most recently in the Spring Migration collection--began at Earlham. If you want to catch a bit of the Earlham story and some beautiful images of spring migrants we saw recently at Point Pelee National Park in Ontario, sit with this video for a few minutes. Believe it or not, it's one I actually put together.
Looking to Next Season
The next Clandestine Chocolates collection will come out in the Fall, in late October or Early November. I'll be in a few places before then that may well inspire themes for future collections, like our old home in the Columbia River Gorge and then the Pantanal in Brazil, the world's largest tropical wetlands. Will the Pantanal's jaguars be on some future chocolates? We shall see.
Before that, there's a high likelihood some of the incredible imagery we experienced in Bhutan earlier this spring will show up in the fall. Take a look below. I find it hard to avoid contemplating how to transfer something onto chocolate when seeing designs like this everywhere.
That's all for now. There may well be a few newsletter updates over the summer on topics I think you might find of interest. In the meantime, I hope you have some relaxing time in warmer weather wherever you are.
Thanks for reading.