17/02/2026
🍫 THE FIRST BATCH 🍫
So. Let’s talk about CHOCOLATE.
It’s messy, it’s finicky, sensitive, mysterious, sometimes unpredictable. It’s also magical, transformational, filled with amazing properties and benefits for mind & body, and part of a rich tradition connecting humans, especially women, to the earth and to the trees literally for millennia.
Over the past week, gearing up for the .nl Chocoa trade fair and chocolate festival in Amsterdam, I finally did something I never expected to actually do: I started making chocolate.
Not just melting, tempering and reshaping it, I literally MADE chocolate. I selected each bean by hand, chose and set my roasting time & temp, cracked and winnowed (some even by hand! Brooklyn too!).
With bleeding thumbs I realized this was going to take way too long by hand so I trekked across Paris with my beans to get them winnowed by a friend in his machine.
Four minutes is definitely better than four hours!
I washed every part of my new melangeur by hand, stood over it for aaaages adding nibs slowly with one hand and hair dryer in the other hand, listened to it whir and change pitch overnight. I nervously stood by as my 4.5 year old added sugar while the machine still whirred, agonized over every taste test, deciding if it was done or needed a few more hours… I painstakingly emptied and washed the machine again, wrapped the chocolate to dry and harden.
Then finally yesterday afternoon I reheated it again, tempered it by hand in my kitchen and quickly quickly filled the molds before dashing out to school pickup and cake deliveries. Hours later, I popped them out and wrapped each one individually in foil to bring to Amsterdam and share with my chocolate community.
Had you ever imagined that it could take so much time, love, agonizing blood sweat & tears just to make 700g of chocolate?!
A huge thanks to everyone who supported and enabled this project, especially , , and , , and others!
Now, who wants to try it??
