A Day in the Life of a Chocolatier

Mona Newbauer, Chocolatier, Island Angel Chocolates, invites you to experience "A Day in the Life of A Small Town Chocolatier". This is your opportunity to find out what it's really like being a Chocolatier and running a chocolate shop in a small community. It's fun, it's challenging, it's creative! Do it for yourself or buy as a gift for the person in your life that has everything.

"A Day in the Life" is a one-on-one experience with the Chocolatier in the store and may include both observing and hands on training of any of the following experiences depending on the day you choose to come in: Truffle making, cookie baking, fun with fudge, toffee training, brittle breaking, new recipes, customer greeting, packaging and display, and of course, there's candy tasting. It's a day that you will remember for a long time.

Here's the specifics: You pick the day! Day choices are on a first come, first served basis and are available Monday through Saturday. The day starts off at 10:00 am before the store opens and continues until at least 4:00 pm and maybe until 6:00 pm depending on your stamina and mine! Cost is $75.00 for the entire day. E-mail me at monalynn@whidbey.com to schedule your chocolate experience or purchase a chocolate experience for a friend. Let's all make chocolate!

Creating the Perfect Life in Chocolate

For a few months now, Island Angel Chocolates, has been in the hands of a broker with the intention of selling the chocolate shop.

There are problems with this for me. First, I love making chocolate. I love interacting with the people that come into the shop for chocolate or conversation. I love training the staff to make chocolate and instruct them on interacting with the customer. And I like writing about the chocolate shop, doing the newsletters, and blogging. This is all easy for me to do. It is where I feel there is flow in my life. Right now I'm going into the shop pretty much every day but Sunday. I even love that.

There are things that I do not like about owning my own business. Marketing is one of them. I know that there are lots of ways to market a business. There is going from place to place and talking about your products to sell them wholesale. There is presenting classes, lectures, chocolate tastings, etc. There is going to shows and presenting your product to the market that way. There are creating blogs, like this one, and Internet discussions. And of course, there is paying for space ads

With this post, I'm reaching out for help in the areas that I'm not good at? My intention is that this help come in the form of a partner, or a marketing and sales person willing to work on a commission basis.

So if you, or someone you know, may be interested in partnering with me, please contact me! You can reach me through e-mail at monalynn@whidbey.com and I can give you more information on what this partnership might look like.

Where Does Chocolate Come From?

Theobroma Cacao. That's the name of the chocolate tree. Theobroma is Greek and it means "Food of the Gods". In this instance, the pronunciation for Cacao is KA-COW. Once the fruit of the tree is processed into chocolate, the spelling and pronunciation changes to Cocoa, pronounced KO-KO.

The trees grow in the tropics within 20 degrees north and south of the Equator. Africa is where the most Cacao is grown. They produce about 70% of the world's Cacao. The trees grow best under the shade of larger trees, like banana trees, much like coffee. The trees produce approximately 2000 pods per year and each pod has 30 to 40 seeds in them. They range in color from orange to red, to yellow, to violet and are about the size of a small football. The picture to the left was taken in the Dominican Republic by Victoria Santos of The Sister Island Project.

The tree flowers prior to producing fruit pods. The pods or fruit of the chocolate tree extend directly from the trunk. This is different than most fruit trees. Most of us all know what an apple tree looks like. Can you imagine the apples growing directly out of the trunk?

The Cacao pods when left alone are eaten by monkeys and other forest animals. The sticky substance inside the pod is what the animals are after and they usually cast the bitter seeds aside. In this way, the animals help to re-populate the area with trees.

The pods are harvested by farmers and cut open by whacking the pod with a machete like object and then the seeds are removed and layed out in the sun to ferment and dry. Once this process is complete, they are shipped off to be sold to chocolate manufactures.