The Art of Chocolate Making

To start production of our own handmade house truffles back in 1991, we converted a room on the ground floor of our Bonnington Square house into a kitchen to be used only for making chocolate; just a large marble table for tempering and a bain-marie for melting. It was a spiritual homecoming, crafting Rococo chocolates within a stone’s throw of Vauxhall Gardens, the home of Rococo London in the eighteenth century. We experimented, tried out new flavours, and made beautiful one-off hand-painted figurines, eggs, rabbits, fish and hearts and our Artisan bars and house truffles. I hired our first part-time chocolatier, Jo Gaskell, a psychotherapist from a culinary family (her sister is cookery writer Jocelyn Dimbleby). Although she had not worked with chocolate before, she was a complete natural. Soon she was technically better than me. Our second chocolatier was Ruth Morgan, an artistic neighbour who took to the painting like the proverbial duck to water. One day a young pastry chef called Gerard Coleman came to see me in the shop, after reading my book The Chocolate Companion (a directory of chocolate makers around the world) and asked me if I would be his mentor. I suggested he learn with one of the masters in Europe. After a year in Brussels with Pierre Marcolini, Gerard returned and asked if he could join Rococo as our first full-time chocolatier. We were still working from our tiny kitchen, so it was a leap of faith, but it was great to have someone with the skills of a true pastry chef. Output grew and we developed a range of flavoured ganache prototypes, which we invited Nigel Slater to taste – he was highly enthusiastic.