Handcrafted butter toffee and rare Trinitario cacao beans!
Walking into the Candy Store (inside the Coffee Company on Plaza Drive) is always an adventure! Every time I go in (which is regularly), I find fantastic new arrivals, some of which I didn’t even know existed. That’s what happened the other day, when I saw a stack of these very, very limited-edition dark chocolate bars from Shawn Askinosie. Shawn has been doing remarkable work with chocolate for nearly 20 years now; in fact, you can read about him in The Power of Beliefs in Business, in the same essays on hope where I also share the story of meeting Melvin Parson. All of Shawn’s chocolates are excellent, but this one is especially special on almost every level.
The high-quality Trinitario cacao it’s made with comes from a couple of wildly good origins: the Mababu co-op, in Tanzania, and Davao, in the Philippines. Each, on its own, is excellent, but together, the two make for a really superb combination. Dark, creamy, velvety in mouth feel—all with little bits of crisp, caramelized toffee inside. It’s subtly crunchy, delightfully buttery, and made with love, entirely from scratch.
Producing these involves so much work that Askinosie made only a few thousand bars! As they explain, “due to the incredibly labor-intensive process of hand-pouring these bars to perfectly enrobe the toffee,” they had to greatly limit how many they could make. As a matter of fact, Askinosie has actually run out of the bars at their plant in Springfield, Missouri—so what we have in stock at the Candy Store is all there is. I bought one to write this piece (I don’t like to write without tasting), and I’ll be going back later this week to get a couple more. Seriously, wonderfully dark and delicious!