Over the last four years, The Sweetest Little Chocolate Shop has grown from Stu Jordan’s idea to include a range of delicious Kāko chocolates in three stores. I chatted to Stu in the bustling Sylvia Park store:
“I started the business after I got made redundant. So many people talk about things they wish they had done, or what they want to do but never do it – when you’re made redundant you’re confronted with the reality of if you’re going to do it, now’s the time.
“This was a big-time career change for me. To train as a chocolatier, you get professional training from chocolate masters – I studied in Melbourne and Singapore. It’s an involved process – you can’t learn it in a day, although we do try for our Chocolate School to teach people a few of the basics. We’ve GrabOned a few of our classes before!
“Kāko Chocolate are the evolution of chocolate. They’re a new style of chocolate – the shine that we get on our chocolates has nothing to do with artificial glazes. It’s about understanding tempered chocolate and how to manipulate the beta-five crystal to achieve better refraction which gives the chocolates that almost glass-like shine. We end up with little jewels of chocolate.
“Our slogan is ‘Art of Chocolate’ and the real art is inside the chocolate and the way we develop flavours from scratch. Rather than just make a base ganache and put lots of different flavours in, which is like hearing the same piece of music in a different octave, we make every single one unique and different to achieve a much better overall flavour experience. You’ll have never had a chocolate like this before. There is nothing like it – this is a world first.”
I don’t think I’ve ever had a better chocolate than the best-selling passionfruit heart. The shiny, milk-chocolate shell cracked to bold, flavourful passionfruit filling.
“It’s not what you’d traditionally expect from a chocolate. We’re more about creating an experience than a chocolate. The ganache filling contains real fruit – it’s 40% pure passionfruit. It’s made with the best quality ingredients money can buy.
“No more bad chocolate – life is too good! Ten years ago we had pretty bad chocolate. Moving forward I would hope there’ll be a lot more in this style. Now that we’ve got the technology and the scientific understanding of the molecular structure of the crystals that form within cocoa butter. It’s all very scientifical.
“We’re always developing new flavours – the peppermint ganache is our latest one – it’s only about three weeks old. Baileys is the next one – that’s under development. Developing a new chocolate takes anything from one day if we’re lucky, to four or five weeks to test variations. The passionfruit we got it first time – the chocolate gods were looking over us when we made that chocolate.
“Prince William and Kate have tried our chocolates. They’ve just had their baby, which was supposedly conceived in the Solomon Islands – their resort room contained our chocolate! Add two and two – or one plus nine – and that equals baby. Of course we’re not saying that Will didn’t do some of the work, but the chocolate helped – we’re sure of it.”
Today you can grab 10 artisan Kāko chocolates for $10 from The Sweetest Little Chocolate Shop. Plus, head over to Facebook to see the rest of the photos!