The Shell is most often the evidence of a right tempering; in the chocolate world, it is referred to as “Shine”. Is a rabbit hole of master class to promise a maxi-shine.

I do not fully believe knowledge only comes from experts or formal teaching.

Often, I believe more in relations, in the body and in the idea that if you stay with a question long enough, it slowly opens another entrance.

Chocolate is like this kind of entrance; it opens a Pandora's box.

Behind every maxi-shine bonbon were histories of colonial extraction, plantation economies, forgotten cash crops, slavery, child labour, commodity speculation, branding, synthetic flavouring, food fraud, global trade routes, and class distinction. Chocolate contains an entire archive of Modernity.

The deeper I went, the more impossible it became to separate chocolate from the systems that produced it. is like the shell cracked open, revealing another shell, and another.

And yet, despite all this knowledge, my relationship with the material remained stubbornly tactile.

When I temper chocolate, it leaves traces everywhere. It sticks to bowls, spatulas, fingertips, and the kitchen countertop. It stains cloth, and it insists on contact.

At first, I found it overwhelming, almost unpleasant. But this sticky contact became familiar and even comforting. I don’t fully know when that shift happened, and how this repetitive handling somehow creates an intimacy that co-exists with my uncomfortable finding with its histories.

Sometimes I wonder whether this contradiction is exactly what keeps me returning.

Chocolate is neither innocent nor entirely corrupt. It is a material saturated with complexity. It connects me simultaneously to my son, to the global systems of extraction, the fermentation processes, microbial life, economic histories, and to the everyday labour of care. Everything is connected.

I originally just wanted to make a chocolate for my son. In the end, I entered an entire world. It all wrapped inside a thin chocolate shell.

I have come to think of chocolate as a practice of the unknown.

Because every time I make it, I am brought into a new set of questions.

And those questions are often more interesting than any answer.

Even now, I am still curious since a single piece of chocolate can hold crystallisation and colonial history, microbes and logistics, desire and labour, care and extraction. Not only ganache, jam, or caramel.

Can it also hold a Migration?

A conversation?

a shameful heritage?

or a question that has not yet taken shape…