We put chocolate waste products around our plants and trees, on the farm, as organic fertiliser.
Chocolate “Trash” in Wheel Barrow.
There is a small, but thriving, chocolate-making place in Punta Gorda which supplies us with all their waste products from making chocolate. The waste is highly nutritious and has a high nitrogen content. It takes about 2 to 3 months for the trash to break down to release the fertiliser. The chocolate is so potent that it kills all the weeds around our plants so it also helps with weed control.
So, Chocolate All Around For Our Plants; Nothing but the best!
Today has been a day to work on some products. I had already started by extracting chocolate essence from cacao solids a few weeks ago but then the falling apart of the piggie cages necessitated sorting out our furry friends (is everybody sick of hearing about Guinea Pigs yet??) and making essential oil had to be put on hold. However, now that the piggies are sorted we can get back to more serious considerations…
The initial extraction is a post for another time (when I do it again) but it basically involves taking cacao solids (preferably after the cacao butter has been removed from the fermented, roasted beans) with a solvent using an extractor. The result is a dark brown liquid which while plenty aromatic does not qualify as an essential oil, it is more like a tincture. This is what I started with today.
The next step involves the removal of all of the solvent using the apparatus shown below…
Removal of Solvent from the Simple Cacao Extract to Get Chocolate Essential Oil.
The solvent is carried over the apparatus and is collected (not shown) to be re-used for future extractions. The pay dirt is what is left in the flask at the end…for a litre of original extract this takes about twenty-four hours and leaves a very dark brown, thick and syrupy liquid. This product is the essential oil; it is a very, very concentrated broad spectrum natural chocolate flavour and yields what is called an Absolute. As a little aside, essential oils are usually produced by steam distillation while the Absolute is produced by solvent extraction.
Today I made body oils; this consisted of pasteurising coconut and avocado oil (I basically heat it up to 72C and hold it at that temperature for five minutes.
Body Oil Bottles.
The Chocolate Body Oils are very popular down here in Toledo for the tourist market since cocoa (cacao) is a major commodity down here.
Gluing and Pasting Every Single Label.
In keeping with our philosophy, I cut, glue and paste every single label. It is my hope that my positivity in working will infuse into the product from beginning to end.
Bottles are Packed in Plastic to Keep Away Bugs in The Tropics.
We live in a wooden house in the Tropics (in the bush…think Sean Connery in Medicine Man…yes, we do live like that!) so I have to obsessively protect my wares from the environment. One particular problem is a bug which looks like a metallic shiny green robot bug (looks exactly like StarBug from Red Dwarf, if you know what I am talking about); it hovers and buzzes around all my precious boxes looking to plant mud everywhere to build nests. You can spot him a mile away with its back legs trailing mud everywhere and it makes a continuous droning noise like an electric screw-driver. Truth be told, they are actually rather “cute” in a buggy sort of way and if you look at them, they are not menacing or predatory like the biting bugs of Belize. They just act as if they are messy little bugs that mean you no harm but like to smear mud everywhere. They have made too much of a mess of my products that as a consequence, I have had to cover all my products in plastic. I used to wrap things up in brown paper bags in boxes but these bugs seem to be attracted to anything made out of paper.
I am tired today so it is going to be a short one; I was not going to write one but Gnome said that I should try to keep the Blog alive. It is like something alive which I am trying to cultivate and at some point it will assume a personality and a presence.
This morning I spent many intense hours cutting out labels, sticking them on jars and bottles and packing a lot of products.
Ribbons and Labels for Packaging Chocolate Velvet.
Gnome dipped the bottles in wax and I followed up with the ribbons and labels for the product.
The Final Product Bagged and Packaged For Sale.
We packaged soap; this involved the cutting of plastic from a roll and sealing.
