The Chocolate Tart is a handmade chocolate school teaching the art of the chocolatier to anyone aged 10 -110. And the chocolate is even suitable for royals. It was whilst cooking a dinner for HM Queen Elizabeth back in 2005 that the idea of starting a chocolate school was born!
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00:00 The Chocolate Heart is a handmade chocolate school teaching the art of chocolatier to anyone aged 10 to 110.
00:10 But how do you make chocolate and what can you expect from a chocolate masterclass?
00:16 So I run chocolate workshops in various venues in Clevedon and I'm teaching the general public how to make chocolates,
00:24 how to work with chocolates and hopefully how to catch the bug and go home and make more chocolates on their own.
00:30 So I run a couple of workshops which are more about fun and just coming and working with the chocolate that I've melted and tempered.
00:38 Everybody leaves with what they've made, packaged, looking beautiful to take away as gifts.
00:44 And then I run other workshops which are a little bit more in depth and go into crystal structure and molecular structure
00:53 and giving people a proper understanding of how to work with chocolate.
00:58 I'm called a melter in the chocolate world in that I buy my chocolate in already made into chocolate.
01:04 If you're making chocolate from scratch you're a bean-to-bar producer.
01:09 So I know a lot of amazing bean-to-bar producers but that process is very different to what I do
01:18 which is I'm melting down chocolate and then I'm tempering it so I'm realigning the crystal structure in a way that it's suited
01:25 to working with the chocolate so that your end product has a shine and a snap and ticks all the boxes that the senses are looking for.
01:33 And the chocolate is even suitable for royals.
01:37 It was whilst cooking a dinner for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth back in 2005 that the idea of starting a chocolate school was born.
01:46 Let's chat to Lisa to find out the story.
01:49 I started, it was nearly 18 years ago now. I had an event catering company which took me to London for charity events and government events a lot.
02:04 And I just was looking to find a business that would keep me in the Bristol area.
02:09 And I was really fortunate to be asked to cook a dinner for the Queen and that menu, she sent a request for Eton Mess which I put into a handmade chocolate cup.
02:21 And in that execution of that event the chefs that were working with me were all asking me how I tempered the chocolate and how I'd made the cup.
02:30 And it just was the start of a journey of realising that a lot of chefs miss out on chocolate work when they're training.
02:38 So I wanted to be able to teach chefs and fill in that gap with a passionate subject that I'd come to be obsessed with.
02:49 And pretty much straight away I had the general public booking onto classes.
02:53 So although I've taught a lot of chefs, I've also taught thousands and thousands of people that just like baking or creating or being arty or archa-alcoholics.