Chocolatier

Don’t think for a minute that a Chocolatier is just someone who makes chocolate. A Chocolatier is a mad Scientist, a Designer, a Sculptor. As an artisanal Chocolatier, you craft chocolates into mouth-watering works of art: the flavors, shapes, colors, textures, and patterns making your sweets much more appealing than a basic candy bar.

To ensure that the chocolate not only looks great but tastes great as well, you’ll spend hours and months and years experimenting in the kitchen. From the bean to the bar, chocolate goes through a lot of chemical changes, and you’ll need to understand the subtleties of the process. There’s a key step called tempering, when you heat and cool the chocolate until it reaches the perfect level of softness or crispness, dullness or shininess, that will be of particular interest to you.

When you get to the molding and sculpting steps, the work turns from science to high art. Chocolatiers can be so serious about the design aspect of what they do that there are world competitions to determine the most attractive “chocolate showpieces.”

If you want to run your own independent chocolate business, you’ll need to step out of the heavenly aroma of your kitchen, as there’s plenty of marketing and bookkeeping to be done. Building your own brand—including company name, packaging, logo, colors, presentation, advertising, and seasonal concepts—might be as fun as creating the chocolates in the first place, but be prepared to work long hours!