Cocoa Love... the (re)awakening
Like a mythic creature in the night, Cacao entered my dark, colourless world and changed everything. She gave me warmth when I was cold, lost and alone. She enrobed me in her warmth, gave me rest and then slowly a reawakening. That was 2003 when she gave me a taste, just a taste and I had to have more, then more… always back for more.
Cacao reawakened my soul, the dead, uninspired, spontaneously shrinking part of me was given a light, a canvas, space. I, like so many others, have become a conduit, a passage way from her to the mini-masses as she expresses her temperamental complexities through me and confounds, mesmerizes and melds countless others through my hands.
When she is with me, and the creative is flowing, I usually have the music of my life playing in the background: Motown soul music, spiced with a bit of world, a riff of jazz and the thump of hip-hop. This is the essence of my food-love language lab… where inspiration comes around the blind corner and ‘BAM’ hits me again. Where, to this day, she guides me to tempting flavour and textural combinations that surprise even me and are nearly impossible to explain.
Our relationship spans two continents and more than a decade. In this time, she has taught me a new language: that of our ancestors, all of our ancestors. A language that melds food and love. I have shared this language with countless friends, family members and strangers near and far. And I have endeavoured to pass along this food-love language to my son, Nikolas, who at the age of 7 has an enviable curiosity for food, culture, love and life.
Anthony
Niko B. Organic Chocolates - London
