Chocolate for the holidays: Elements' Peppermint with Lavender
Candy canes and tuxedos go together like lavender and peppermint.
If you’re hosting a dinner or cocktail party over the holidays, may I suggest high chocolate elegance to accompany your guests. Craft chocolate is like the little black dress: it fits any occasion and suits any palate. It’s never overdressed or under-dressed. It’s simple, humble, yet always impresses. There is a “little black dress” that I count on for the holidays—it never disappoints. From first look, as you can see above, this chocolate even looks like you could wear it.
Have a special someone with discerning taste for elegance and a sophisticated palate? Consider a gift subscription to The Cacao Muse:
Chocolate maker: Elements
It may stun you to learn who the people behind Elements are.
They’re former Wall Street traders. As in, algorithmic and quant traders. With graduate degrees in computational finance, information systems, and computer science.
Yeah. Just your regular everyday folks.
For those of you who’ve done (or are still doing) finance, or tech, it probably won’t stun you to learn that these two traders decided one day they’d had enough and that they want a bigger purpose in life than squeezing bits of square numbers through round holes.
Traders, after all, are human like the rest of us.
Alak Vasa and Kushal Choksi, a wife and husband team, didn’t set out to create a chocolate company, per se. All they knew is that they loved healthy food, and kept coming back to Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old science of wellness and health they had grown up with. With Alak’s training as a chef’s assistant in a patisserie, chocolate was a natural choice.
In their words, Elements is “rooted in Ayurveda, and in our passion for clean, functional and yummy food.”
Location: Jersey City, New Jersey
Peppermint infused with Lavender
Cacao Muse review: This is an exquisitely crafted bar. It truly is the little black dress of chocolate… a long, smooth, tailored figure, with a clean, minimalistic flourish at the top. If you can bring yourself to break off a piece of this delight, your tongue will experience what your eyes just did: subtle notes washing over a foundation of high quality cacao. The perfect balance of peppermint, lavender, and chocolate.
And they have a sense of humor—check out this little gem on the product page for this bar: “You’re mint to be loved.”
Gotta love the wit & charm!
Tasting Notes: Peppermint on its own is an intense, wintery sweetness. But suffused throughout a bar of dark chocolate, its intensity softens. Blended with the fragrant touch of lavender, and the healing notes of raw honey, the peppermint’s coolness rejuvenates, and lingers on after the last breaths of chocolate have melted away.
Percentage: 70%
Origin: Ecuador
Ingredients: Organic cacao butter, raw honey, organic cacao powder, peppermint essential oil, lavender essential oil
One quick note. The previous packaging, which you see above, had the word “Raw” on the front. This is something chocolate companies sometimes get not quite right… because no chocolate can be truly raw. You need heat to ferment the beans (fermentation itself is considered a cooking process), and you need heat to make chocolate. How much heat, depends on your desired end result. It’s more accurate to say “unroasted.” However, their current package design no longer says “raw,” so kudos to Elements for the correction!
Our next review will arrive around the same time Santa’s sliding down that chimney… so be sure to leave out plenty of those fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies! The chocolate we’ll be reviewing you’ll want to keep for yourself :)