Holiday Tour Day 15: Seven Senses and Treat Dreams

Not all cacao dreams last forever

Wait, where’s the chocolate??

Before we begin, I’d like to welcome all of the new Cacao Nibs of The Cacao Muse. This is a very young publication… launched late September this year. At the start of this Tour, we had 99 members. We are now at 154. Not a huge list, but it hasn’t been a full 3 months yet! Most importantly, I made the conscious decision to start from absolute zero, instead of bringing people over from The Muse. I wanted real, honest-to-goodness organic growth. Because you know, organic chocolate.

Reader: Um what’s a Cacao Nib. I mean, I know what a cacao nib is, but what’s a Cacao Nib?

Birgitte: Well I certainly didn’t want to call new subscribers ‘noobs’ so ‘nib’ fit the bean bill quite well. You can also become a Cacao Tree or a Cacao Deity—we’ve got a few Deities in our community already and have shipped their special tokens of adoration (no small animals were sacrificed). More deets about membership levels here.

We’re running a very special offer during the Tour: 20% off an annual subscription now until December 25th. You’ll get not only 20% off, that will also be the last time you’ll need to pay anything to read The Cacao Muse. As in, forever. One discounted annual subscription vs having to pay every year for all of the premium walled chocolate garden stuff.

Only ten days left until the end of the Tour, and the end of Forever.

And of course you can give a subscription to friends, loved ones, colleagues, even sworn enemies. Nothing like chocolate to melt barriers… hey maybe we should send some to those [unspeakable four-letter word that starts with a capital N and ends in ‘i’ and has been the topic of numerous discussions in Notes lately…], maybe it will melt their levels of intolerance and vitriol…

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When you go see a movie, they do the preview thing. You know, where…

THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR
ALL AUDIENCES
BY THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

Here at The Cacao Muse we do things a little differently. We do the feature first, and then the postview.

Reader: A what.

Birgitte: A postview. You know, “preview” refers to a preliminary look. So, a “postview” refers to something you watch afterwards. After the feature, in other words. And now, for our feature presentation!

TCM Holiday Tour Day 15 pairing:

SEVEN SENSES and TREAT DREAMS

I was introduced to Sabrina, the creator of our featured Substack, by

Jolene Handy

— thank you Jolene! The universe works in such curious ways. Not only does Sabrina write a Substack, she loves Bonnat chocolates, spent a lot of time in France, and is a cat mama. Sabrina is a visual storyteller with global DNA in her blood. What does a visual storyteller do? Use all the toys in the box to tell stories, of course! Words, art, video, photography, and anything else you can see or touch. In Sabrina’s own words:

“I rely on the language of symbolism to understand and reveal the true nature—the kenshō—of this human story.” ⁠

You can check out her website here.

Please welcome Sabrina Smith of

Kenshō studio

and

Seven Senses

.

Words by Etel Adnan. Courtesy of Sabrina Smith.

The Cacao Muse: Sabrina, such a pleasure to have you here with us. Tell us about Seven Senses.

Sabrina Smith: Seven Senses explores reality through our senses. I dive into different topics—merging creativity and spirituality–and curate 7 recommendations for our senses:

SEE: a visual recommendation (exhibit, film, book)
HEAR: an auditory invitation (music, podcast, nature)
SMELL: an olfactory experience (botanical, food, alchemy)
TASTE: a culinary suggestion (art, recipe, specialty food)
TOUCH: a tactile play (nature, textures, creative prompts)
BALANCE: a contemplative meditation (art, guided audio)
ENVISION: a symbolic vision (original artwork) 

Birgitte: I’ve always loved the number Seven, and the word flows so beautifully with “Senses.” Balance feels like proprioception, the very real 6th sense we have that doesn’t get enough press—the awareness of our bodies in space and motion. It’s what allows gymnasts to perform those heart-stopping twists in the air and land on their feet. Envision feels like intuition to me… an internal sight, insight.

TCM: Art is one of the roads to Paradise, but you know what the other one is? Chocolate, of course. Which cacao path are you on now?

Sabrina: That’s a tough one! I typically try new chocolate bars every year, around the season. A favorite from recent years has been a Mexican brand called Cuna de Piedra.  

Birgitte: How curious, I recently discovered Cuna de Piedra in a little market in a small town down near Santa Cruz. Funny how the tiniest markets carry the biggest treasures. I bought two bars and can’t wait to review them. Love the name… in Spanish it means “cradle of stone.”

As a visual storyteller, you’ll appreciate this tabletop I did of the chocolate I’ve selected for you: a little block of heaven surrounded by stone, marshmallows, cacao beans, cherries, and merengues. The company, very appropriately named Treat Dreams, was based in Australia and dedicated to making their chocolate vegan. I’ve judged quite a few of their bars, and they never disappointed. I especially loved their visual form—nine pillows fused into a square that you could do so much with from a lighting and materials perspective.

Why the past tense? Because, sadly, Treat Dreams had to close its doors last year. When we savor chocolate, such as any of the extraordinary chocolates featured on this Tour, we are coming into contact with the final stage of a very long and complex journey that a pile of cacao beans took, and the many human hands that touched them along the way.

The business of chocolate is hard, and it doesn’t always last as long as you would like it to. That’s why it’s so important to support the small chocolate makers, the artisans and craftspeople of chocolate. They put the most love, the most time, and the most care into their chocolate, and into their relationships with the cacao farmers.

This is an homage to Treat Dreams, and their dream of vegan chocolate.

Chocolate: Aussie Pavlova Bar (Limited Edition)

Percentage: 38%

Origin: Unlisted

Ingredients: Direct trade vegan white chocolate, vegan marshmallows, freeze dried fruits (passionfruit powder, strawberry pieces, mango powder)

Price: n/a 😭

Tasting Notes: This bar tastes like a flower garden in the tropics. Tones of passionfruit, strawberry, and mango in an intricate dance atop the soft fluffy texture of marshmallows we all know and love. Light and not overly saccharine like so much white chocolate tends to be.

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TCM: Is there anything you’d like to ask the experts?

Sabrina: A burning question about chocolate: why add soy lecithin? I know it’s used to emulsify the ingredients, but chocolate factories have done without it for many decades…

Birgitte: The experts disagree on whether soy lecithin in chocolate acts as an emulsifier as technically chocolate is not an emulsion. An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that do not blend together well naturally, and chocolate of course isn’t that—it’s a bunch of tiny solids (cacao solids) suspended in fat (cacao butter). What lecithin does do, and the reason it’s used in chocolate making, is lower the viscosity of the chocolate—make it more liquid—to make it easier to temper and mold. The reason it’s used is because, frankly, it’s a lot cheaper than adding more cacao butter which would do the same thing. It also speeds up the process—if you want to make more chocolate in less time, you use lecithin (or more cacao butter). This is why bars with no soy lecithin are more expensive. Taken on a mass industrial scale, this explains why Big Chocolate loves soy lecithin so much. It saves them metric tons of money—which of course flow right past the pockets of the cacao farmers and into corporate coffers.

Sabrina: Another thing I’ve learned about chocolates in recent years is that the ‘right’ way to eat chocolate is to let it melt in your mouth (rather than chewing it!). 

Birgitte: Correct! That’s one of the first things I tell people during my chocolate tastings. Do. Not. Chew. Chocolate is made to melt on the tongue. Or in courtrooms.

TCM: Is there anything you’d change about the chocolate business if you could?

Sabrina: Hmm, I’m not sure I know enough about the industry to say what I would change about it? But I do have an anecdote. When I was a waitress in NYC, I met a ‘Chocolate Man,’ a modern Willy Wonka who had fallen in love with chocolate (had a sort of spiritual experience amongst the cocoa trees in Ecuador). He had transformed his whole life in order to make raw chocolate. I visited his small chocolate factory (a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn) where he spent all day creating delicious raw chocolate. Since it’s raw, it melts easily and is hard to ship so he mails distributed to health stores and boutiques in NY (this was back in 2011 or so). I even wrote a short story about him! 

Birgitte: Oh you should share the short story, how fun! Curiously, there is an actual Chocolate Man—a company—up in Washington State. They were at this year’s NW Chocolate Festival. Now, Mr. New York Chocolate Man is mislabeling his chocolate—no chocolate can be raw. I see this a lot, chocolate makers using the term to describe what is essentially unroasted chocolate. You can’t make chocolate without at the very least fermenting the beans, which is a form of cooking.

Funny you should mention Willy Wonka because… the movie opens today!

You thought we’re about to run the postview, right? Not so fast. We’ve got a special guest I’d like to introduce to you. You remember Boss Cat. Yes that cat. As you’ve probably sussed out by now, he runs an entire enterprise. And as any self-respecting Boss of an organized cat ring, he needs people—er, felines—to manage things. Manage the humans and their chocolate, because humans can’t be trusted with the stuff. They do weird things with it, like eat it, drink it, and swoon over it. But a cat knows better. A cat knows that chocolate possesses special properties that can only be unlocked under certain conditions, and it should definitely not be eaten. That stuff is poison (to cats)!

This is Kactus. Formally, on paper, she’s Sabrina’s cat—or rather, she’s her human. But don’t let bureaucratic details fool you. Look at those piercing eyes. Those are the eyes of a criminal mastermind. Those perked-up ears, scanning the airways for intel. Those whiskers, impossibly clean, and the well-trimmed facial fur. Clearly a cat of considerable means. And what was that Beyoncé said… Girl cats run the world!

You’ve seen that face somewhere before… very recently. And you’ll see it again.

Reader: I have? I will?

Birgitte: Yes, you have, and you will. Oh, the postview is starting, hush!

Today, December 15th, is the release of Wonka, the oompa-loompteenth cinematic version of Roald Dahl’s original story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which I personally don’t particularly love). But it stars Timothée Chalamet and he was great in Dune, so… we’ll see if he’s even better covered in chocolate! Sans those horrid period costumes of course.

Curious his last name is so similar to chocolate… must be another conspiracy.

If you see the movie let us know in the comments what you thought!

After the postview, be sure to open up all of your seven senses and check out Sabrina’s Substack Studio. And do all the online gymnastics that will spread the chocolate love about our Holiday Tour: liking, commenting, sharing, restacking. The more the merrier!

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COMING UP! DAY 16 of the TCM HOLIDAY TOUR

They say people choose their pets, but those of us with animal family members know it’s really the other way around. Our animals choose us.

And when the animals choose to be with artists, magic happens.

~ Is this another movie? I love movies.

~ We cannot release that information at this time. It’s still Day 15.

~ Come on, you can give me a sneak peek… please?

~ Nope sorry. Editorial policy is editorial policy.

~ You people are so… so obstinate.