Holiday Tour Day 20: The Cairo Dispatch and Sandhill Chocolate

The shifting sands of time

Barefoot in the sand

Hey chocophiles. The TCM Forever Clock be tickin’! Only 5 days left until we close the doors on the only chance to become a bonafide Cacao Muse Deity (premium member) for 20% off forever, until the next year-end holidays.

If you’ve enjoyed this Tour, if you like love chocolate, if you’re intrigued—and if you want access to novel The Jaguar and the Cacao Tree in serialized format with author commentary (which you won’t see published anywhere else), this is the easiest, fastest, and least expensive way to get the keys to the walled garden.

Besides, you don’t know what might happen if you risk missing this opportunity. The Lords of Xibalba might swoop down on the Feathered Serpent and melt all the chocolate in your pantry, leaving it a liquidy mess.

Boss Cat might send his band of ruffians to your doorstep to meow all night long and not let you sleep.

The Art Dogs¹ might sniff out whatever free posts are left and drag them back to their digital dens hidden among the art spaces on Substack.

The risks are just too great. Climb that chocolate truffle pyramid to claim your Cacao Deity hat now.

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As those of you who’ve been on the Holiday Tour since the beginning know, I’ve done a lot of tabletop photography of chocolate. A lot. My database holds hundreds of photos of chocolate bars in all sorts of artistic and often compromising positions.² There are cats. Hippos. Venetian masks. Jewelry and precious stones. Old stamps and tubes of paint. An actual fossil my family received as a gift from a collector in Los Angeles. All sorts of props and fabrics and things.

But there was never sand. Why would you put sand in a tabletop scene of chocolate? Well, first, it wouldn’t be a tabletop, would it. That would be cheating. That would be misleading you, my respected readers, into thinking I had gone out to the beach, slid a perfectly molded bar of dark chocolate into the sand at low tide, gotten down on my stomach and took pictures of it at sunset.

So I went and did exactly that, because Muses don’t lie.

The only thing I won’t say is where this sand is. You guess. (Guess right³ and I’ll give you 90 days of a Cacao Tree membership).

TCM Holiday Tour Day 20 pairing:

THE CAIRO DISPATCH and SANDHILL CHOCOLATE

Samantha is one of the most well-traveled writers here on Substack. True to this reputation, she is currently not in Cairo, so we’re not sure whether the name of her publication will change, or have its name emblazoned on the side of one of the pyramids (apparently that’s [not] a thing now).

Early in my Substack journey, Sam and I connected via an unexpected shared interest in Guatemala: on her end because she’s got family connections there and on my end because my novel The Jaguar and the Cacao Tree takes place in Tik’al, Guatemala. More curiously still, her Guatemalan family connection has a further connection to chocolate, and that’s where the mic dropped.

Please welcome

Samantha Childress

and The Cairo Dispatch.

The Cacao Muse: Welcome to the Holiday Tour Samantha! What do you write, and why?

Samantha Childress: I’m a travel writer. John Steinbeck’s famous quip that “people don’t take trips, trips take people” is my guiding principle. I write for my fellow thinkers, daydreamers, and adventurers who know that the point of seeing the world isn’t just to see things, it’s to discover more about ourselves and others.

I alternate between personal essays about my own experiences (I’ve been living in Egypt and generally globetrotting for the past two years) and virtual “salon dinners,” where I share recipes, book/movie recommendations, and conversation topics centered around a particular place. I like to think of my salon dinners as ready-made templates for bringing the world into your home, getting offline, and trying new things with friends and family, which is sorely needed in our extremely online era! I always want to stoke wanderlust, feed readers’ souls, and leave them feeling a kinship with new-to-them cultures.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

~ John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

TCM: We hear you’re from California originally, so we can guess what chocolate you’re likely fond of!

Samantha: Being a Bay Area native, yes, I have to go with Ghirardelli, a chocolate company that has been operating in California since the Gold Rush. My love for it is less about the chocolate itself and more about memories—Ghirardelli chocolate squares and hot cocoa were everywhere during the Christmas season when I was growing up, and whenever I went to San Francisco with my parents, we had to stop at Ghirardelli Square for sundaes with fudge from the original Ghirardelli ice cream shop. I haven’t lived in California for many years, but I still dream about that combination of french vanilla ice cream and hot, oozy fudge in a tulip bowl. Anything Ghirardelli feels homey and festive to me. 

Birgitte: I hear you. When I first came to California for university many cacao harvests ago, Ghirardelli was the first chocolate company I discovered, and associated it with San Francisco. But that of course has greatly widened, with the amazing small batch craft makers now up and down the West Coast, including San Fran.

TCM: Ghirardelli is a big brand now. Is there anything that bothers you about the way the bigger companies do chocolate?

Samantha: Others have already mentioned the ethical and environmental problems posed by the chocolate industry. My gripe is small potatoes in comparison and might be somewhat specific to the U.S., but I wish mass-produced chocolate would use less corn syrup! I have food allergies and corn syrup gives me an itchy rash on my face, so that means a lot of chocolate products, especially chocolates with caramel or other flavorings or inclusions (a term I recently learned from The Cacao Muse!) are off-limits for me.

I also think it gives chocolate an overly sweet, chemical-y taste. There are plenty of higher-end brands that don’t use corn syrup, so I still have options, but I just wish corn syrup would go away entirely.

Birgitte [looks around the yacht to make sure no one hears]: Samantha, you have spoken the magic words. Come with me, but hush! Not a word.

[Samantha puts down her cup of hot chocolate and slips quietly off the yacht, following Birgitte down the plank and onto the beach where a sunlit chocolate bar awaits them.]

Birgitte: Here at The Cacao Muse we have a secret plan to make the wishes of people like you come true. We are organizing a secret anti-corn syrup, anti-palm oil movement.

[Before Samantha can respond, a shadow passes overhead, cutting off the golden light of the setting sun. The sand beneath their feet shimmers—and soon they feel it. A deep tremor underfoot.

Birgitte: The sand… it’s liquefying!

Samantha: Oh my god, the bar!

[The chocolate bar begins to sink into the sand…]

[Birgitte and Samantha attempt to stabilize the chocolate bar, but the tremors grow stronger, knocking them off their feet. The bar sinks deeper into the sand as the entire beach turns into a series of undulating dunes, pushing everything in front of them—seashells, crayfish, seaweed, chocolate bars…]

[Then, a low subterranean growl passes underground—they can feel the low bass through the sand. Birgitte grabs Samantha’s arm.]

Birgitte: Sam, it’s the Lords of Xibalba.⁴

Samantha: How can you be sure? What if it’s Osiris?

Birgitte: No no, it’s them. I researched them for my novel, remember? It sounds like them. They’re trying to pull the chocolate down into the Underworld. They probably think it has corn syrup.⁵ They really can be pretty dense sometimes.

[Samantha gives Birgitte a look. The sand is still shaking by the way.]

Birgitte: Let me think let me think… didn’t you go to Guatemala recently? Wasn’t there a chocolate connection?

Samantha: Yes… my sister-in-law has been living in Guatemala … for years. She actually used to run a hostel called Ciao Cacao and sometimes makes her own chocolate straight from cacao! My husband and I went to visit her earlier this year, and the chocolate culture in Antigua was amazing. There are lots of specialty shops that make all sorts of cacao-derived products. We tried 90% cacao dark chocolate bars (I’ll admit those were a bit much for me) and tea brewed from the leaves of a cacao plant, which was surprisingly rich and chocolatey. The chocolate in Guatemala has an almost fruity flavor, which, as I understand it, is because they don’t roast the beans at high temperatures as most other chocolate producers do. 

Birgitte: And they don’t use any corn syrup. That’s the key! Quick, break off a piece and taste it.

Samantha: What do you mean, why—

Birgitte: Trust me on this Sam. Quick before it disappears…!

[Samantha breaks off a corner of the sinking bar. The moment she puts it on her tongue, the flavor it releases ignites a bolt of lightning that travels straight into the Underworld. Satisfied there is no corn syrup in this chocolate, the Lords of Xibalba cease their underworldly terror. The beach settles back into stillness, and the bar stops sinking. In cinematic drama fashion, the sun breaks through the clouds. Birgitte pulls it out of the sand and holds it up to the light.]

Chocolate: Santa María Cahabón by the Sandhill Chocolate Company

Percentage: 75%

Origin: Guatemala

Ingredients: Organic cacao beans, organic raw fair trade cane sugar, organic cacao butter (Tanzania)

Price: $12.00

Tasting Notes: A full-flavored profile brimming with notes of red fruit that melt into tones of brazil nut, touch on a little acidity, and finally finish with bitter orange peel.

Birgitte and Samantha now need a day’s rest, having rescued a perfectly corn-syrup-free chocolate bar from certain melt in the Xibalba realm. In the meantime… did you know that liking, commenting, restacking, and otherwise demonstrating love to a writer online has been proven to have significant healing properties and send feel-good vibes?

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COMING UP! DAY 21 of the TCM HOLIDAY TOUR

Have you ever heard of Ferris Island?

I haven’t either. Hmm. I wonder if it really exists then. Because, you know, if a writer writes it but no one’s heard of it, does it exist?

I believe that’s called fiction. Tomorrow, we sit down with a weaver of words of multivariate lengths and disparate kinds, of imaginative threads and speculative stories and serializations of supernatural and spiritual stuff, of suspense and sincerity—

~ Okay that’s enough alliteration

~ Ah, so you do like literature!

1. See here for the origin story of the art dogs of Art Dogs.

2. Now you know why the chocolate bars always look their best in my photos. I know too much about them, and they don’t dare misbehave. Chocolate is dark, but chocolate blackmail is darker.

3. I don’t expect you to guess the precise geo coordinates but it has to be reasonably close enough. What’s reasonably close enough? “The West Coast of the United States” is not close enough. “California coast” is also not close enough. “San Francisco coast” would be close enough.

4. This really needs a much longer footnote, but in essence, the Lords of Xibalba are the gods of death in the Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of Creation of the ancient Maya. There are twelve of them: two main dudes and ten lesser deities, or demons. You don’t want to mess with these dudes. They’ll liquefy the sand right under your feet.

5. Very likely a miscommunication. I mean, to be fair, if you were the Lord of Death sitting deep underground, and you heard someone up above talking about corn syrup in the physical proximity of a chocolate bar stuck in the sand, you’d probably make the wrong assumption too. Still, ya think they’d have the presence of mind to ask for clarification before they turned the entire beach to mush.