Saturday Farmers’ Market Vendor Feature: The Drunken Chocolatier

This week’s featured vendor is The Drunken Chocolatier! We had the chance to talk with Carina, the owner and the chocolatier behind Drunken Chocolatier. While she says she is just having fun playing around with flavor and color, the results are incredible (just look at the photos)! Read more about her business and what we learned when speaking with her below, and stop by to see her this week at the market, 10am-2pm.

Why did you start making chocolates?

I used to work in a bakery, where I saw people in the same company making chocolates and it seemed like a lot of fun! I started with liqueur simply because she used to visit a friend in the Okanagan, and would gather a lot of liqueurs and I wanted to do something with it because I wasn’t going to drink it! So I put it in chocolates and gave it away, and people seemed to like it, so I jumped into even more elaborate products!

How long does it take to make your chocolates?

Making one flavor takes two days. You use a mold, and then hand paint everything and complete it with the shell. The difficulty is that the filling has to set overnight, so it has to take at least two days.

How do you select the liqueurs or beers?

Just by trying it! If we have a relationship with the distillery or the brewery they will give recommendations, but we also do tastings and things like that to ensure the flavor is what we are looking for.

How do you decide on the theme of each chocolate?

It depends! Sometimes it happens with season, say you get to Halloween and you want a pumpkin beer, then I will design the chocolate around that type of beer so that the look reflects the taste in some aspects. Other times I just get creative.

What are your most popular chocolates?

Earl grey is the most popular overall, followed closely by the tiramisu. However, we do have a signature box, with the nine flavors that are most popular overall, depending on what it is we have available at that moment. The two chocolates that I have been recommending today are the lemon basil gin, which uses local basil, and the elderflower. I submitted that one to a competition in Toronto and it won an award for the Canadian International chocolate awards.

Can you tell me a bit about the classes you teach?

I teach classes at the kitchen we use, about how to temper the chocolate so that it has a shiny shell when fully set, as well as truffle painting. If this is something that interests you, you should definitely participate in one.