The Art of Chocolate
"They have to be beautiful," states Lecia Duke when. She is speaking of the hand rolled chocolates in the cases of her intimate shop Chocolat. "If they're not beautiful, they don't go in the case."
Lecia Duke is as beautiful as the chocolates she produces. Of French, Irish, English and Cherokee descent, her cheekbones are high and her dark coloring is dramatic. When she talks about chocolate, she grows even more beautiful as enthusiasm heightens the color in her cheeks. There is a twinkle in her eye that hints at a good sense of humor, and she moves about her shop with a dancer's quick and easy movement. Duke developed an interest in chocolate when there was no demand for anything but inexpensive milk chocolate. She had graduated from university first in her class in architecture and seemed destined to work with hard steel beams, not sheets of liquid chocolate. As if startled by her own life, her eyes grow wide as she states, "I found it kind of funny when they told me I had to have a valedictorian speech." With a guaranteed future ahead of her, she joined an architectural firm and began what promised to be a bright career ahead, one that hinted at stardom. She worked hard drafting plans for those steel beams. She put in long hours, in part, she says, "to compensate for being a woman in what was then a man's world." But one day she realized that architecture was not bringing her pleasure and began to question what she was doing. She wasn't sure what she wanted, but she did know that, "If I had to work that hard, which I would, it had to be something that brought pleasure to my soul." Duke spent several months of introspection, wondering what her road in life might be. "I wasn't Mother Teresa, I couldn't go off to work in Third World countries, but I had to do something other than just make money. " Discovering chocolate, she decided that this was what she could do, an expression of sharing that was in her heart. Her family was dismayed that she was overthrowing a promising career, to become an exotic thing known as a chocolatier, but she told them, "don't even think about it." She had discovered that chocolate was "an animal of its own," and she could exercise her mind on taming this animal. She went to Switzerland where she studied techniques perfected in 200 years ago. "It amazes me that while we were hacking our way through the wilderness, the Swiss were perfecting their subtle techniques," says Duke. Her career started with a nod to her architectural background. Duke's first ventures, unique at the time, were to make chocolate logos, such as a three dimensional chocolate car, created when the Honda Accura came out, a chocolate record album for Grammy winners who prominently displayed their gold record but ate the chocolate one. "Chocolate is an entity of itself, it has a personality," Duke states. "It's like a baby - it'll tell you when things aren't right. It can be atmospheric conditions outside the building, something on the inside." She shakes her head as if in dismay, but she is smiling. She has known what it's like to take care of her baby, to sit with it, to cry with it, and best of all to enjoy at it when the perfect chocolate has been achieved.
Our favorite chocolates -the ones we had to buy- revealed Duke's sense of humor. Created with whimsy, these were truffles and their decorative swirls were inspired by the swirling braids of a Rastafarian. They call it their Jamaican Truffle of course.
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