Sometimes baking is a job. Sometimes it’s an experiment. And sometimes, on our best days, it’s an expression of what we simply love doing.

For this love of the baked good, we are out and about, once again, to find new ideas and recipes to bring home for the opening of our dessert cafe. We’ve done this whole “in search of the best” before and it inspired a grip of The Chocolate’s offerings. (ie. our current sugar cookie, our chocolate cake, our red velvet cake, et al.) Half our menu was born from family recipes, and the other half are original recipes based on that delicious something-or-other from that one place in that one city. We eat an incredible, life-changing dessert and it becomes an issue of national security to be able to recreate it (national security=our innate sense of tastiness and professional well-being).

Basically, we want The Chocolate to be the best. We want our cafe to be synonymous with class, kindness, and offensively good cake . So we’re going to ask the places notorious for being the best what they do (and don’t do) to make them the cream of the crop, the upper echelon, the apple of  your eye, the cat’s meow. And by the time we get back, we hope to have a suitcase full (carry-on size, of course) of ideas that you’ll probably want to get in line to stuff your face with.