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After ruminating over and over on what to do next - I have not done much, so any step I take will be a step forward - I decided to take more classes; although I am taking a class at the moment, the nature of it being online does not keep me motivated enough. I need to be there, working the chocolate, networking with other people, in a more conducive atmosphere. The whole online thing is actually a little boring! I am from another era, albeit computer savvy!Anyway, so today I visited the ICE (Institute of Culinary Education) and signed up for three classes. One is not really a class, but a chocolate tour in Manhattan. The tour will be done in a 5 1/2-hour period and a certain number of stores will be visited. We will be able to check the facilities, talk to the owners and try their chocolate.That's going to give me a good idea of what goes behind the scenes in a real retail environment. What equipment they use, how much chocolate they produce, how many people they have running the store at any given time? These are important questions for me and I hope this tour will help me answer some of them - hopefully all of them.The second class is a one called Advanced Chocolate Techniques. This one is a two-day working that takes place on a weekend. The class will cover working with polyethelyne sheets and chocolate color, free-form molding with silicon or cocoa powder, spraying/air brushing, molding chocolate, and gluing/showpiece assembly. At the end of the course, we will bring home a showpiece created by ourselves.I am very much looking forward to this training, mostly because this one is the key that allowed me to take the next one.The third and last one I signed up for is called Chocolate Decoration. Now, this is a really exciting training for one reason only - Norman Love will be giving the class!This class is for people who are working in the area already, but because I am a former student and will have completed the Advanced Techniques, I was able to sign up for this one.It was really great to receive the email confirming my enrollment in all three classes. I felt like I was finally following the path I decided to take a little while ago. Let my new career begin!Next: the search for a tempering machine! That's going to be a tough one.

Imagine your very own chocolate workshop - shelf space for all your molds, spatulas, pots, pans and junk; room for all your machines which nobody loves but you; boxes and boxes of your fine couvertures from around the world. What is the one thing you need to make your vision complete?You need a marble slab! I am the proud owner of a new marble slab which now lives in my state-of-the-art-on-a-twizzlestick-budget chocolate studio formerly known as.my basement. Here I can store all my chocolate gear, develop new recipes, make chocolate decorations and tinker with the gadgets of artistry: molds, bands, transfer sheets, paint sprayers, flower cutters, leaf veiners, exacto knives. Endless fun. From here, I cart the new ideas & designs to my co-op commercial kitchen for production, which is now a heck of a lot more efficient. In the words of Virginia Woolf, I have a room of ones own. Shopping for marble? I considered granite and marble and started pricing pieces from the usual suspects: Home Depot and Costco. You can beat those prices! I wound up in the stone works district of Los Angeles which is in North Hollywood (who knew?). This big boy pictured above cost me $400 with no delivery (borrowed my friend Garys truck and also my friend Gary to help carry the damn thing) which is 1/4 of the price Home Depot quoted me. Dont get me wrong, I love my peeps at Home Depot but these shiny slabs require some muscular shopping. I hear you get good deals at the graveyard but I had to draw the line! Granite is a little cheaper than marble; both natural stones are pourous so you have to use some caution with food colors and cleansers, but I chose marble because of this wonderfully clean color (against which all chocolate is easily visible) and its long history as the cool, clean favorite of confectioners.

We are finally opening our shop in notting hill (81 Westbourne grove to be precise) on Friday June 5th.Come and try our theobroma cacao and theobroma grandiflorum pulp juices as well as our chocolate summer cocktails based on chocolate or cacao pulp including cacao pulp bellini, cupuacu and tonka Margarita, chocolate martini and matcha and white chocolate New Orleans gin fizz.Sit under our 4m wide panoramic plantation light whilst listening to sounds of the rainforest and tucking into some chocolates, warm fondants, chocolate mousse, chocolate ice cream. Everything on the menu is chocolate based, all drinks and all foods (apart from the water We are equally excited and mildly scared by the opening...Gerard Coleman

Tom and I packed our chocolate in our old station wagon and drove up to Berkeley this weekend to be vendors, along with Malena and Clive of The Xocolate Bar (such wonderful chocolate art!!), the folks from Divine Chocolate, and Ethan Ash of The Tea Room, at the North Berkeley Chocolate and Chalk Festival. There were apparently some exciting chocolate events going on somewhere, and, I imagine, lots of chocolate in chalk, but we missed almost all that because we were so busy at our booth. The chalk art I posted here was the best of the handful of pieces between our booth and Peet's Coffee, my sole destination beyond the vending area all day.Such a lot of smiling and repeating the same story! Exhausting, but so worth it.

Eve asked me whether I've taken any training so far. I have. One! And there is another one going on now.The first class I took was a one week, 25 hour introduction to chocolate making at ICE (the Institute of Culinary Education) in New York City, where I live.One aspect I enjoyed about that class is the fact that due to internal reasons, the institute had 3 different chefs training us over the 5 day period. That gave us all a good perspective on their personal approach to chocolate making. Quite interesting! I was extremely pleased with our last instructor, who is a very knowledgeable and likable person. Too bad we only had one day with him.The second course I am taking is online - quite not so exciting, I have to say. After going back and forth, I decided to take the online training from Ecole Chocolat. I've heard good things about the training from some former students, mostly the approach they have on starting your own chocolate business.The amount of information they give is astounding, but keeping up with an online course is really not for me. I love the interaction of a hands-on class. I am already behind on two assignments and I need to keep reminding myself I have to finish them.Ecole Chocolat offers a hands-on training in their location in Canada. I am considering taking it this year.So, that's what I have accomplished so far. Almost nothing, but we need to start somewhere. I only need to make sure this does not become another "hobby" of mine - I tend to be a little negative on my take on life (as you could probably see by the way I respond to some forum posts here - I am trying to change that, I swear!), so I think I need to start seeing some results, which will probably help keep me going.Watching what you guys have been doing is inspiring and I hope one day to be an inspiration to someone else.

This is a picture of Karin Sander's "Siegfried" from the German book, Kunst in Scholade (Chocolate Art). Today's mail brought a fine new copy for the store in addition to a few more treasures:

The hot chocolate cup is my favorite. It's Austrian, made by Higgins and Seiter, translucent china with delicate roses and gold trim, and a wonderfully eccentric spiraling handle.I also like the rabbit mold very much, even though it's only half there. He has a rather dignified look and stands on his own.The other books all come from paperbackswap.com, where I've been using all my credits on chocolate books for the library. The shop will have a good library as well as chocolate books, new and used, for sale.I thought I might sell the switch plate, too, but now that I see it, I know exactly which switch to use it on in the shop. Maybe I can find some more to sell...

First of all, thanks Eve for giving me the kick in the behind I needed to start blogging about my own journey! I needed it. Seeing the photos of what's to become your store made me realize how much I want to go through the same process. I want it! And that's a huge statement if you only knew me!So, before I start, let me give you all a short background on myself.I am Brazilian, but I've lived in New York City since 2001. I just turned 41 this past May and, so far, I've never had an actual career - I've been in the workforce for as long as I can remember, but basically going from one company to another without making much sense of it all. If an opportunity came by, I would take it. Don't get me wrong; I've only been to 5 different companies since I started working, and I mostly spent around 6 years in each, with the last two ones (the ones in the US) averaging less than that.Anyway, for the past 10 years or so I've been struggling with the idea of working for myself, having my own business, etc...problem is, I could never come up with something I really loved, and apparently you need to love whatever you decide to do on your own (that idea is still sort of iffy to me, as I think you can "develop" love for something, as long as you enjoy doing it to begin with).I've had some "a-ha" moments in the past, but they were ephemeral and did not survive the test of time - a week or two was all I needed to go from "I love that" to "I really don't want to deal with that anymore."My last one was wine. I love wine, and I thought I could make a living working with it in some way. Although I still love wine, the passion to actually focus on a business is not there.Chocolate is the belle du jour now. So far it's lasted way more than 2 weeks, which is fantastic. I know I like chocolate a lot, and I know I want to work with something created by me, where I put my imagination to work - and I think that's key! After 10 years searching for something, I finally realized that what I really want is to be proud of my own creations (that was one of the shortcomings of my wine idea - unless I worked at a winery, I would not be creating anything really special, with my own hands!) and I believe chocolate is one of those perfect medium to accomplish just that!Hence (I love when I can use "hence" in a sentence), here I am, ready and willing to begin my journey as a chocolatier (I know! I know! There are discussions about the correct use of the word "chocolatier." Although I don't plan on making my chocolate from scratch, I don't know a better word to describe what I want to become - and "chocolate melter" is out of the question!).I will try to keep you guys posted as often as I can.Andre CostaChocolatier-to-be

Here's the shop as it looks today. Its last incarnation was as part of a furniture store that took up much of the block. I've done drawings for what the front will look like - a new glass door and a radically different paint job - but it won't be done for another few weeks.

To get our plans okayed by the health department we're adding an ADA-compliant bathroom, a three bay sink and a mop sink, replacing the old carpet with linoleum (the expensive kind, too - they wouldn't accept our lower cost choice), putting in new wiring and a new ceiling, air conditioning and more.

This will be the retail area. It's small, just 20 x 30, I think. Behind the interior window there's larger area where we'll be doing packaging, shipping and storing the chocolate.

Join me on my 7th annual trip to help cocoa farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast. These two countries produce more than 55% of the world's cocoa. Their farmers are extremely poor, and their poverty makes possible the mainstream chocolate that some of us enjoy.We will land in Accra, purchase cocoa storage bags, travel to Ebekawopa, Ghana, donate a dryness meter and 100 cocoa storage bags, measure the effectiveness of the solar cocoa drier we built last year, then travel to Ivory Coast, where we will visit three villages that just received cocoa scales from my NGO, Project Hope and Fairness .We will also visit a village where we just dug a 180-feet-deep well and Saf Cacao, the fourth largest cocoa buyer in Ivory Coast. There are lots of other adventures in this action-packed 7 day trip, costing $4,000, which includes travel costs from NYC to Accra and back (with a stop in Casablanca for a little fun in the souk).For more information about past trips, see my blog .

Look - yesterday's haul led me here!