Chocolate making is a patient art, particularly bean to bar, but even using whatever cheap chocolate mix she could get her hands on Allison, a precocious and entrepreneurial child, would watch the chocolate settle and take shapes, all the whilst allowing her budding thoughts and values to do the same.
The wholesome endeavour of making good chocolate while also cutting corners – non-fair trade and non-sustainably – is an unacceptable contradiction to Exploding Tree. This was a contradiction recognised even before Allison’s first chocolate-making class but the zeal to rectify it had only grown stronger in her journey from the chocolate room in Canada to the Exploding Tree studio in Cork, where her home-workshop hybrid is quaintly tucked on the shoulder of the small, famously fair-trade town of Clonakilty. A six-month visit with her new husband fifteen years ago perpetuated into the present day and her humble endeavour of selling homemade chocolate at the town market turned into the celebrated Exploding Tree of today.
With a relentlessness to ensure fair-trade and sustainable practices, this general philosophy of kindness, both to fellow humans and the earth, has become as much an integral pillar to Exploding Tree’s architecture as the wholesome chocolate itself. This spirit no doubt elevates Exploding Tree’s charisma and charm but the greater implication of these practices - that compassionate eye on the bigger picture - is perhaps what makes Exploding Tree so beloved. The vibrancy of their chocolate as well as their small-business, big-ideas spirit has carved out a niche in the emerald isle’s chocolate world, but it is precisely their position that allows them to so gently and deliciously influence the precarious industry by one cacao bean, one bar, one apprentice chocolatier at a time.
Whether it’s providing alternatives to dietarily restricted children around Easter time or the freely given wisdom and know-how of fair trade and sustainable business to aspiring chocolatiers, they’ve shown that simple kindness is a profound thing. The fiery and full-of-character namesake of Exploding Tree has its roots, pardon the pun, in this same simplicity: it is a phrase that represents something both radical and natural. It’s beyond fitting for them where the practice of kindly-made chocolate is as pure as it is extraordinary.
Exploding Tree
