Books have lots of great ideas, but they don’t give you a recipe for basic chocolate.

Sometimes they’ll just tell you to melt down store bought chocolate bars (really??), which isn’t going to give you full control over the ingredients that go into your chocolate. It also doesn’t count as ‘making your own chocolate’.

Most of the students that come to us want to know EXACTLY what’s going into the chocolate, so they can make the healthiest chocolate possible to give to their family. To do this, you’re going to want to make it yourself, from scratch, with the ingredients you trust.

And what if a recipe or technique in a book doesn’t work out? There’s really no way to know what went wrong and what to do to fix it.

It’s especially hard if you’re a visual learner. Even the most detailed photos will only get you so far.

But seeing it done in front of you, either in person or on video, you’re able to notice the intricacies of the textures, consistency of the chocolate and the method start to finish, which increases your chances of success massively.

Then even if it goes wrong, you need a place you can come to ask questions.

We provide this in The Raw Chocolatier. You’ll be able to ask questions in each of the lessons and get help from your fellow students, some of which are now professional chocolate makers, selling their own chocolates.

People come to us genuinely curious if it’s even possible to make high quality chocolate at home.

This means they either don’t try to begin with, or when they do try, will settle for less than perfect results (the type you see in the ‘before’ picture above). They’ll often put their poor results down to ‘not having the right equipment’… and who wants to invest in lots of expensive equipment when they don’t seem to be getting anywhere with even the basics?

This is a real shame because:

a. It’s absolutely possible to make high quality chocolate at home

b. You don’t need a kitchen full of expensive, professional chocolate making equipment to produce stunning chocolates.

In The Raw Chocolatier Amy takes great pride in showing you how to get started making chocolate at home, with what you have already.

You may need to get a few more pieces of kitchen items to make your job easier, but you won’t be asked to set up a full professional chocolate production setup. Most people can get started spending less than £75.

It also may be true that once really getting into your chocolate making you’ll want to buy extra moulds, upgrade your blender and maybe even get a stone grinder (which are very reasonably priced now, at under £200) but at least by then you’ll already be producing amazing chocolates and you’ll know you have a love for this.

Tempering chocolate is a combination of heating, cooling and constant motion done in a specific way that makes the crystals of the chocolate uniform.

Why is this important? Because it’s the tempering process that gives chocolate bars a shiny, snappy finish and makes the chocolate more stable at higher temperatures.

So if you’ve ever made chocolate that’s powdery, melts at room temperature and doesn’t have a shine to it, that’s why.

This is another limitation with trying to learn chocolate making from books; they rarely cover chocolate tempering, and even when they do, the chances you’re going to successfully pick up this process from a book are very slim.

There are many ways to temper and Amy covers several of them in The Raw Chocolatier course. Plus, they can easily be done at home (no expensive chocolate tempering machine needed). Learning this in person or by a very well thought out and produced video lesson is really the only way.

I took Amy’s course in 2012 as a treat to myself, after being left some money. I wanted to be able to make raw chocolate for my family, as I wasn’t impressed with the raw chocolate on the market.

It all seemed a bit overwhelming at first, but with Amy’s base recipes I started getting creative with different colours and flavours and ended up creating my own recipes and making truffles for friends as well as my family.

I just wanted to make chocolate so badly. My fascination with it beyond just loving the taste, was when I read about the mystical qualities of the raw fresh cacao straight from the pod.

Before The Raw Chocolatier course, I’d tried to make a few batches without knowing anything about tempering or right ingredients, which was frustrating and disheartening to say the least.

Finally I found The Raw Chocolatier online and wow… learning about tempering was like learning a hidden secret! Having the chocolate pop crisply out of the molds was so exciting!