For innovative flavors with an Asian twist:
When Liane Pensack-Rinehart’s mom passed away from cancer at the end of 2020, it was a wake-up call. “That’s when I was like, I can’t work for anyone else anymore. I want to really get back on track with my own business," she recalls. By 2021, she was working full-time on her venture, Colorado Cocoa Pod. Pensack-Rinehart worked in tech before going to pastry school in 2015. That's where she fell in love with chocolate. "It’s the perfect medium for me to be able to be artsy but also, chocolate is very temperamental [so] you need to be very technical working with it,” she notes.
After graduation, she oscillated between working for various bakeries and confectioners and getting Colorado Cocoa Pods going. But after her mother’s death, she went all-in selling her handcrafted bon bons in flavors inspired by her half-Chinese, half-Japanese background.
“I grew up with a lot of different Asian desserts and I just wanted to create these desserts and put them into a bon bon and make them very well-flavored and balanced, but not too sweet,” says Pensack-Rinehart. (The best compliment you can get out of an Asian auntie about a dessert is, “It’s good, not too sweet!”)
Colorado Cocoa Pod's first flavor collection was inspired by a trip to China. “I’ve always loved the Chinese Zodiac and it’s perfect because there are twelve different animals and I had a twelve-piece box that I wanted to create,” Pensack-Rinehart says. Flavors include passion fruit vanilla (representing the tiger); raspberry matcha (snake); milk tea (horse); and soft caramel and black sesame (rat). There are also more classic flavors like cookies n’ cream (dog); and peanut butter and banana (monkey).
Colorado Cocoa Pods consistently puts out seasonal hand-painted bon bon boxes with innovative flavors. The one-woman business recently expanded to solid chocolate bars in flavors such as matcha raspberry black sesame and ube fruity pebbles. For this summer’s special offering, Pensack-Rinehart released her take on the viral Pistachio Knafeh bar as a large chocolate cup filled with pistachio praline, tahini paste, white chocolate, toasted kataifi and freeze-dried raspberries.
Shipping is currently closed until October but pick-up is available online. You can also find Colorado Cocoa Pods at various pop-ups and markets. For more information, visit coloradococoapod.com.
For new flavors every week:
After living in Castle Pines for more than twenty years, Gretchen Harrison wanted to bring something unique, boutique and delicious to her neighbors. After becoming an empty nester, she opened up Alice + Kate (the name is inspired by her grandmother, Kate, and her aunt, Alice).She started with macaroons then expanded into caramels and chocolates. “I do a molded chocolate with brightly colored cocoa butter and it is a genuine surprise to people to see something like this on this side of town,” Harrison says. “They’re so used to only seeing it in Denver and I’m presenting it here.”
She makes it a point to partner with other local businesses like the Sweetest Bean, a Littleton-based company owned by two women who source their vanilla from a Ugandan village where they lived for seven years; and Black Sheep Pasture in Peyton, which is where she gets her eggs. She also stocks Tea With Tae, Huckleberry Roasters and Colorado Mountain Jam in the retail section of her shop.
She approaches her work like a mad scientist: “I did a deep dive into confectionery science to be able to perfect the glucose structure,” Harrison says. “It’s really becoming this evolving little sweets shop here as I get each menu item perfected, then I’m able to build onto that and start producing newer, better, seasonal things.”
Week-by-week visitors will find everchanging macaroons and caramel flavors — although customer favorites like pretzel with bacon and Fireball dry rub are constant. Some of her seasonal summertime flavors include cherry pie and strawberry lemonade macarons as well as peach vanilla and dark cherry brandy liqueur chocolates.
Alice + Kate is located at 572 Castle Pines Pkwy A5 in Castle Pines. Visit aliceandkatebakery.com for the most updated hours of operation.
From left to right: Mahaila Deshotel (employee) with Mara and Patrick Tcheunou in their Edgewater Market retail/factory space.
Helen Xu
For true farm-to-mouth chocolate:
An NPR article sent husband and wife Mara and Patrick Tcheunou on an unexpected path to becoming the owners of a cocoa farm in Cameroon and Bibamba Artisan Chocolates inside Edgewater Public Market. “It was about this impending chocolate shortage in the world because of climate change [and] younger generations aren’t necessarily interested because of the malpractice of the chocolate industry,” explains Mara, referencing the abusive history of child and/or slave labor on cocoa farms. “And my husband, chocolate is his favorite food, and he’s like, ‘Oh no, this can’t happen.’”Patrick, who emigrated to the U.S. from Cameroon, reached out to his family and their contacts. In 2015, he purchased farmland in the Center province of the country and started planting cacao, plantains and coffee seeds. At that time, Patrick worked as a chemical engineer in oil and gas while Mara was a psychotherapist (she still practices) but both had a burning desire to become entrepreneurs in an ethical, sustainable manner that could be passed down to the next generations.
“We realized we wanted to have the cleanest supply chain possible and we felt that we needed to control that supply chain from scratch,” Patrick notes. That means plotting the farm to exclusively use rainfall for irrigation, not using pesticides or GMOs, and directly employing workers.
The plan was to focus on the wholesale market, which is what they were geared up to do when the container of cocoa beans from the farm's first harvest arrived in America in early 2020 — around the same time COVID hit.
Patrick and Mara realized they needed to pivot to retail, so they got a commissary kitchen and started selling at farmer’s markets, pop-ups and online. Bibamba's first product was Jungle Crunch, a dark chocolate bark made with plantains harvested from the farm. Today, the most popular bark flavor is the orange bark, which is 60 percent dark chocolate with whole orange slices and warm spices like cinnamon.
Six months ago, Bibamba made the leap to a production/retail storefront at Edgewater Public Market and expanded its product line to over twenty items including bon bons, caramels, cups and its heavy-hitter, pate au chocolat. It's “a chocolate nut spread with roasted hazelnut and almond. It’s dairy-free and we don’t use any palm oil,” explains Mara. Basically, it's elevated Nutella that’s perfect for spreading on toast or drizzling over oatmeal, ice cream and fruit.
The retail location also allows the Bibamba team to connect with customers and tell their story visually through photography of the farm displayed on the walls; verbally while selling chocolates; and through workshops and classes hosted in the space.
“We are just regular people trying to figure out something. So yes, we enter not even knowing exactly how much it’s going to cost, how much we didn’t know,” says Patrick. “We have to learn as we go and just stick with our vision.”
Bibamba Aritsan Chocolate is located at 5505 West 20th Avenue in Edgewater and is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. For more information, visit bibamba.com.
