About Mackenzie, founder of Map Chocolate and the Next Batch bean to bar chocolate school

I’m a self-taught craft chocolate maker, founder of Map Chocolate and the Next Batch School, dedicated to a hands-on small batch approach to chocolate in a big batch world. Find my chocolate writing here

I craft chocolate from the bean because I fell in love with cacao. For some folks it’s shoes: for me it’s the sight of cocoa beans in jute sacks.

I didn’t know a lick about “craft” chocolate back in 2014 when I started making it. In fact, the idea of making chocolate from the bean was a revelation, a stop-right-then + there and question everything moment. That first inkling is how the Map started to unfold.

Before my first-ever batch what I knew was bars snuck into movies or handfuls of tiny chips nibbled while baking cookies or big blocks whittled into slabs for campfire s'mores. A lifelong love for baking (and a brief career as a pastry chef) meant I knew it as chopped + melted +swirled, and licked from my fingers when the boss wasn’t looking.

Like most folks I knew end result without having a clue of the why or the how. Just bars, chips, chocolate kisses.

I've flipped sourdough pancakes on the banks of rivers, pickled grape leaves in Grand Canyon, baked a cake on a sailboat, made foraged-apple butter when I should have been reading my law books, checked a wedding cake on a Southwest Airlines flight and cross-country skied cheesecake to a yurt, but I never knew I could make my own chocolate.

the Day of the Chocolate Chicken

Made from wild-crafted beans from Bolivia, (which I know now are teensy and harvested via canoe) and despite how darn cute it was I took one look and then a bite. It did not taste like a chocolate kiss, a Mars bar or any chocolate I’d ever had. What it tasted like was my chocolate worldview shattering, my cartoon brain skyrocketing chocolate fireworks, and a few Homer Simpson duh!’s thrown into the mix. Also, it had the clean + heady bite of a series of questions, of how and what, and who knew?! each new question a destination I began aiming for on my chocolate Map.

Did I reach my destination? um, no. as far as I can tell, the Map just keeps unfolding.