Cocoa Bean to Chocolate Chip: From Start to…The Beginning

Ending Queer Chocolatier's baked goods production has been bittersweet (pun fully intended). The timing of it only adds to the bittersweetness; the middle of October is the most emotionally challenging part of the year for me as 10/8 and 10/17 mark the passing of my great-grandmother and my grandmother, respectively. Having another thing just come to an end arbitrarily, albeit much less significant, seems to add to the loss I feel this month.

But occasionally endings can lead to new beginnings and sometimes even lead back to old beginnings.

My Introduction to Chocolate, Twice

The story of Grandma's chocolate chips is the start of it all for me and it’s a story I love to tell because I just am tickled by young Morgan's shenanigans! If you read that story, you’ll learn I was never suited to become a burglar but definitely was meant to have a career involving chocolate!

For the last several months, I’ve been trying to learn the chocolate-making process. But I’ve not been able to dedicate myself to learning and only have practiced in fits and starts. Running a business and trying to pivot at the same time is challenging, but when a global pandemic made its way to Muncie, pivot was all I could do and running a business was becoming less viable.

I had to abandon my old way of running the business if I wanted Queer Chocolatier to not only survive but to emerge on better footing.

It wasn't easy for me, though.

Selling baked goods was not only a good revenue source, it was a bit of a weird security blanket that provided cover in case I ended up not being good at the thing I wanted to: make chocolate.

My grandma once told me to quit a miserable job I had and she just gave me that permission that I somehow needed as a young person who just graduated from college. I didn’t have another job lined up or anything but that job was definitely a dead end. Not long after, though, I found a decent job that I held for a couple years before becoming a stockbroker.

Dropping something so that you can carry something else is good and healthy but we are not really taught how to do that. I still struggle with it.

But I’m grateful she was my first teacher of this lesson.

Coming off of just dropping the baked goods, I'm scared but ready to carry on learning the chocolate-making process and dedicating myself to the craft.

A reintroduction, if you will.

When I was in the shop yesterday, I was doing a bit of housekeeping. But, for fun, I decided to play and temper a bit of test chocolate I just made earlier in the week to use in a new mold I recently purchased: a chocolate chip mold! I experimented with making a few chocolate chips so as to not waste time, but it seemed to work really nicely!

But this morning, 10/17, I just got hit with the overwhelming sense of how subconsciously I made chocolate chips and started to remember my grandma. I woke up thinking how excited I was for those chips then started sinking into memories.

It made me go through a lot of steps of grieving again.

But this time I'm left feeling hopeful and that I have permission for a yet-another new beginning.

I’ll be sharing a lot about this new beginning and all I learn and struggle with. I want to help others see what the process is like, not simply the chocolate-making process but the process of pivoting a business and learning a new skill and failing but learning from failures. I want folks to be connected to the products I make as much as possible.

Connections, especially now, and even if they’re just in one’s memories, are so important for all of us to pull through together.