There’s no business like chocolate business! Lets face it, majority of people enjoy chocolate… the explosion of taste, the eruption of our senses, the dopamine it sparks in our brain and that little bit of ‘naughtiness’ that brings a smile to our mind. It's that thing your bring over to dinner when they tell you not to bring anything!

If we like, your clients will love it! Sure you can give them a pen, or a cap, but a good chocolate will give you an emotional connection to your brand and business, an experience to remember.

“So how does this chocolate business thing work? Like just hand clients chocolate?”

If you want to promote and or market your business, Chocolate Works can moulded your chocolate with your logo or message that your client see when biting into their delicious piece of yumminess. We also provide customised packaging with personalised messages and branding on that doubles up as a branding message.

All in all this give your client or consumer an awesome experience as well as your business an opportunity for exposure and memorability. Whats your chocolate choice? Moulded chocolate, wrapped chocolate, stamped chocolate coins, printed Smarties™, freckled chocolate, printed chocolate…. We’ve go you covered!

Great question! If we travel way way back Mayans as early as 900AD (where it was said to be discovered), they named the cocoa ’Food of the Gods’ and was consumed during religious ceremonies and marriage celebrations. “King Montezuma, the Aztec king, drank 50 cups of cocoa a day, and an extra one when he was going to meet a lady friend. Because of its stimulating effects, Aztec women were forbidden to drink it.”

If we fast forward to present day, science has shown that chocolate acts as an aphrodisiac and dark chocolate boost serotonin and release endorphins (in layman terms, it makes us happy campers). So if you see someone down and your feeling compassionate, offer them some chocolate!

Then not to knock the blokes, (or men in general!) but one thing they get, is that to give a loved one chocolate they bank on a smile, a hug and….. (we shall leave the rest up to your imagination!)

You name it, we can produce it! A chocolate gold shoe, yep tick. Letters made from chocolate, yep tick, a chocolate plaque with a special message, yep tick, hot sexy chocolate lips, yep tick! Chocolate chocolate chocolate… we’ve got you covered!

So an egg is has a symbolic association with fertility and in many different tradition, Easter is a celebration of the new beginning, a rebirth of kinds.

Back back when (history notes around the 17th and 18th century) people would colour, paint and decorate eggs with vegetable dyes, charcoals and flowers as part of this celebration time. It wasn’t until the early 19th century the (ingenious) Europeans created the idea of making the humble Easter egg out of chocolate (praise the lord!). And that is essentially how it began.

Now a days we have the technology to make customised moulds to extend the Easter egg shape to pretty much whatever you want! Easter bunnies, Bunny ears, Easter bunnies filled with little Easter eggs, printed chocolate Easter eggs, decorated freckled eggs and so on.

So get your Easter ooogie boogie boots on and jump into some delicious customised Easter chocolate!

How did Valentine’s Day start?

Legend has it, in the 3rd century in Rome, a guy named Claudius decided that single soldiers were better warriors than those with wives and families and outlawed marriage (could you imagine after so long of bringing same sexed marriage to Australia). This defiant of marriages, made them secretive held by a priest named Valentine. When Claudius discovered this, Valentine was put in prison to be put to death. While in prison, he sent his first ‘Valentine’ greeting to himself after falling in love. Before his death, he wrote her a letter signed ‘From. You Valentine” .. myth or fact?

To this day many people around the world send loved ones messages of loooove.

Chocolates are rated number 1 in 35 Best Valentine's Day Treats to Buy for Your Loved Ones (by good house keeping), At Chocolate Works we know how to make your relationship sweet and tasty with customised premium chocolate. So get ready to design the best present ever!

Chocolate excites our senses, we get a dose of ‘yeah that feels good’ when it melts in our mouth, tingles our taste buds, and sends reward signals to the brain… the same kind of dopamine explosion as sex, laughing or watching a contestant win.

It could be said, that our younger memory of eating chocolate is associated with a positive experience and so when we eat it as an adult, subconsciously those neuro transmitters are sending signals “ahh what a great feeling of fun-ness”.

At Chocolate Works, we use quality coverture chocolates with pure cocoa butters and cocoa mass that’s a straight shooter to those loved up dopamine that will have you coming back for more!

As the dust starts to settle on the media whirlwind that was the launch of The Great Aussie Waffle Log, the take away message from the experience is two-fold.

Firstly, it's even more apparent than before that a simple chocolate bar is far more than just a combination of a few ingredients. It really is a placeholder in the lives of thousands of Australians and has been missed by many. So did Nestle bail on this Aussie icon too soon? Probably not. Once the volumes dropped below the critical mark that can sustain a large production line, it becomes unviable for a multi-national to continue to satisfy the needs of the remaining Polly Waffle lovers. It had run it's race. But the memories lived on and we have been proud to shipping our reinvention of that delicious bar.

Secondly, and possibly more importantly, from the flood of correspondence received, there's more than one favourite that people would love to be able to wrap their chocolate loving hands around.

We've received hundreds of messages from chocolate lovers requesting that we become the maker of chocolates past.

So what else is missing from your past chocolate delights? What's the one chocolate bar that has disappeared from your life that you'd love to get your hands on again?

I was asked an interesting question by a client today that I hadn't ever thought of in 15 years in the chocolate business. That doesn't happen all that often.

He was wanting to know if we could make him a customised chocolate, yes, but it needed to be a chocolate that was suitable for vegetarians.

A Vegan chocolate? I'll get back to you.

In our office we have a sign that reads "chocolate is made with cacao, cacao comes from a tree, that makes it a plant which makes it a salad." There's your answer its clearly Vegan!

The real answer is not so simple though.

Chocolate is more than just the cocoa bean. A whole lot happens to it before it gets to the shelves of your local chocolate store.

Milk chocolate for example naturally has milk added to it. Milk comes from cows - cows are an animal. So there's a problem.

In fact even some dark chocolates, particularly the cheaper ones, have milk or milk products added to them to fill them out and reduce the cost, which primarily comes from the cost of the cocoa mass and butter.

But good dark chocolates contain no milk products at all. They are made from Cocoa Mass, Cocoa Butter and Sugar with limited quantities of some additives like Soya Lecithin and Flavour.

Furthermore for the vegans some producers also replace the milk in chocolate with non dairy substitutes like almond or rice milk.

So being a strict vegan doesn't stop you from enjoying the delights that come from the cocoa tree.

When we first had the idea to reinvent that long gone chocolate bar the PollyWaffle we never anticipated it would make such an impression with people. Sure, there's a Facebook page dedicated to trying to convince the former manufacturer to bring the bar back, and it has a decent number of followers, but at the end of the day, it's just a chocolate bar.

Or is it?

Echoing the thoughts of my last post about chocolate and the hold it has over people, like food does in general, reinventing the Polly Waffle, that iconic, floating in the pool confectionery, has touched the hearts, the memories, and the souls of people. So many people have asked - "does it float?"

It's front of mind for people because it's taken them back to a time gone by. Of summer days spent at the beach sipping a Tab and crunching a Waffle. Of watching Caddyshack and the scene with the floating chocolate bar and the cry of "DOODIE" that cleared the pool in seconds flat, followed by Bill Murray chowing down on it once the pool had been emptied. Interestingly, it was an American film and not even a PollyWaffle. It was a peanut-and-caramel nougat Baby Ruth - but let's not allow the facts to get in the way of a good memory, Australians converted the bar into something they knew.

People have found a little spot in the back of their mind that this confectionery reminds them of and they've been reminiscing these "better days" and pining for reminders of them. If The Great Aussie Waffle Log helps people get back there - then we've done our job.

And yes, we tested it - it floats!

For us chocolate is our livelihood.

We pay our bills, business and personal, based on selling the sweet nectar that is chocolate.

But it's more than that. Chocolate is one of the oldest food stuffs known to man. It's held a prestigious place in the history of mankind. At times it was more valuable than gold. History tells us that the stuff of cacao beans has been serious business.

But most people don't reflect on that when they unwrap a bar of chocolate.

What lures them in, aside from their taste buds, is the memories of chocolate past.

It's the childhood memories of Easter Egg hunts, those when you truly believed a bunny had come in and left lightly dusted paw marks on your hallway floor and hidden an assortment of delicious chocolate eggs throughout the house. And even the years you knew better about that mystical bunny, but you toed the line so as to not disappoint your parents and to not put those eggs in jeopardy.

It's the times you went to the store with Mum for the weekly shop and she plied you with a freddo frog to fill the time and keep you from complaining in every aisle.

It's the teenage years when you naughtily sat at the back of the movie theatre and rolled the spare jaffa's down the aisle for no particular reason other than it felt naughty.

It's the night snuggled on the couch watching Charlie, Augustus, Mike, Violet and the other children wondering the expanses of Willy Wonka's magical chocolate factory and going to bed afterward wishing it was true with the wise words of the Oompa-Loompa's ringing in your head.

Well that's what chocolate is all about for me. It's the memories of what chocolate represented through all those years. So why not become one of the chocolate makers? The dreamers of the dream.

Interesting news for hot chocolate fans. Sipping the sweet stuff could help improve your memory, according to a new study.

The news was discovered in research from Columbia University published in Nature Neuroscience, which found a link between the flavanols from cocoa and age-related cognitive decline.

In the Columbia University trial, participants aged between 50 and 69, were given one of two specially prepared cocoa drinks, one with 900mg of flavanols and one with 10mg over three months. Those that had the drink with 900mg performed much better in cognitive tests.

Scott A. Small, who wrote part of the paper, said: "If a participant had the memory of a typical 60-year-old at the beginning of the study, after three months that person on average had the memory of a typical 30 or 40-year-old."

So basically, the flavonols, which act like anti-oxidants, could help stop your brain declining as you age.

This has led some to believe that a change in diet could help prevent the onset of conditions like dementia - although unsurprisingly, dementia charities were cautious of the results and insisted more trials were needed.

And this doesn't mean you can run to the kitchen and make yourself a hot choc in the hope it will boost your brain - most cocoa products we consume have a much lower level of flavanols than the special drink prepared for the study (we doubt it came with whipped cream and marshmallows).