I have followed Bellflower’s essentialist philosophy concerning good food, however, and I provide to you a humble template — utilizing only the best examples of the necessary ingredients — to produce the modern-classic brownie.

When Will and I first started Bellflower six years ago, our interest was in reimagining chocolate milk with single-origin chocolate driving our product line. However, given the onerous task of meeting state and federal regulations around producing dairy products, particularly for wholesale, we put more of our focus on our bars, nibs, and confections since those were easier to distribute due to less stringent regulations.

We love that our chocolate making endeavors require the employ of beautiful machines.

It’s apparent that chocolate has another food item to liken itself to, in addition to wine, tea, coffee, and beer: olive oil. In a likewise nascent stage in terms of appreciation, quality control, and regulation, olive oil, like cacao, doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Cornelia brought the test macarons, tinted Bellflower blue. We tasted, we liked, and then, over coffee and buttered croissants one early morning at Sea Wolf, we hammered out the pricing and profit-sharing details and said let's do it! Can we ship something for Mother’s Day?

The remains of this party were remnants of laughter caught in the midnight green boughs of the big Western red cedar between our yard and the neighbor's as they misted into memory.

Goût de ter·roir: infusing chocolate with a sense of place via Seattle's Japanese history. 

I’m sitting with my back to the wall in a coffee shop on Queen Anne with five other people, not including the barista. It’s blue out now, after a morning’s wait for the gray to burn off and the sun to take its place. My most recent cook book acquisition sits open in front of me, revealing photographs and culinary algorithms: Notes From the Larder, A Kitchen Diary with Recipes.