Chocolaterie Wanders offers you the world's finest handmade gourmet chocolates.

During the Mother’s Day craziness I almost forgot to mention that we will be condcuting tastings in Alexandria and in Gainesville. You will find us between 1-4pm on those two locations, offering you all we have to taste. Additionally there will be a wine tasting going on at Cork & Fork (I will have to be there then).

If you haven’t had any luck with finding Mother’s Day gifts, then this is a good idea too - either come by the Sugar Cube and pick up some high-end confectionary or visit us at Cork and Fork and pick up your favorite chocolate and a good bottle of wine.

Either way, we wish you & your mom a great Mother’s Day!

We have made up our minds and these are the exciting specials for this year’s Mother’s Day:

• Cointreau chocolate confection prepared with freshly grated orange zest and Cointreau liqueur
• Tea Tower featuring 28 confections and a tin of our new chocolate tea
• Mother’ Day Gift Basket with lots of chocolate confections, dried fruits, tea and more …

We are very excited about our new tea blend. It presents a soothing and slightly sweet blend of organic and fair trade certified black tea, rooibos, vanilla, chocolate bits, and coconut. The nose is slightly tropical and nutty with a rich coating of butterscotch on the palate.

Also very exciting is the limited edition Cointreau chocolate. This is a great candidate for our year-round assortment, but - as always - we let you decide whether to keep it year-round or not.

You will find more detailed information about our Mother’s Day specials in our upcoming newsletter (sign up here) and in our online shop.

Thanks for reading - and Happy Mother’s Day!

As we try to play catch-up with the time after Easter, we are also thinking about Mother’s Day Specials for you. Of course we are running behind and I don’t have any images yet, but by the end of the week we should be all set. We did try some other ideas earlier this week and here is a photo of some marzipan roses we did:

These were beautiful to look at, but since they are so intricate and detailed, they take very long to make. We are still debating whether to offer the roses or not - stay tuned for our next newsletter to find out!

We are making more marzipan products almost weekly - the reason you don’t find them in our online shop is, that they are made to order and sometimes it takes a few days to fit them in the production schedule. If you need some special marzipan products, just let us know - meanwhile we are working on a system to offer more marzipan articles in the online shop as well.

That’s it for today. I will be writing again, as soon as I have more pictures and we finalized our Mother’s Day Specials - one hint: It’s going to be tea-licious

We hope y’all had a very nice Easter weekend. Melanie and I actually worked on Sunday, but only until 5pm. We then went to take a walk in the park and enjoyed the chilly, but nice and fresh air and the blue sky. Afterwards we had ‘Boeuf Stroganoff’ - except that I made it with pork instead of beef (just had pork) and I made it just like my dad still makes it, with lots of red wine and cornichons in the sauce.

Well, where does the chocolate fit in?!

Today we delivered the goodies for ‘A spoonful of sin‘ - a dessert of the month club coming out of Manassas, Virginia. All members will get a package containing some of our chocolate confections, marzipan fruits and Wine Pate de Fruits. We are eager to hear what everyone thinks!

This Thursday we will be having a tasting event at Artfully Chocolate in Del Ray - it’s free and there is usually sparkling wine as well, so come on by if you have nothing else planned yet! The folks at Artfully do ask to RSVP (although walk-ins are always welcome) - we will make sure to have enough chocolate for everyone

Yes, we are wearing green today

No, we are not coloring our chocolate green (or with any other color for that matter!) However, we are enrobing quite a few chocolates today in preparation for this week. Easter is on the way and we spent all weekend making Easter Eggs and Bunnies - all of them are already sold though! I guess we will be making more tomorrow …

Our Rocher Eggs are made with the same delicious caramelized almond/dark chocolate mix than our Christmas Trees around Christmas - if you enjoyed those, you might want to consider to get your egg (or you have to wait until Christmas - and it’s a looong wait )

Some impressions from last weekend:

What is he telling his friends?!

Eggs everywhere! It is a nice sight though and it’s great to see the smile on people’s faces when they get their own ….

Oh, and here is a little story:

So, we met a fellow German, who came by to check out our production and discuss an order. He realized that we make and work with marzipan and saw the bunnies and asked if he could have one. Sure! - I said and handed it to him …. The next moment, the bunnies head was gone ….. then the paws and finally (not a minute had past) there was nothing left.

Now, don’t be surprised - this is actually how it is supposed to be. Not only is the marzipan bunny nice to look at - but it tastes even better!

So, if you are planning on getting a Rocher Egg with Easter Bunny, then please, don’t feel bad at all  and EAT the Bunny!

To all of you the best! And don’t forget to wear green today!

… but it’s not here yet!

Nonetheless, we are starting to enjoy our creativity with marzipan …. here is what we came up with:

We will be making more marzipan fruits and other products, as it is a delicious treat for the eye and your taste buds. While we are perfecting our designs, we welcome your feedback - let us know, if you like marzipan - and we mean freshly made almond paste - not the dry sugary stuff in the supermarket

Stay tuned for our next email newsletter - we will be showcasing our new Spring flavors and some specials for Easter this year.

We survived another Valentine’s Day. Has it really been that crazy? Yes it has

But after a long day, we enjoyed our own Valentine’s Dinner with friends at the City Square Cafe in Manassas and it was time to relax and recap all the events the prior days.

One of our personal highlights was to have the opportunity to serve the needs of the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia:

We also made some custome confections for the City Square Cafe’s Valentine’s Day dessert, which is pictured here:

They are dark and white chocolate hearts, about an inch in diameter and they were used to decorate the strawberry-filled crepe - YUMM!

This week we will make more ganaches (since we are almost completely sold out) and prepare to make our new Spring flavors (recipes are finished and the new flavors will be announced soon) as well as prepare the first Easter specials. Our marzipan bunnies will make a comeback, but we’ll also have some new surprises for you ….

That’s it for today, don’t forget to eat some more chocolate!

Although we really enjoyed our trip to Mexico and the plantations (yes, there are still many more pictures to come!), we are glad to be home too.

We have a few new additions to our retailers list and I will have to update the website accordingly (Occoquan, VA and Ashburn, VA).

We have been mentioned in the February Issue of Northern Virginia Magazine (page 25) - also to view on this site under ‘in the news’ (to your left).

We will be out and about in a lot of places before and after Valentine’s Day to conduct free tastings. The exact locations and dates will be announced here on the blog and in our email newsletter.

If you haven’t heard - we are featuring our Jasmine Tea Hearts this Valentine’s Day again. They were a big hit last year and since they are for Valentine’s Day ONLY - they are going to be hard to get. Luckily you are able to order them online with us and we can ship them out to a later date.

Enough for today, we have to get up early tomorrow, as a power outage prevented us from working late tonight.

Have a good night!

While travelng through Mexico, we climbed up quite a few of the Mayan and Aztecs’ pyramids. The statue above shows a priest, serving the rain god. The view from this particular pyramid was breath-taking. The ground has just been discovered and dug out a few years ago (maybe 10 years ago?) …

The picture above is titled ‘El Chocolatl’ and apparently pictures a chocolate god? We found it in one of the smaller museums close to an archaeological park.

Safe and sound back from our trip to southern Mexico - we were about 100 feet from Guatemalan border at times

First of all I have to apologize for not keeping up this blog - it has been over a month since the last entry and well - it is finally time to catch up with everything.

We will bring you a detailed report with all of our discoveries of the beautiful country of Mexico - we learned a lot about the culture and history of the country and its people. We also learned a lot about the history of cacao and inspected a few plantations along the way to familiarize ourselves with the growing and processing of cocoa.

For tonight it is already too late to type all this up, but stay tuned for more information and more pictures from the trip - one of our computers had to go to the hospital (and it happened to be the Mac that I need for graphic processing) - on the weekend we should be able to bring you some imagery!

Finally we hope that the weather will be good on Saturday, so that we can entertain everyone with our chocolate making class together with TasteDC.

Good Night and have a nice weekend!