A Honeymoon Topped with Chocolate

A Costa Rican vacation, lots of chocolate, and a glass of something called drainage.

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Four years ago, I married my best friend in what I will objectively describe as one of the best decisions I have ever made. When I moved to another state for ten months the day after I proposed to her, and she still said yes, I knew she was a keeper.

A romantic private horseback ride along the beach!

Adriana and I honeymooned in Tamarindo, a small town on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, complete with scenic rainforests, unique shops and restaurants, and beautiful crystal blue beaches. We enjoyed an unforgettable week of horseback riding, beaches, zip-lining, nature encounters, and many a pina colada. But if you know me at all, you might have already guessed that I had one very specific item on the itinerary that had nothing to do with the beach. Months before we left, I had booked us into a chocolate-making workshop for our last day. I booked so early not because spots were limited, but simply because I was super excited and felt it necessary to book a Costa Rican chocolate class before we had even booked a flight.

Reina's Chocolate

The workshop was hosted by Reina's Chocolate, a small bean-to-bar operation run by a friendly chocolate-loving couple, Ron and Reina. Upon our arrival, Ron greeted us and immediately led us into his workshop to show us a batch of chocolate he had been conching since the day before. If you're not familiar with conching, it's a prolonged mixing and aeration process that develops chocolate's final flavor and texture. We hadn’t been there for five minutes before Ron and I were talking shop together about the wonderful intricacies of chocolate production.

When sampling time came around, Ron's helper Andres started us off with a sample of chocolate tea, which is a genuinely interesting concept that neither Adriana nor I will be ordering again. We are not tea people. The chocolate samples that followed were a different story. We worked through eight varieties of dark chocolate, including a 100% bar that pretty much tasted like sadness. There was also sipping chocolate, which is not hot chocolate, not melted chocolate, but something in between: smooth, rich, creamy, and the inspiration for our own Gourmet Sipping Chocolate at Christo's Confections.

Then Ron offered us a glass of something he affectionately called "drainage." This is the liquid that runs off fermenting cacao beans in the early stages of fermentation, and while the name does it no favors, it was surprisingly refreshing. It looked a little like toxic sludge but had an unexpectedly zippy, fruity taste and was apparently packed with nutrients and antioxidants. Ron and I agreed that someone ought to bottle it and sell it as a super drink. A future Christo's endeavor??

After that, Ron took us on a walk through his three-acre garden, where he showed off his carefully curated collection of cacao trees and rare tropical fruit plants and handed us things to taste straight off the branch. I did not keep as detailed a list of what we tasted as I had on a previous trip to Europe, where I thoroughly catalogued 39 gelato flavors over two weeks in Italy with full tasting notes. I am choosing to frame this as growth.

Hand-grinding cacao beans to make our chocolate bars

Then we made chocolate!

We toasted cacao beans, cracked and shelled them by hand, and ground them repeatedly into a rough paste. We added a little sugar and kept grinding (and grinding) until we had something that looked and smelled unmistakably like chocolate. We poured it into bar molds and chose from an assortment of mix-ins such as salt, coffee, cacao nibs, coconut. I added sesame seeds to one because I was curious. It turned out to be an interesting combination. Not for everyone. Possibly a winner for a very particular palate. But hey, now I know.

While the bars set, Ron took us through sixteen more chocolate samples and a few more drinking chocolates and delivered a loose, wide-ranging history of chocolate and the cacao trade that somehow managed to wander into other topics like global economics, divorce rates, and Marilyn Monroe.

We wrapped our bars, bought a few more to take home, and I left Reina's knowing I had definitely chosen the right career path.

Pan de Azucar

As we were leaving, Ron mentioned a dessert shop down the road that made sorbet using the cacao “drainage,” so we decided to make one more spur-of-the-moment stop. Pan de Azucar was run by two French pastry chefs, and the gelato, bon bons, macarons, and other gourmet desserts were made with the kind of precision you'd expect from a team of highly trained French patissiers. Every piece looked like a work of art and tasted even better.

When I mentioned that I made desserts, one of the chefs lit up and walked us into their adjoining production kitchen, where they produced plated desserts for local restaurants. He showed us what they were working on, introduced us to the baker, and had him plate up a dish of tiramisu for us right there. It was, for the record, some killer tiramisu.

Some of the beautiful desserts at Pan de Azucar. We tried the pink one and the grey on the top row, and both were excellent!

When we walked back to the front, they handed us two enormous gelato macarons. A wedding gift, they said. We thanked them about four times more than was probably necessary and bought two desserts to take back to the room. They turned out to be tartufos: little magical bundles of gelato in a thin chocolate shell, one that was pink and green with a fruity gelato filling, one that looked convincingly like a decorative rock and was filled with chocolate gelato inside. We ate them that night and agreed it would be worth visiting Costa Rica again just for the desserts alone.

Four Years Later

We are home in Birmingham now, four years, three little boys (one only a week old!), and a great deal of chocolate later. Since that very first time grinding cacao beans together, Adriana has been right by my side for our chocolate adventure – supporting me, helping me, and making Christo’s possible.

Happy anniversary, Adri. Thank you for a wonderful honeymoon, four years of marriage that have been far better than I deserve, and for everything else.

Christo's Confections - Artisan chocolates handcrafted to spread happiness,

one bite at a time.