Vallejo’s chocolatier Sarah Cain makes high-quality goodies enjoyable

VALLEJO — Sarah Cain, the proprietor of Spirited Sweets Chocolates, by no means thought she would change into a chocolatier. She labored in eating places for years, first as a waitress after which as a sommelier. Eventually she began making and educating make liqueurs, which gained a number of awards on the Alameda County Fair.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cain pivoted to educating on-line. Since she at all times made the liqueurs alongside along with her college students, she quickly discovered herself with too many bottles at house. 

“During the pandemic there were no parties, you were not going anywhere, so the normal ways that I would disperse all of that liqueur were not there,” Cain mentioned. “And you can’t drink a whole lot of liqueur at any one point, so I had to figure out what to do with it.” 

One day she noticed chocolate bottles crammed with alcohol at a grocery retailer. “And I thought, Oh, well, that’s a good idea,” she mentioned. “You know, how hard can that be?”

It seems that making high-quality goodies may be very arduous, however Cain was up for the problem. After a number of experimentation, just a few lessons and, as she says, attending “the university of YouTube,” she launched her enterprise Spirited Sweets Chocolates in 2022. Currently she produces her confections in an expert kitchen on the Odd Fellows Lodge in downtown Vallejo.

All her bonbons are made with truthful commerce chocolate and authorized natural dairy. She focuses on what she calls “booze infused bonbons,” however she additionally affords non-alcoholic and vegan varieties. The vegan bonbons are made with oat milk and creamer and a vegan butter.

The molds make her collections whimsical and unique, they usually usually comply with a theme. One of her favourite themes is horror as a result of Cain loves Halloween. In reality, she ran a Halloween haunted home in Mare Island for ten years, and the identify of her enterprise, Spirited Sweets Chocolates, is a reference to the spirits of Halloween in addition to to the alcohol that infuses her goodies. A Halloween-themed field of goodies might include bonbons in darkish colours and within the form of a cranium, the moon, and so forth.

Other frequent themes are Tiki, retro, classic and popular culture, in addition to containers suited to completely different holidays, equivalent to Christmas, Hanukkah or Valentine’s Day. The flavors additionally change seasonally. 

“It’s important for me that you can taste the alcohol, but I don’t want it to hit you over the head,” Cain mentioned. “I want the flavor of the liqueur or the infusion to be the integral note.” Each of the booze infused bonbons comprises lower than 4% of alcohol by weight. 

Making bonbons is a fancy and time-consuming process. Each bonbon takes no less than six hours, between portray every mould, dropping a high-quality chocolate layer to create the arduous shell, tempering the chocolate so it units, creating the filling and including it to every bonbon and, lastly, capping them with chocolate to shut the bonbon. 

Cain makes use of plaques that include 20 to 30 molds every. She works on batches of round 400 bonbons in a day. It takes a very long time, however Cain finds it stress-free, nearly like a Zen meditation. 

It’s a finicky course of. “There is a lot of science involved, but some of the things that affect making chocolate are the temperature and humidity level in the room,” Cain mentioned. ”If there’s wind, if there’s an excessive amount of of a breeze, if the air is simply too stagnant. It’s actually attempting.”

After six months of experimentation, Cain was prepared to start out promoting her bonbons. She had participated in occasions for years to drum up curiosity in her liquor-making lessons, so she introduced her goodies to these occasions and her enterprise took off. 

“Some of my most popular bonbons are my blood orange liqueur in a semi-sweet chocolate ganache and my coffee liqueur, which I call Caffeine in the Caribbean,” Cain mentioned. “Sometimes I use the tiki head mold and I call it Coffee Head. I love playing with puns. And one that has become very popular is what I call Tropical Treasure, which is coconut and ube with rum.”

Cain sells her bonbons primarily throughout events and pop ups in and outdoors California, touring to area of interest markets like horror, goth and tiki. She additionally sells and ships through her web site, or you’ll be able to decide up the containers of bonbons immediately from her in Vallejo. 

For Valentine’s Day, Cain has created a particular field of 9 goodies, which can embody her bloody orange coronary heart, a raspberry rose, and her model of the Dubai chocolate amongst different flavors. Orders want to return in earlier than Feb. 4 so Cain has time to meet them.

Cain was born within the Bay Area and lived in Philadelphia for over 20 years, however has discovered a house in Vallejo since 2013.

“I have a large customer base here, because Vallejo has a really good history of fantastic chocolatiers, such as Ian Scott Confections and Fera’wyn Artisan Chocolates, which have now moved to other parts of the country,” Cain mentioned. “People in Vallejo have a taste for fine chocolate, for sure!”

You can take a look at her choices on her Facebook or Instagram web page and submit an order for pickup by way of a kind on her website.