225BatonRouge.com

Steven Lawrence didn’t understand the language, but inflection and sheer volume translated the gist: he was doing something wrong.

“I used to get yelled at a lot in French,” says the now expert chocolatier of his first pastry job at Denver’s Fairmont Hotel. But even then in his early 20s he was, like a mad scientist, experimenting at home with chocolate recipes, a passion he has refined over time. Raspberry, bitter lime, whisky, curry, firewood honey with lavender—these are just a smidgen of the ganaches Lawrence painstakingly produces in his own kitchen. In June the New York Times called his artisan chocolates “rustic, complex and sublime.”

Now 51 and a veteran of award-winning Fran’s Chocolates of Seattle, Lawrence moved to Baton Rouge this summer after his wife joined the LSU faculty. The area’s unique agriculture, like the small family farms that produce fresh citrus fruit, should provide him with plenty of ways to have some fun with the cocoa bean.

“And if you make mistakes with your chocolates,” Lawrence says, “well then, you’ve just got to eat them.”

With some of his family’s belongings still confined to moving boxes, Lawrence is working from home. But within the next year he hopes to secure financing for his own production space and retail chocolate shop, one in which he can give Wonka-like tours of the factory and sell a variety of take-home goodies.

The past few years small specialty confectioners have cropped up like microbrews did in the late 1980s. These serious chocolate chefs are taking essentially the same ingredients but combining them in new ways with their own whimsical twists to produce one-of-a-kind desserts. Theo Confections makes gourmet candy bars that combine dark chocolate with artisan breadcrumbs. Hotshots Pierre Herme and Michael Recchiuti are cultivating their own refined clientele of connoisseurs who know their sweets as intimately as wine lovers know their drinks.

“People want to know if it’s a blend of beans, or where they were grown,” Lawrence says. “It’s an appreciation of the process. It’s fascinating, complicated, and I think it’s intoxicating.”

The process is extensive just to reach the unroasted cocoa bean, a dark, shiny morsel that smells like vinegar and doesn’t taste much better. Going from that bean to a delicious dessert is a lengthy and intricate evolution Lawrence says demands respect at every step. Chocolate is extremely sensitive to movement, and it is more sensitive than butter to temperature. A new challenge for Lawrence has been the Baton Rouge humidity, a foe he rarely faced in his former Portland. He employs a dehumidifier in his home kitchen to stave off the thick Louisiana air. To keep his chocolate pure, Lawrence never adds vanilla or lecithin, an oily emulsifier used to make chocolate shinier and easier to mold.

Lawrence used to fill chocolate orders for catering companies in the past but would rather have complete discretion over his desserts in Baton Rouge by operating a retail store. Like most passionate artisans, Lawrence can be a bit of a control freak. Though he is always experimenting, always looking for the next bizarre and fantastic flavor.

“Coming to Baton Rouge I’ve noticed there are things here I hadn’t heard of before,” Lawrence says. “There’s this fruit called mayhaw from Hawthorne trees. Maybe I can do something with that.”