The Concept:
To make confections, especially truffles, that were made in small batches wholly from fresh ingredients without the addition of artificial flavors. Not as easy as it sounds.
The Woman:
Take a girl that grew up watching her mother create spectacular wedding cakes, throw in a now ex-husband that is a Culinary Institute of America graduate, add a passion for going against the grain, and you get Lexan Koenig. She grew up learning at her mother's knee, how to make a bunch of simple ingredients into something so special and wonderful that brides would cry when they saw them. She learned that flavors can *taste right in your head*, before ever being made real. She learned that the art of creating food truly is an art, and that this art can give people as much joy as a Renoir or a Van Gogh.
As a young woman, she worked in restaurants, primarily as a waitress and bartender, as she put her husband through culinary school and raised their infant daughter. On weekends, when he was home, she would read his books and ask way too many questions about what he learned, absorbing everything like a sponge. She started working in kitchens doing prep, but always watching and learning. When her husband was in need of a baker/pastry wench for a restaurant he was running, she applied and earned the job, making simple things at first and slowly expanding her repetoire to include mousses, tortes, cakes, tarts, ice creams, creme caramel, cookies of all sorts, but most of all truffles. Chocolate became her passion, and she'd use it in any way she could; she understood that although, strangely enough, she doesn't eat chocolate herself, the rest of the world does, and they love it . Over the years she has developed some very unique flavors to match her unique approach to business - never underestimate the palate of the consumer. Which brings us to.....
The Plan:
The first off the wall flavor was lavender. Flowers in chocolate? Yep, I was doing it years before anyone else. It's a flavor you either love or hate. My own mother says it tastes like you're eating potpourri, but my 16 year old son and 21 year old daughter think they're divine. I suppose since I never went to culinary school, I don't know what's *wrong*, and therefore I have less boundaries in experimentation. Espresso Lemon in Dark Chocolate? Why not? You put a lemon twist in your espresso, right? Will you drink that while eating chocolate mousse? Of course you would! It goes back to tasting in your head, being able to develop the flavor profile in your mind - smelling it, tasting it, even feeling the way it melts on your tongue - before you ever put cream to chocolate. If you would drink this while eating that, why not eat it all together? Ruby Port with Extra Dark Chocolate. That one took a long time to master, getting the center just right. Slowly, I developed a menu of basic but interesting flavors and started to market it, first to friends as gifts, then brides as favors, always using the best, freshest ingredients we could find. Icould customize the chocolates, for the most part, to match the flowers in the bouquet or the flavors in the cake (please see our Custom Flavors page for further information). I stayed small and a little too obscure, all the while tweaking and developing. Now I bring that custom feel to you, the internet consumer, just as if you lived in my little town.
"The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity."
— Ayn Rand