Cocoa delicacies for a cracker of a festival

How would you like a chocolate bomb for this Deepavali — not the kind that you have to light up, but the kind that you bite into to let your palate be coated in delicious dark chocolate goodness? In line with the ongoing green efforts to cut the use of air polluting firecrackers during Deepavali, city-based chocolate brand Zitter is bringing the perfect sweet alternative that will not make you miss crackers. As part of its Deepavali menu, the company, founded by chocolatier Janani Kannan, is offering ‘pattasu’ chocolate boxes, containing dark chocolate shaped into sutli bombs, rockets, flower pots and jamin chakrams.

The 15 miniature cracker chocolates that come in a box, each wrapped in colourful paper just like firecrackers, use dark chocolate so they don’t melt till 32-33 degrees Celsius. The cracker chocolates are the year-old brand’s latest offering — with the others being bonbons and chocolate bars. “Our USP has been making chocolate with Indian fusion flavours. From chakkara pongal, kulfi, mango chilli, masala chai to mishti doi — we make them all. The bonbons we make using these flavours use 100 per cent Belgian chocolate,” Janani tells us, as she is swamped with orders for the crackers and bonbons. As a one-woman team, she runs both the front-end and back-end of the business — from taking orders to hand crafting each of the chocolates to having them delivered.

The difficulty she faced in finding a good bar of chocolate in the country made her realise the gaps in the chocolate and confectionery industry, she recalls. “I could never find any good flavours in chocolate that I wanted to eat as well as gift. That is when I realised that my skill in making a good masala chai could be put to use in creating a masala chai chocolate,” Janani recollects. Armed with a diploma in pastry from Le Cordon Bleu in Malaysia, and some experience working at a patisserie in Singapore during her time in the country, she decided to start her brand Zitter. “I have been trying to bring out different flavours in chocolate through real ingredients. For example, in a masala chai chocolate, I don’t just add a few spices to bring in the taste of chai, but use almost all the ingredients that go into its making. I want it to be as close to a masala chai as possible. Every chocolate has to remind the person consuming it of what I claim its flavour is,” she asserts.

Janani’s chocolate bars include dark, milk, white, caramel gold as well as ruby, the newest variety of chocolate introduced to the world in 2017 by Barry Callebaut, a Belgian-Swiss chocolate company, making her one of the first chocolatiers to bring it to the city. “When I began making chocolates, it definitely was a struggle to get a market. Thanks to many bean-to-bar chocolate makers, awareness on chocolate is getting better. Instead of consuming the commercial-made chocolate, which uses compound chocolate (a low-cost alternative to real chocolate) and vegetable fats, people are willing to pay a bit more for quality chocolates,” she notes. While she is keen on introducing newer flavours in chocolate, Janani looks to work more on retailing her delicacies in the future.