Chocolates, like stories and celebrations, are better when shared. In honor of the 10-year anniversary of her award-winning CocoVaa Chocolatier, Syovata Edari ’96, JD’01 combined all three into a monthlong festival of flavors. The CocoVaa 10th Anniversary Advent Calendar is a curated collection of confections that trace the company’s path from a kitchen-table hobby during Edari’s legal career to becoming an internationally acclaimed chocolatier. Edari also wrote a book to include with the calendar, which tells the story behind the box’s design and guides readers through each of the chocolates inside.
“Together, they mark 10 years of work in our kitchen — and the community that made every one of those years possible,” Edari writes in the book’s introduction.
Here are just a few of the sweet stories she has in store.
Day 2: Morello Cherry
The second truffle in CocoVaa’s calendar represents Edari’s first official step away from a law career and toward becoming a chocolatier. In 2016, she traveled to France to take a masterclass at the renowned chocolate and pastry school L’Ecole Valrhona.
“Walking into that French laboratory, I had to shed the protective armor of a seasoned trial lawyer and stand completely vulnerable as a novice,” Edari writes.
In that French laboratory, she learned the formula that would eventually become her Morello cherry caramel, a puree of caramelized Morello cherries encased in 63 percent dark chocolate. The confection has received awards from the International Chocolate Salon and the Academy of Chocolate, but to Edari, it still represents both the discomfort and the freedom of being a beginner.
“If you are standing at the edge of something new this season, I hope this piece gives you courage to take the next step,” she writes. “You’ll never know until you try.”
Day 15: Eliki
This truffle is Edari’s homage to childhood kitchens scented with the cardamom of her Kenyan father’s baking and to the spice’s unmistakable presence in cuisines around the globe.
“Each culture encountered the same green pod and made something distinctly its own,” Edari writes.
To create her cardamom confection, Edari grinds green cardamom pods and steeps them directly in Venezuelan white chocolate. In 2019, Eliki won gold in the flavored white chocolate bar category at the Academy of Chocolate Awards.
“Ingredients travel,” she writes. “People travel. Traditions travel. Along the way, they encounter new places, new hands, and new ways of being understood.”
Day 17: Cranberry Caramel
On Day 17, Edari pays tribute to a flavor indigenous to Wisconsin: cranberry. As she writes in the calendar’s guide, “Its story did not begin in a holiday recipe. Yet over time, it found a place at winter tables, where cooks sweetened the intensely sour berries and served them beside rich roasted meats.”
In Day 17’s confection, cranberry is concentrated into caramel, which is then infused with orange rind, creating a crisp, sweet, and acidic experience that echoes the fruit’s true, tart nature.
“This is a tribute to Wisconsin,” Edari writes, “its marshes, the people who knew this fruit long before it became a holiday fixture, and the possibility that we sometimes mistake proximity for ordinariness.”
