About the Maker

The first ten years

I am self taught. In my twenties I tried to learn everything I could about cooking and food, and I was fortunate to discover chocolate early in that process. I love its simplicity and I appreciate its complexity.

In 2013 my mom gave me The Joy of Cooking for Christmas. The following spring I offered to make her anything she wanted from the book for Mother’s Day. I still remember how she pointed to a classic French chocolate truffle recipe and gently suggested, “you might like this.”

She was right.

Chocolate was simple enough to begin working with at home without much technical knowledge. At the same time it was complex enough to reward deeper study. There is always more to learn.

Each year since then I have refined my skills and gradually expanded what I can make.

In 2020 I converted part of my family home into a commercial kitchen and began selling at the farmers market. Hand dipped truffles became molded truffles, and chocolate bars joined the lineup. At the time I made three things: sourdough bread, granola, and dark chocolate.

In 2023 I decided to focus entirely on chocolate. Splitting my energy across three categories no longer made sense. That year I sold chocolate wholesale to local stores.

Toward the end of the year an opportunity appeared to open a shop of my own.

I took it.

Wholehearted Chocolate opened in April 2024.

Learning the craft

I learned to work with chocolate through trial, error, and reading. 

The early years were experimental. I started with classic ganache ratios, testing different ingredients and techniques to see how chocolate responded.

The initial learning curve centered on tempering, the mother technique of all chocolate work. It is simple in theory, but it only becomes intuitive through repetition. Chocolate reacts constantly to time, temperature, and movement.

At the beginning I was working in an old farmhouse without any form of climate control, in Virginia humidity, and without specialized equipment. Looking back, I would call this learning the hard way.

Over time my experimentation became more deliberate. I began working with molds instead of hand dipping, developed my own recipe formulations, and gradually increased my production capacity.

Even now the work is still continuously evolving. Chocolate rewards attention. Doing the work is what teaches you.

Wholehearted Chocolate today

I now work in a dedicated chocolate kitchen with climate control and specialized equipment. I open the shop three days a week, and the remaining days are spent making chocolates and attending to the other parts of life.

I mainly make molded truffles and chocolate bars. This is a deliberate constraint that allows creativity without spreading the work too thin.

“Small-batch” is a term with a loose definition. For me, it means the amount I can produce as a single maker.

Wholehearted Chocolate is intentionally built around that scale. I am not interested in growth for its own sake. The making is what I enjoy most.

Keenan Sherwood
Chocolatier