08/07/2022
A heartfelt greeting to Vashon Island, from Randal Collen, Cacao's Meow's chocolate maker:
“This is the little white house that I saw in my dream,” said my wife, Carolyn, when she showed me the rare rental that she found on Vashon Island. So this was literally a dream come true for us when we moved here 4 months ago. We are so happy to be here!
We were making bean-to-bar chocolate in Sebastopol, CA for the last 5 years. It is a complex and disappearing artisan craft because the labor-intensive process of transforming cacao beans into tempered and molded chocolate takes many involved
stages and is truly a “labor of love.”
But life has a way of magically reciprocating the efforts of the heart. So it is with the open-hearted reception that Vashon’s Island has given to us. It matches and mixes so well with our labor of love, just like strawberry ganache blends with chocolate into a strawberry true. You can get our strawberry "Trues" every Saturday at the Vashon Farmer’s Market and at Mica’s Kitchen, where Cacao’s Meow has now found a new home. Along with trues, Cacao’s Meow's own chocolate bars, chocolate-covered Carolyn’s Cookies, chocolate-dipped fruits, and our own extra-special fresh ground Chai Latte.
Making chocolate was supposed to be a retirement gig, but it has become our full-blown passion. Carolyn was a lifelong Waldorf kindergarten teacher with a passion for baking and playing the harp. I inherited my mother’s changeling gene, and have had a succession of careers from Jungian-based clinical psychotherapist to CA DRE mortgage broker to a commercial property developer in Sonoma County, CA.
But always I have had a passion for playing jazz piano.
We just got a dog, Molly, a beautiful 5-year-old creme-colored English lab who was a pedigree breeder and has now retired with us. Her passion is to play fetch. So you may see us on a walk, or at the beach, or at the Farmer’s Market. We plan to stay here and become part of this artistic paradise Island scene.
Hope to meet you soon and share some chocolate and chai latte!
