Like so many of us, Sarah Dwyer has loved chocolate as long as she can remember. Unlike so many of us, she decided to make a career of it. After nearly twenty years working in banking and finance, she quit to take a Cordon Bleu pastry course in Paris. In 2010, she founded Chouquette to produce highly specialized, high-quality chocolates perfect for personalized expression.
She offers several flavors of filled bonbons and other molded chocolates, some to order and others on specialized themes such as cherry blossoms, dogs, famous women, the beach, and more. There are collections for the seasons, political events, and generic occasions. About a third of her business involves custom orders for weddings and other events, both personal and institutional.
And for cicada eruptions! Starting in 2021 with our local Brood X experience, Sarah designed a gift box including her classic bonbons, molded cicadas filled with marshmallow creme in either milk or dark chocolate, an enamel pin, sticker, and greeting card. And! Six actual, chocolate-covered insects, each about an inch and a half long and looking just like oblong blobs.
How do they taste? Like crunchy, dark chocolate. The bugs don’t actually have an identifiable flavor. The frisson you get while eating them is all about the novelty. It’s kind of the ultimate expression of a specialized confection.
We went to visit Sarah in her production facility in Gaithersburg, near the airpark. “We should be more open to eating bugs,” Sarah told me. I agree – I wrote years ago about a Dutch project to raise insects for human consumption.
Sarah doesn’t sell her chocolate-covered cicadas; they are gifts included with the purchase of the cicada-themed product box. This is how the Chouquette website explains the situation:
“FDA allows bugs in peanut butter, but only farmed insects can be sold, although cicadas are GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe, those with seafood allergies should NOT eat cicadas). As we cannot sell cicadas directly and recognizing the demand from cicada enthusiasts, we can include them as a gift with purchase in our limited-edition gift boxes.”
Her cicadas are sourced from a farm in Virginia, where no pesticides are used. They are picked from trees soon after emerging, when they are at their tastiest and tenderest!
I confess I was excited to get a peek into a commercial kitchen. Sarah shares space with the caterers Simply Fresh Events, using their facility after they wrap up their event prep for the day. She has a room full of shelves storing materials for an impressive variety of subjects to transform into themed chocolates.
As we were leaving, we noticed shelves of another bespoke product, Old Bay-flavored, crab-shaped chocolate pops. Dark chocolate with a spicy edge: yum!
If you are chocolate-cicada-curious, you can order from the Chouquette website. Don’t hesitate, however, they are a limited edition!
