Homemade Chocolates | Best Cook in Town

Follow in Denise Eckhardt’s footsteps to make someone very happy on a special holiday or as a Valentine’s Day surprise.

Thirty-seven years ago, when Denise Eckhardt was pregnant with her first child, a friend brought her a box of Serenade Chocolates, a locally cherished brand made by a beloved chocolatier in Brookline, Massachusetts. The box contained a wonderful and colorful selection, and Denise was inspired to begin making her own homemade chocolates, decorating them beautifully and then giving them away.

Later, she took a cake-decorating class, and the course included a little bit about chocolate making. “I took that and ran with it,” she says now, standing in her compact kitchen in Arlington, Massachusetts, where, for three decades, she has spent more than a week each year making and assembling nearly 75 one-pound boxes of assorted chocolates to give as Christmas gifts. The list of the lucky recipients is long, and it changes as her life changes. “In the early years, I always made a box for my pediatrician,” Denise says. “Of course, he’s not my pediatrician anymore. My daughter is 37!” Denise has no problem finding others in her life for whom she’s grateful. “I can think of all kinds of people I want to give to,” she says. A small woman with a cloud of strawberry-blonde hair, Denise raises Bengal cats for a living. They roam about her house like a pack of small adoring leopards, mewing and winding around her ankles as she talks. Her friends come over to help her during her chocolate-making extravaganza and try to keep up with Denise’s conveyor belt, placing the candies—something like 2,175 in all—into paper cups and assembling them into boxes. Every flat surface of the house becomes covered with freshly dipped chocolates, so Denise’s husband, Richard, an MIT-trained engineer, has helped to streamline the process. He designed a ring on a wire handle so that Denise could dip the chocolates without dropping them into the pot, a costly and time-consuming mistake she often made when using a fork for the job. And, even more innovative, he engineered a tray with tube-like slots so that she could cut many center fillings at once, instead of working on just one log at a time. Each one-pound box of decorated chocolates contains 29 pieces—buttercream, coconut, maple walnut, chocolate-covered cherries, rum balls—the list is long and delicious. Denise decorates each piece differently—using sprinkles, stripes, foil wraps, and so on—which takes the guesswork out of choosing a flavor. She also includes a guide inside each box. “I never wanted to bite into something I didn’t expect,” she explains. In high school, Denise worked at Hebert Candy Mansion in Shrewsbury, that great New England roadside institution. She did things like cut fudge into squares and wrap caramels in cellophane, twisting each end tightly, never thinking at the time that it would lead to her benevolent tradition. By her own admission, she’s not an expert chocolatier—just someone who enjoys the making and the giving. “If you want to know the truth, the true gift here is the labor of love,” she explains. “That’s better than the chocolates.” But the chocolates are pretty good too, if you want to know the truth. [haven_recipe post_id=”30539″]