Available at: Amazon and Barnes and Noble

Explore the global kitchen with Amber and Jake Royer, through the lens of the history of culinary herbs. There Are Herbs in My Chocolate features over 60 delectable herb-infused recipes that feature chocolate – including unexpected savory chocolate appetizers and entrees, decadent chocolate beverages and desserts, and fun chocolaty breads, all paired with a wide variety of culinary herbs. In this book, you will learn how to make herbal syrups, sauces, pastes and candied herbs, and to infuse herbs into ice cream, confections, breads and pastries. Most importantly, you will learn how to choose herbs to pair with different types of chocolate to create balanced flavor profiles. The herbs involved may be fresh from the garden, dried, or infused into herbal liqueurs. Techniques for working with chocolate include learning how to temper, which is important for making candies. These meticulously tested recipes, featuring detailed full-color photographs, will take you on global culinary adventures. This cookbook updates and fuses traditional ingredient combinations.

This book is a collection of some of our favorite things to do with two of our favorite ingredients: chocolate and culinary herbs.

Create complex flavors by pairing chocolate and culinary herbs! Join the Royers on a culinary journey through traditions in the global kitchen that combine culinary herbs and chocolate. In this book, they have riffed on traditional uses of savory chocolate in different parts of the global kitchen – and come up with some unconventional takes, such as substituting the sugar in Thai peanut sauce with white chocolate. They also tweaked chocolate dessert recipes to accommodate herbs, such as with sage infused into raspberry gelato.

The Royers are avid gardeners who have become accidental chocolate experts while researching other projects. (Amber writes a mystery series staring a chocolate maker sleuth.) They have visited cacao plantations in multiple countries, including Hawaii, the only US State where cacao is commercially grown and have gotten to know many chocolate makers and chocolatiers. Much of this is recorded in the Coffee and Chocolate Field Trip videos on their YouTube channel.
While some of these recipes started out as experiments, some of them have become standard meal options in the Royers’ kitchen. (And yes, there were some ideas that just didn’t work. For example, Amber really wanted to do a rosemary chocolate bacon cheese bread, but whatever ratios she tried, she couldn’t get the flavor balance to come out right. A bit heartbreaking, really, because usually if something doesn’t come out picture perfect for photographs, you can still eat it.
The moral here: once you get comfortable with how the flavors of herbs and chocolate influence a dish, you can experiment on your own. Quite often it will work. (And if not – just substitute a white chocolate sourdough in your menu list.)

The Royers are avid gardeners who have become accidental chocolate experts while researching other projects. (Amber writes a mystery series staring a chocolate maker sleuth.) They have visited cacao plantations in multiple countries, including Hawaii, the only US State where cacao is commercially grown and have gotten to know many chocolate makers and chocolatiers. Much of this is recorded in the Coffee and Chocolate Field Trip videos on their YouTube channel.
While some of these recipes started out as experiments, some of them have become standard meal options in the Royers’ kitchen. (And yes, there were some ideas that just didn’t work. For example, Amber really wanted to do a rosemary chocolate bacon cheese bread, but whatever ratios she tried, she couldn’t get the flavor balance to come out right. A bit heartbreaking, really, because usually if something doesn’t come out picture perfect for photographs, you can still eat it.
The moral here: once you get comfortable with how the flavors of herbs and chocolate influence a dish, you can experiment on your own. Quite often it will work. (And if not – just substitute a white chocolate sourdough in your menu list.)