Tjanpi.

Doc.Choc here. I’m finding it rather hard to be succinct about this next one; bear with me.

In a previous life, I worked in a very small, very special restaurant. In it, we served our bread course in these hand-woven raffia baskets. They came from a group called the Tjanpi Desert Weavers. It’s hard to explain, but you felt drawn to these baskets. We had six of them, because we really only ever sat six tables at once - and hoped that they ate their bread fast enough that we’d be able to pinch their basket back for the next table.

The next year, I started a chocolate business. I made some hilariously fragile Easter eggs and sold them in six baskets. I called the whole thing Oshter Haus and unsurprisingly went on a tangent about the interconnection of people, culture and meaning across the history of Easter. The concept was very first draft. I hadn’t spend enough time practicing making eggs and I found the whole production cycle very tedious.

Easter often is as a chocolatier; you spend this very intense window of time directly after your busiest time of year making a product that you only make once a year. In a limited number of moulds. And it seems to go on forever. Round after round. It’s all a bit crazy really. I lent into that idea last year and went down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole at Easter. I made a Mad Hatter showpiece (all out of chocolate) and spent a little too long on Pinterest looking at hat boxes. They’re such a beautiful, old-world thing. After a while, something clicked.

Eventually I designed and had six of these miraculous Tjanpi Egg sets manufactured. Six, less so because of the two stories I told you - though in hindsight perhaps there is a connection - and more-so because the next minimum order was 200 and that seemed a bit of a stretch.

That’s the first half of my thoughts on the Tjanpi Egg’s - scroll on down for the rest of ‘em.