The eccentric chocolatier talks Christmas in Venezuela and why chocolate's great on roast potatoes. By Charlie Cottrell
4Food caught up with Willie Harcourt-Cooze dashing between home and the chocolate factory he built, on an industrial estate in Devon. There's been a forklift truck problem and, with a delivery of cocoa beans imminent, he's on the hunt for a replacement vehicle. It sounds like little has changed since we last saw Willie getting his wonky chocolate factory off the ground, but despite the chaos, Willie and his wife Tania have found time to host a Christmas show where everything from the food to the decorations are home made - and laced with chocolate.
(Laughs) I don't think anyone would tolerate my singing! They might find my chocolate interesting but I think they'd rather I kept the singing to myself. I'm renowned for singing while I roast though.
Ooh you know we certainly do, you just need to see it in a different light. If you enjoy cooking you'll find chocolate is an exciting addition as a condiment and a flavour enhancer. We might overdo it eating at Christmas but chocolate is a refreshing change - like a breeze through the front door.
I think you can never have enough chocolate, it just depends how it's delivered to you. The cacao I make is the closest thing you'll get to Aztec chocolate and, if people were making offerings to the gods while drinking chocolate, it's got to be good.
Marzipan - it's always on the outside of the Christmas cake. Actually, the whole meal. It's one of the few times everyone gets together and then there's the kids - Christmas is for kids isn't it?
I'm the sort of person who doesn't leave anything. If I take it, I eat it. Maybe it comes from having lots of brothers and sisters. That said, I'm not sure about bread sauce.
It's funny, it's the snowy ones you remember most. I remember whizzing down slopes on home made sleds - maybe it's the adrenaline - and throwing snowballs. Venezuelan Christmases are very different because they're warm. It's a completely different experience. In Venezuela, people think nothing of turning up at your house on Christmas day so you have to make sure you're always armed with plenty of food.
A little bit of goose fat, sea salt and a very fine sprinkling of cacao - it would give a slight toasty flavour.
If it's got chocolate in, I love it. I have to admit I'm not so partial to the traditional one, but with a little cacao it changes its flavour. The cacao plays off against the fruit. One likes to be traditional but it's nice to add a little twist. At Christmas you get all the generations together and you need to keep everyone happy - the traditionalists and the more adventurous.
Nothing gets thrown away. One Christmas we had a polytunnel that we were growing Chinese veg in so we made a lovely turkey stir fry with chillies and vegetables and I'd say put a bit of cacao in there too - chilli is married to cacao.
We had one Chinese vegetable that had huge leaves and we made turkey sandwiches on rye bread and wrapped the whole thing in one of these leaves. It's logical when you think of it, wrapping it in the leaf stops all the filling falling out. Shops should sell sandwiches wrapped in a leaf. Visually, it's stunning.
Well, I've been very fortunate in that I've had a television programme on my side. It's hard to tell what it would be like with no credit crunch. We're a very small company, I do roasting and everything myself - we don't have mass production. It's definately a time of trepidation for most companies. We're lucky in that no-one else is doing what we're doing and England has got a lot of adventurous people.
I'm not sure. (Laughs) I've never thought of myself as one - the real celebrity is the cacao. I'm just the catalyst for chocolate.
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