At 62, Jane Swayne ate a chocolate that would change her life. On a visit to see her daughter, who was working in The Hague in 2013, the Somerset-based charity worker decided to buy a box of chocolates to bring home as a present for her husband. “I found a chocolatier who made these amazing sea salt and tarragon chocolates,” she says. “I ate one and realised I hadn’t tried anything like it before. I never liked chocolate as a child but this was miraculous. I decided I had to try to recreate them when I got home – one box wouldn’t be enough.”
Swayne’s husband, John, was equally enthusiastic and encouraged her. “I’ve always loved cooking but I had never tried making chocolate before,” she says. “I realised it’s a very labour-intensive process but ultimately quite simple, mainly relying on the use of fresh herbs like the tarragon. After a few tries, I had a decent version of my own.”
The chocolate-making was an enjoyably distracting hobby while Swayne’s charity work became increasingly complicated. Having trained as an English and drama teacher before working in dance therapy, in 2003 Swayne founded a summer school for children with special needs in postwar Kosovo. Travelling back and forth between the UK and Kosovo for the next decade, she operated on a shoestring budget until she received a phone call informing her that the project’s funding would be cut.
“I was on a trip to stay with friends in Peebles, Scotland, when I got the call in a cafe. I was completely devastated,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do next – and then I looked down at the menu and saw an advert for a chocolate-making course run by the master chocolatier Ruth Hinks. It felt like a sign.”
Enrolling on the three-day course to learn how to make moulded chocolates, Swayne soon realised that her home-taught skills needed plenty of refining. “I was hopeless,” she says. “Ruth was very lovely but direct, and I struggled with the science of it all, especially since I didn’t even take chemistry at O-level.”
But she embraced learning how to make ganache and the art of tempering chocolate – heating and rapidly cooling chocolate to specific temperatures to ensure it has the gloss and snap required of a top-quality sweet. “When I turned up for my second course with Ruth, she was incredulous I was back,” she says. “But I had the bug by then.”
Swayne turned a corner of a disused barn into her new chocolate-making workshop and began experimenting with flavour combinations from Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus book, before landing on local inspiration that planted the seeds for her business. “I decided to use the drinks made by the Somerset Cider Brandy Company, which is local to us, as an alcoholic base,” she says. “I came up with cardamom and ginger, coffee and cherry combinations, and when I took it to the company’s founder, he loved them. He said he wanted to stock them in their shop.”
Naming her new business Gilbert & Swayne, she refurbished the barn to create a professional kitchen and began churning out orders for the cider brandy company, as well as local delis. “It cost me thousands to get the business started but I loved making people happy with my chocolates, so it was worth it,” she says. “I also decided to donate 10% of my profits to charity, to keep connected to my old life.”
By 2016, Swayne expanded her business to include chocolate-making workshops, after a nearby hotel asked if their sous-chefs could learn from her, and her business began to make a profit. Now 73, she holds one-day courses throughout the year and employs a full-time chocolate-making assistant to keep up with demand for her 22 flavour combinations and 160 moulded designs. “In the run-up to Christmas, we make 5,000 chocolates a week and I’m usually in the kitchen from 5am to 9pm,” she says. “It’s stressful but it always amazes me how much joy it brings people.”
She has no plans to slow down. Instead, she wants to hire more chocolate-makers and focus further on her workshops. “It’s incredible to meet people from all walks of life on the courses and to teach them something new,” she says. “I can’t believe this is what I do now, especially since I was never into chocolate as a child. But if one piece of chocolate can lead me to reinvent myself at 62, anyone else can find their passion, too.”
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