Doc.Choc here;

If you’d have told me two years ago that I’d be making this much honeycomb a week, I’d probably cry, sit cross legged on the floor, and cry some more.  Having a bestseller really does make life easier. It gives you a bright flower to admire and hunt down on what is often a very obscure path that never seems to quite reach the edge of your dreams.

Honeycomb’s become Kenyak’s best seller; the chocolate covered variety. I’d love to take credit for it or to appear like an omniscient chocolate god, but really – the truth is very simple. If you make a honeycomb candy with a lot of really goodhoney, and caramelise it as far as you can take it to the edge of bitterness before it’s instantaneously destroyed; and then cover it in really very exceptional chocolate that has been grown and processed with a lot of love and bought from people at a fair price, then – then shock horror, it tastes really bloody good.

So our honeycomb has become a bestseller. And it’s given me the gift of following my dreams – but also, the chance to say something.

Not all honeys are the same. And that matters.

We are extraordinarily blessed in Australia to have access to some of the most unique and delicious honey on earth. Our country, this great wide continent, has such astounding diversity that it’s almost unfathomable to come to terms with the all-encompasing flavour profiles and stories of honey that are produced here.

When I started Kenyak I made a very simple decision, we would not coat the same honeycomb in different chocolates. It just wouldn’t do justice to what’s on offer here. We’d do a version for milk, and a version for dark, and we’d hunt down the most marvellous honey to sing and shine and strike unadulterated joy from the core of each recipe.

I did that. And then about six months later I realised what I’d done. I’d picked two honeys that couldn’t be further from each other. Honey produced by the Charles Family and their bees in the Tarkine Wilderness – one of the worlds most undisturbed wilderness areas found in NW Tassie; a little flaunt of the significance of environmental stewardship. And honey produced by Jack from Bee One Third in Brisbane and his bees, depicting the simple necessity of caring for pollinators, and the outstanding work of those doing it.

Which was pretty cool.

But as I find myself standing over the same pot a year later, cooking batch after batch after stupidly delicious batch, I’m wondering if people get it.

Not all honeys are the same. And that matters.

I don’t think anyone else is making honeycomb like this. And that’s not the point. But it’s the point – right? I don’t think anyone else is making honeycomb like this. Paying attention to the story, and the taste, and the accountability that calls at us.

Why are we selling honeys that have been diluted?

If we live in this great country of ours; and we’re so blessed – why? Why can you still find half a dozen honey’s on the shelf at your local supermarket that aren’t pure honey? That have been sloshed with impurities? And why should these beekeepers keep working so assiduously to share the life’s work of so many bees with us mere mortals if we’re not going to hold it up and celebrate it and cherish it for how good it is?

That’s all a bit melodramatic. Of course. Embellishment sells right? The wilder the better. At least that’s what my year eleven English teacher told me. But maybe she was onto something…