Vallejo’s chocolatier Sarah Cain makes fine chocolates fun

VALLEJO — Sarah Cain, the owner of Spirited Sweets Chocolates, never thought she would become a chocolatier. She worked in restaurants for years, first as a waitress and then as a sommelier. Eventually she started making and teaching how to make liqueurs, which won several awards at the Alameda County Fair.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cain pivoted to teaching online. Since she always made the liqueurs along with her students, she soon found herself with too many bottles at home. 

“During the pandemic there were no parties, you were not going anywhere, so the normal ways that I would disperse all of that liqueur were not there,” Cain said. “And you can't drink a whole lot of liqueur at any one point, so I had to figure out what to do with it.” 

One day she saw chocolate bottles filled with alcohol at a grocery store. “And I thought, Oh, well, that's a good idea,” she said. “You know, how hard can that be?”

It turns out that making fine chocolates is very hard, but Cain was up for the challenge. After lots of experimentation, a few classes and, as she says, attending “the university of YouTube,” she launched her business Spirited Sweets Chocolates in 2022. Currently she produces her confections in a professional kitchen at the Odd Fellows Lodge in downtown Vallejo.

All her bonbons are made with fair trade chocolate and certified organic dairy. She specializes in what she calls “booze infused bonbons,” but she also offers non-alcoholic and vegan varieties. The vegan bonbons are made with oat milk and creamer and a vegan butter.

The molds make her collections whimsical and original, and they often follow a theme. One of her favorite themes is horror because Cain loves Halloween. In fact, she ran a Halloween haunted house in Mare Island for ten years, and the name of her business, Spirited Sweets Chocolates, is a reference to the spirits of Halloween as well as to the alcohol that infuses her chocolates. A Halloween-themed box of chocolates may contain bonbons in dark colors and in the shape of a skull, the moon, and so on.

Other common themes are Tiki, retro, vintage and pop culture, as well as boxes suited to different holidays, such as Christmas, Hanukkah or Valentine’s Day. The flavors also change seasonally. 

“It's important for me that you can taste the alcohol, but I don't want it to hit you over the head,” Cain said. “I want the flavor of the liqueur or the infusion to be the integral note.” Each of the booze infused bonbons contains less than 4% of alcohol by weight. 

Making bonbons is a complex and time-consuming task. Each bonbon takes at least six hours, between painting each mold, dropping a fine chocolate layer to create the hard shell, tempering the chocolate so it sets, creating the filling and adding it to each bonbon and, finally, capping them with chocolate to close the bonbon. 

Cain uses plaques that contain 20 to 30 molds each. She works on batches of around 400 bonbons in a day. It takes a long time, but Cain finds it relaxing, almost like a Zen meditation. 

It’s a finicky process. “There is a lot of science involved, but some of the things that affect making chocolate are the temperature and humidity level in the room,” Cain said. ”If there is wind, if there's too much of a breeze, if the air is too stagnant. It's really trying.”

After six months of experimentation, Cain was ready to start selling her bonbons. She had participated in events for years to drum up interest in her liquor-making classes, so she brought her chocolates to those events and her business took off. 

“Some of my most popular bonbons are my blood orange liqueur in a semi-sweet chocolate ganache and my coffee liqueur, which I call Caffeine in the Caribbean,” Cain said. “Sometimes I use the tiki head mold and I call it Coffee Head. I love playing with puns. And one that has become very popular is what I call Tropical Treasure, which is coconut and ube with rum.”

Cain sells her bonbons primarily during events and pop ups in and outside California, traveling to niche markets like horror, goth and tiki. She also sells and ships via her website, or you can pick up the boxes of bonbons directly from her in Vallejo. 

For Valentine’s Day, Cain has created a special box of nine chocolates, which will include her bloody orange heart, a raspberry rose, and her version of the Dubai chocolate among other flavors. Orders need to come in before Feb. 4 so Cain has time to fulfill them.

Cain was born in the Bay Area and lived in Philadelphia for over 20 years, but has found a home in Vallejo since 2013.

“I have a large customer base here, because Vallejo has a really good history of fantastic chocolatiers, such as Ian Scott Confections and Fera’wyn Artisan Chocolates, which have now moved to other parts of the country,” Cain said. “People in Vallejo have a taste for fine chocolate, for sure!”

You can check out her offerings on her Facebook or Instagram page and submit an order for pickup through a form on her website.