By Jecca Berta

This year’s Advent Calendar features several chocolatiers who are participating in our favorite holiday ritual for the first time. One such participant is the family-run Woodhouse Chocolate in Napa Valley. Together, they’ve been crafting artful confections for over twenty years. We spoke with sisters Caroline Anderson (who handles the business side with their father, John) and Christina Anderson-Sanchez (who runs the kitchen alongside their mother, Tracy). The next time you’re in St. Helena, Woodhouse is on Main Street and is open daily.

You sent in six treats for consideration in our Advent Calendar, and all ranked highly during our blind tastings. How did you decide what to submit?

Christina: We did three different types of toffee because we knew brittle was something we could do well. That’s one of my great-grandmother’s recipes, from when she was doing catering out of her basement in LA in the 1940s and ’50s. We love to have all those old family recipes, and we didn’t think others would submit something like that. My favorite topping was the pink peppercorn.

We were also trying to think of something that would highlight Dandelion’s chocolate and our labors, and have a long shelf life. Passion fruit was another of our submissions because the passion fruit just sings with the dark chocolate.

Without giving too much away, can you tell our readers about the confection you landed on for this year’s Calendar?

Christina: We’re using Dandelion’s Camino Verde chocolate, which is a very unique, single-origin chocolate with interesting, complex flavors. The really robust hazelnut paste that we use melds together well with that chocolate. Along with the fun, bold taste, it lends a complementary earthiness. The flavors melt in your mouth.

Our motto in general as a chocolate shop is we don’t like to do extra. Chocolate and hazelnut is an amazing pairing on its own.

After our blind tastings, what feedback did you receive from Dandelion? Did you make any changes to the treat?

Christina: Initially, there was some feedback from Dandelion about the nut on the top of the treat, and some concerns about it popping off. So we started dipping it in the chocolate to solidify it. They also asked if we could jazz it up a little, so that’s when we brushed it with gold so it looks like a little Christmas tree.

The hand-piping of this treat really stands out (as recipients of our Advent Calendar will see). Is that difficult to achieve?

Christina: The specific technique that we use for this chocolate is very difficult. You need to catch the chocolate at such a precise moment for it to actually work. If the chocolate is too fluid, it’s going to go all over the place. If it’s too thick, you can’t do it at all. It’s also dependent on the day. We had a huge heat wave where we had to pipe in different areas, because the air conditioning was hitting at different spots. It was like musical tables trying to find the perfect environment.

My mom and I are the only ones who make this piece, period. Our two other amazing chocolatiers are doing everything else in our business. We both have an art background, and we both have a BA in studio art, along with a culinary degree. So that’s what we do — make art. And we’re the type of people who think, What crazy challenge can we do?

What was it like working with our two-ingredient chocolate for the first time? How is it different from the chocolate you usually work with?

Christina: The chocolate is more challenging than what we usually work with. We normally use Guittard, and we have our molding machines and all that. We couldn’t take over the molders with Camino Verde, so we’ve been hand-tempering it and making small batches every day. We’ll mix a batch of gianduja and chocolate together, and pipe as long as we can.

That’s a lot of work! Your parents, Tracy and John, spent many years working at the family’s winery, S. Anderson Vineyard. How did they transition from that to chocolate?

Christina: My parents met when they were eighteen, freshman year of college. My mom, sister, and I went to Scripps in Southern California, and my dad went to the neighboring Claremont McKenna. They met at a party and did their study abroad together in Europe. They went to a play and spent basically all their money on chocolate, and that’s what they had for lunch and dinner. They bought a hazelnut bar, with hazelnut paste and dark chocolate, topped with hazelnuts. They hadn’t yet experienced couverture chocolate, and it just blew their minds.

After college, they worked for my grandparents, who already had a winery. They were there for a long time. My mom catered all the events and did bookkeeping and all that. We sold the winery in 2002 after my grandfather passed away. My parents went to the local movie theater and saw Chocolat, and it brought back all those memories they had when roaming around England and Europe. They thought, let’s just do that! That was the spark, and my mom began working with chocolate in our kitchen. We had three tabletop molders, a speed rack in the pantry, and then we opened in 2004.

When did you join the family business, and what are your roles?

Christina: I work in the kitchen, and my sister runs the front of house and works with customers.

Caroline: Our parents, in the first week of opening our business, forgot to hire employees for the front. This happened to be during our spring break. I was thirteen, and Christina was fifteen. We and our grandma were the first employees. By the time our spring break was over, they had hired employees. We worked there every spring, and winter break, and would come back during college to help out.

Christina: But then once we both graduated, we did our own thing for a little bit. My sister got an MFA, and I worked at several restaurants in San Francisco, doing both savory and pastry. I met my (now) husband, and didn’t want to raise children in the city. I thought, I have this amazing family business … of course I need to go back to that. Once my kids were born, everyone was taking turns holding them while we were making chocolate.

Your family also makes and sells other provisions, like Spiced Pecans from your late grandma Carol’s (the family matriarch) recipe. It sounds as though food has always been central to your family.

Christina: Food is so engrained in our family. It’s always been a part of us in one way or another. It’s in our blood, and it’s a compulsion to let it out. Food is the best way to make people happy. For my sister’s thesis, she made a book called Eating Life that’s about all of our family stories and recipes.

Incredible. Does Woodhouse have anything special that you do during the holidays?

Christina: We love a party. We are the party house. Here at the store, everyone knows where we live, and we give out our chocolate for Halloween. In the past couple years, we’ve turned it into a full-on open house. And we pass out chocolate to the primary and elementary school down Main Street. If adults come into the store on Halloween and say “trick or treat,” we give out something special.

For Thanksgiving, we do tabletop turkeys. We’ll pipe people’s names on the tail feathers, for place settings. We have those recurring touchstones. Christmas is just enormous. We have penguins and polar bears and Christmas trees. We still do a lot of figure work, which people don’t do a lot of anymore. We start with a mold, and then physically pipe on details, like the santa hats on the chocolate T-Rexes. We have a life-sized chocolate turkey, named Leroy, that we sell with a hammer, for people to crack open.

We’ll also be launching the Woodhouse Collection this month — a collaboration stemming from your Advent confection. How many people work at Woodhouse?

Christina: In the kitchen, it’s just two other women, Savannah and Rebecca, with me and my mom. In total, we have nine employees.

Do you think you’ll join our Advent Calendar again next year?

Christina: Yes! We’ve done our own Advent Calendars in the past, and I love being part of the collective. We just don’t want to hand-pipe next year. We’ve already been talking about what will showcase our artistry but not be so labor intensive.

Understandable.

Christina: My sister and I got to be a part of the taste testing at Dandelion earlier this year.

Fun. How many did you try?

Caroline: I tried sixty-three of them. I sipped lots of water, and took a little bite of saltine in between each one.

Any favorites?

Caroline: There was one that had popcorn in it. I liked all the ones that were interesting form factors; one was almost a fruit leather. Oh, and a mango sticky rice one, that was a favorite. I liked all the unusual ones. Working in a chocolate shop, I’m looking for ones I can’t have all the time.

Christina: We really enjoyed that experience.

Caroline: It was nice to see how good everyone else was, but also nice to see that we fit in.

Absolutely. Thank you, both! Your Advent treat sounds amazing.