She Finds Sweet Success With Chocolates

Six years ago, Leigh Saucer, owner of Azhmere Chocolatiere in Dana Point, knew very little about making chocolate and even less about running her own business. But Saucer has since gained a reputation for her ability to depict almost anything in chocolate--a talent she says comes from being entirely self-taught.

“No one ever told me what I couldn’t make out of chocolate,” she said. “Since it was all new to me, I wasn’t afraid to try something different.”

To celebrate the incorporation of Dana Point last year, Saucer designed molds to depict the entire city in chocolate--resulting in a miniature replica, three feet by three feet, that included a chocolate harbor with the landmark tall ship Pilgrim cast in chocolate too. The scene included chocolate hillsides, streets, houses with miniature electric lights and a chocolate “Welcome to Dana Point” sign.

For the holiday season, Saucer is making hollow chocolate houses with white chocolate snow on top. The recipient’s name and address can be stenciled on the house to give the gift a personal touch. She also makes a chocolate Christmas card with the sender’s greeting engraved or stenciled in white or dark chocolate and a solid chocolate Christmas tree surrounded by presents and a solid chocolate toy train. Prices for specialty items range from $30 for the chocolate houses to $125 for the Christmas trees.

Saucer, who lives in Laguna Beach, said she entered the chocolate business “by way of mistakes, messes and miracles.”

In 1978, Saucer left her position as director of instructional TV at KOCE-TV in Huntington Beach to become national director of children’s TV and educational services for the Public Broadcasting Service in Washington. There she became disenchanted with children’s programming and eventually decided to leave the field--”but I had no idea where to go or what to do.”

Saucer decided to return to the home she still owned in Laguna Beach and tried to transform it into a European-style bed-and-breakfast inn. But the endeavor was unsuccessful, and one day she phoned a friend for consolation and wound up being invited over to make chocolates.

“She thought it would cheer me up,” she said. “I didn’t want to go. I hated the idea. But I went anyway.”

Saucer presented the results of her afternoon’s activities to a friend later that evening when they got together at a local restaurant to celebrate his birthday.

“That was the only gift I could afford to give him,” she said. “But he was an entrepreneur type. Everything he touched turned to gold. He loved the chocolates and told me that I should start my own business. I didn’t have a better plan, so I decided to give it a try.”

Saucer set out to perfect her recipe and struggled for hours in her kitchen, melting chocolate over bowls of hot water in the sink.

“I needed to learn how to form and temper chocolate. I wanted the candies to have a distinctive shape. I worked and worked and couldn’t get it right.

“One day I just threw the spoon down in disgust and walked off. When I came back later and picked up the spoon again, I realized that I had inadvertently discovered the proper wrist action needed to shape the chocolates. But then I had to figure out how to do it again.”

Through continued trial and error, Saucer developed a product line and set out to persuade local specialty shops to sell her candies.

“The only sales experience I had was selling vegetables at a produce stand when I was a kid growing up in Nebraska,” said Saucer, who is 46. “But Linda Brown at St. Ives in South Coast Village offered me some pointers on packaging and became my first distributor.”

The present site of Saucer’s candy kitchen is what used to be the office portion of a former Weyerhaeuser Co. greenhouse complex overlooking Dana Point Harbor. The surrounding greenhouses are still leased to nursery owners, and Saucer’s operation seems a strange juxtaposition among the large white structures coddling exotic orchids and palm trees.

But true chocolate lovers know that 18th-Century botanist Linnaeus was inspired to name the cacao plant Theobroma, which means “food of the gods,” Saucer noted.

And it is a heavenly aroma that wafts from Saucer’s kitchen when production is in full swing. Her mass-produced line of chocolate candies and novelty items is also made here and distributed under the name Beach Cities Chocolates to specialty stores throughout Southern California. (Her handmade chocolates are sold mostly by telephone or mail order.)

But Saucer retained the handmade Azhmere line to preserve what her favorite author, Willa Cather, referred to as “that intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.”

She came up with the name Azhmere after having a dream in which she found herself back on a TV sound stage being asked to think of a word that meant quality and luxury. In the dream, Saucer replied “ cashmere ,” and a voice told her to “drop the C. “

This month, Saucer and her staff are prepared to work almost round the clock during the Christmas rush to transform 11,922 pounds of chocolate into truffles, turtles, liquor balls, chocolate Christmas cards and personalized figurines.

Then Saucer plans to take a week off after Christmas to rest and prepare for her next project: making 2,000 miniature chocolate replicas of the new San Diego Convention Center for its grand opening dinner in January.