Jasper & Myrtle is Canberra's new chocolate company

Li Peng Monroe was on holiday in West Australia when it came to her. She and her partner had visited a chocolate maker and it set her to thinking.

"I don't know about you but when I go on holiday I start thinking about life and death and then universe and I was asking the difficult questions so for myself, is being a Canberra public servant what I'm destined to be?" she says. "So we started the research… and it sort of snowballed."

Now she's still a Canberra public servant - but she's also a self taught chocolatier and the owner of her own bean-to-bar chocolate company, Jasper & Myrtle. Her chocolate bars are stocked in different outlets, she's been invited to the Handmade Markets, and recently won silver and bronze medals at the Royal Melbourne Fine Food Awards.

"I said, yup, I need to try something different, a creative outlet outside of the public service and I just basically did it," she says. The name Jasper & Myrtle came from her past - she's spent time in both West Australia, where gemstone mines produce the semiprecious stone jasper, and Newcastle, where lemon myrtle grows in abundance.

Jasper & Myrtle is a very local operation - Monroe makes the chocolate in specially built little lab at her Garran home. "My partner built me my chocolate pod - which is really the size of a garden shed - which is fully lined and approved by the health department," she says. She bought some second hand equipment to roast and grind her cacao beans and had friends lining up to volunteer as tasters as she began experimenting with flavours and combinations.

From the start, she knew she wanted to do bean-to-bar chocolate. "The business didn't get established until I knew I could procure the beans. I contacted a number of suppliers around the world," she says. "The beans are sourced from Peru and they're sourced from a multinational company - that's the Criollo bean, which is quite a rare bean and very expensive." The other bean she uses is the Trinitario bean, which she says she sourced from Papua New Guinea through the island nation's Cocoa and Coconut Research Institute.

"The Criollo bean, because it's so pure and so rare, that's actually my favourite. I use it in the 66 per cent dark chocolate, it's got a fruitiness to it. The Trinitario is quite dark and intense, almost a coffee-like intensity. People who haven't tasted the difference in the beans are really quite surprised when we do a tasting at the markets."

Monroe makes eight different flavours, including a dark espresso chocolate, wakame and Himalayan rock salt bars, white chocolate and sour cherry, dark spiced rum and a lemon myrtle and macadamia chocolate.

She had always wanted to start up her own business but hadn't known how to go about it - until she finally took the plunge. "It's really scary, obviously there was money we had to spend on the machinery, it was slow and we're still paying the costs," she says. "But we're doing well. It's was certainly something that was quite scary. You think, this is money that could be going into the mortgage. But it's quite a creative process and a lot of people are interested - because we get a lot of requests for flavours."

And in true Canberra fashion, Monroe found that the community embraced her little company - there's been a lot of support and plenty of interest from people at markets and in shops. "We've been amazed."

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