The ancient Irish name Áine carries a range of meanings: radiance, brilliance, splendour or brightness, depending on where you look. In Celtic mythology, Áine is associated with summer, wealth and sovereignty, a figure rooted in folklore as a goddess of love, fertility and the sun, closely tied to midsummer, crops and cattle.
So when I ask Ann Rudden why she chose the name for her handmade chocolate business, she smiles and offers, “for most of those reasons.”
There is, of course, the simple fact that Áine is the Irish for Ann.
“Áine’s Handmade Chocolates just has a certain ring to it that works. You wouldn’t call it Ann’s Chocolates,” she says. “Although when I started 25 years ago, nobody used their name for a business.”
At the time, chocolate brands tended towards solid, formal surnames — Cadbury, Rowntree, Mackintosh — but Rudden was intent on putting a more personal stamp on her work. If you’re going to put your name on something, it has to stand up to it.
Fortunately, the confectionery in question is absolutely delicious.
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One in the basket
Neven Maguire visits Áine's Handmade Chocolate
Should run on the image...
sweet success
Flavour explorations
To date, there are seven flavours in the Simply Better range
From a converted family garage in rural Cavan, Ann Rudden has built Áine’s Handmade Chocolates into a thriving business, blending craft and ambition with a sharp instinct for growth, writes Simon O’Neill
BAKE EXPECTATIONS
As well as timing and adaptability, partnerships — such as the long-standing one she has developed with Simply Better — play a crucial role. A meeting at Bloom, the annual food and garden festival, led to a first run of four Belgian-style bars for Simply Better. The bars came in 70% dark chocolate, plain milk, dark orange and mint. Today, Áine’s makes “about 32 lines” for Dunnes Stores, a chunk of production that keeps the factory humming and allows the company to plan ahead rather than just react.
Dunnes Stores, she says, “worked very closely with us as a food producer” and understood the particular vulnerabilities of smaller manufacturers.
“When you start a business, you need high volume to keep your wages paid and to grow. With the likes of Simply Better, they have that volume and it’s a win-win situation for both.”
Simply Better is synonymous with quality, and the provenance of the raw material that makes up the range is key. Áine’s Chocolates are no different.
“We do five different Single Origin bars for Simply Better. From Colombia, we have an 85% cocoa Colombian dark chocolate. From Cameroon, an 80% Dark Chocolate. There’s a 71% dark chocolate from Ecuador. We have a Costa Rican dark, that’s 64% cocoa and a 38% milk chocolate bar. And we also do a range of Belgian chocolate bars, from a 70% cocoa to a 55% and a 34%.”
Simply Better is synonymous with quality, and the provenance of the raw material that makes up the range is key. Áine’s Chocolates are no different
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In a village, enthusiasm rarely goes unnoticed. Down the road was a local baker, Mrs Kyle of Kyle’s Bakery, and a young Ann turned up looking for work experience, eager to learn whatever she could. “I said, ‘I’m so interested. Would you mind showing me how to make icing, or a piping bag, that sort of thing?’” she recalls. “And she did. She was so kind.”
Armed with a burgeoning set of skills, her journey took her to Dublin’s DIT Kevin Street, where she studied Bakery Production Management. The course covered bread, cakes and chocolate, plus the bits people forget to romanticise, such as technology, food science, accountancy and marketing.
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Production takes place in Stradone, a small Co Cavan town that sits on a bend in the road between two small lakes just off the N3. Lough Oughter’s watery maze and Killykeen Forest Park are within easy reach, while the ruined ring of Cloughoughter Castle stands guard on a lone island on the lough.
It is the kind of sleepy Irish town that had a church, a post office, a bank, a draper’s, a few pubs and a garage with a petrol pump out front. That garage was run by Ann’s father, Brian, and it is there that Áine’s Handmade Chocolates is based.
EASTER IRELAND
THE MECHANICS OF CHOCOLATE
“It was full of motors and car parts,” Ann says. The grease, carburettors and tyres were cleared out and the modest space converted into a chocolate factory. As Wonka origin stories go, the one where the prodigal daughter returns to the site of the family business with a dream to convert a rural mechanic’s workshop into a confectionery empire is pretty unique.
By her own admission, Ann wasn’t ever “a car person”, preferring to pour chocolate into a mould than oil into an engine sump, but a little of the mechanic’s meticulous approach has obviously rubbed off. And she certainly had the drive to be a self-starter.
“From a very young age I wanted to start my own business,” she says. And so while her siblings were out playing on the local football pitch, she was in her mother’s kitchen, making cakes and early versions of her chocolates with single-minded determination, melting down whatever bars were to hand, experimenting, tinkering and developing her palate.
“The best years of my life,” Ann says. After graduation, Ann worked for two of Ireland’s big hitters in the chocolate industry: the Irish Chocolate Company (Butlers and Bewley’s, at the time) and then Lily O’Brien’s. She was there from its inception, watching a start-up scale into something formidable.
But the dream of her own business never left her. For a time, she built the business in Dublin, then moved to Oldcastle, Co Meath, balancing her career with a young family. And then came the decision that changed everything: bringing it back to her roots in Stradone. With rising rent costs and the old family garage gathering dust under sheets and tarpaulins, it made a cyclical sort of sense. Armed with a bank loan and a little help from the Local Enterprise Office, Ann came home to reinvent the place she had known as a little girl in “this beautiful part of the country”.
The 85% dark chocolate is a rich, waxy, beautifully textured treat and the various milk chocolates are silky smooth and indulgent.
Five years ago, Ann travelled to the Ivory Coast and Colombia on a fact-finding mission, which was, she says, “absolutely amazing… one of the best trips I’ve ever been on.”
As well as the intoxicating sights and sounds, there was a deepening of knowledge. “Over time, you start to learn the notes of each chocolate,” she says. It is not, she insists, merely about personal preference. It’s benchmarking against European brands, working with suppliers, tasting relentlessly, calibrating and cultivating a taste for what works.
On the contentious subject of putting chocolate in the fridge, she offers her own opinion: don’t.
“No,” she immediately replies. “If you have a good quality premium chocolate, it should be kept around room temperature.”
Cold storage causes condensation and mutes flavour. You can, of course, chill your bar if you like it cold and snappy — but don’t make the mistake that it improves the flavour of the chocolate.
This Easter, Áine’s Handmade Chocolates is bringing out three new flavours in the Simply Better Easter Egg range: Pistachio & Almond Belgian Milk Chocolate (because, as she notes with a laugh, “the world’s gone nuts for pistachio at the moment”), a Hazelnut Crunch Belgian Milk Chocolate Egg, and a Raspberry Crisp Belgian Dark Chocolate Egg, made with 70% Belgian Dark Chocolate studded with freeze-dried raspberries.
For the purists, Single Origin Colombian 38% Milk Chocolate and 70% Dark Chocolate Eggs are available too. Every bar of Áine’s Handmade Chocolates and all the Easter Eggs are gluten-free, which makes gifting even easier. So, if you’re looking for a premium-quality treat from the Easter Bunny, look no further.
Those experiments in the family kitchen and evening lessons from Mrs Kyle certainly stood to Ann in her quest to build her own chocolate brand. There were a few twists and turns on the road but, from a premises fashioned from her father’s workshop, Áine’s Handmade Chocolates is motoring along with no sign of slowing down.
Culture choc
Neven Maguire meets Ann Rudden
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