While many of us are familiar with chocolate, fewer will have tried cacao fruit. If you have got your hands on some fresh ...

You can either discard the shells or get creative and use them in cacao tea or for garden mulch. Roasting your own cocoa ...

A helpful guide to purchasing and working with chocolate, including an easy recipe for ganache that transforms into decadent frosting, mousse and truffles.

A close-up of an opened cacao fruit, next to cocoa beans and cocoa powder on a rough wooden table - wasanajai/Shutterstock ...

It takes about five years before a cacao tree is mature enough to start producing beans, and the plants remain fragile in the first few years of their life, he says. All the while, consumers ...