The breakthrough that made chocolate melt in your mouth

Here's a piece of chocolate history I didn't know until I looked into Cologne's Chocolate Museum properly. That smooth, melting texture we now take completely for granted in a decent bar of chocolate is a surprisingly recent invention. Before 1879, chocolate was gritty and a bit crumbly, closer to a rough paste than anything silky.

Then a Swiss chocolatier called Rodolphe Lindt stumbled on a process called conching, hours of slow heating and grinding that transformed the texture completely. It's the reason chocolate melts the way it does today. Cologne's Chocolate Museum, opened in 1993 by a manufacturer who'd always dreamed of having a fountain that ran with chocolate continuously, now tells that story to over 650,000 visitors a year, and unusually for a museum, it pays for itself entirely through ticket sales.

I painted the chocolate fountain from the museum with the gold chocolate pods in watercolour and ink. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: A Bar of Chocolate, Cologne · Travel Poster