Olivia Curran eats, dreams and creates chocolate, so her choice of hot beverage isn’t totally surprising when the waitress arrives.

“I would have had three bars of chocolate every morning when I was in secondary school in Loreto,” she declares as she sips the creamy swirls, engulfed in marshmallows.

It’s over six years since Olivia started her business from the back of her parents’ home in the townland of Monilea, Mullingar.

“We live eight miles outside Mullingar town on a farm,” she says.

With her SSIA (Special Saving Incentive Account) money she bought a Portacabin, from where she has made the chocolates that have won her 14 awards – most recently a McKenna’s Guide Best in Ireland 2017 award.

“I pinch myself sometimes and think this is happening to someone else,” she confides.

Olivia’s success is hard earned.

“At the minute, a typical day starts at 11am and I work until 5am the following morning. It’s manic,” she laughs.

She claims her passion is the driving force behind her work ethic: “If your heart and soul aren’t in it, you are going to fail because you will lose the momentum. You have to love it.”

When she first started out, Olivia worked full time in her family’s business, Curran Hurling. Finishing at 6pm, she would turn to her kitchen in the evening, making chocolate goodness into the early hours of the morning. She urges others who are in a position like hers six years ago, to contact their Local Enterprise Office and join a food network, like she did.

“They help you along the way,” she says. “The Westmeath LEO funded my stand at the National Ploughing Championships this year, for example, and the Westmeath Food Network has given me a huge support network.”

Now that her own business has grown to include 32 flavours ranging from exotic orange to gooey caramel, Olivia makes chocolates full-time.

Entrepreneurship runs in her blood, considering her father, Peter Curran, invented the indoor hurl.

“Daddy’s always thinking of things and inventing things and I think it has rubbed off,” she says.

When she was in her Leaving Cert year, Olivia entered the Young Entrepreneur Competition and reached the top 10 out of 10,600 students in the country with her invention of Woodie Walkers.

“They were wooden puppets that walked and I made them from the off cuts of the hurls, so they were all timber,” Olivia says.

As a child, Olivia was always working with her hands, making models out of clay. Her chocolate creations are a continuation of this: “It’s an art, I’m just using a different medium.”

Studying Food Quality Assurance in DIT, Cathal Brugha Street, Olivia undertook a six-week placement in Lir Chocolates as part of her third year, which certainly fed her interest.

“Chocolate is very technical,” explains Olivia, who creates her chocolates by hand. “It’s all about the good crystals and the bad crystals. You’ve got to heat the chocolate and then bring down the temperature so that it turns out properly.”

Olivia tempers the Belgian chocolate herself, bringing it through a temperature curve, which aligns the crystals in order to give her chocolates a smooth, glossy look.

This prevents the dull grey colour and waxy texture that appears when the cocoa fat separates out, which Olivia calls pebbledash.

“Even to this day I have gotten caught once or twice – I always have to test. I put a lollipop stick in and leave it for two minutes. If it doesn’t set properly you can have a full run of moulds filled, only to discover they’re not going to set properly and you have to go again.”

One only has to dream of something and it seems Olivia has already made it. Her Pudinis (chocolate in the shape of Christmas puddings), original luxury chocolate box, various hot chocolate pots, coffee chocolate bar and her 2014 hot chocolate box have all won awards at the Blás na hÉireann Irish Food Awards.

Olivia takes inspiration for her chocolates from all around.

“The ideas can literally come from anything,” she says. “We could be sitting here now and we could get a dessert or I could think of a memory from years ago of me eating something and wonder could I recreate it in a chocolate.”

She has made children’s sweets called wallybots, which are little robots filled with popping candy, and chocolate dinosaurs. For Easter she makes a chocolate chick, who is milk, white and orange chocolate.

Olivia loves a challenge but most of all she enjoys bringing people back to their childhood and recreating a sense of wonder with her chocolates.

“There’s nothing better than seeing teenage lads become amazed by my peppermint baskets,” she smiles. CL

Olivia’s chocolates can be bought in Red Earth and Miller & Cook in Mullingar; Fine Food and Wine, Athlone; Wines Direct; Arnotts, Dublin; and Meeting House, Monaghan. Depending on the shop, a box of 12 retails between €13-€15 and a box of 24 between €22-€24. For more info, visit www.anoliviachocolate.com