Sweet, sweet taste of the Oscars
Campbeltown – In a storyline improbable enough for Hollywood, a vegan chocolatier in a remote Scottish port town has made the confectionery to be given to silver screen icons at next month’s Oscars.
Fiona McArthur’s luxury chocolates will be handed out to Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and other VIPs at cinema’s biggest annual night, with each nominee in the main categories to be treated to a box.
McArthur, 37, only opened her small chocolate shop in Campbeltown, western Scotland, in 2019 but it soon caught the eye of the company responsible for assembling Academy Awards goody bags.
At first she thought it was a hoax. But after verifying the firm online, she realised the offer to help fill the gift packs worth tens of thousands of dollars for the 10 March ceremony was genuine.
“It’s mind-blowing. I can’t believe it still,” she said from Fetcha, her self-owned and run shop.
“The best director, best actor, actress, supporting actor and supporting actress – they all get one of my boxes. I’m really excited ... it’s amazing.”
McArthur, a film buff, saw most of the nominated films at her local Art Deco cinema – opened in 1913 – with notebook in hand to jot down ideas for the tailor-made boxes.
She ended up designing six different vegan chocolates inspired by this award year’s biggest films.
The Oppenheimer chocolate, inspired by the drama nominated for 13 Oscars about the father of the atomic bomb, resembles a ball of fire.
The yellow and orange truffle has a hard shell with popping candy “so when you bite through, it kind of explodes in your mouth” with a chilli afterburn that “heats up your tongue”, she explained.
The chocolate for dark comedy Poor Things, a female Frankenstein story up for 11 awards,- was based on Portuguese pastel de nata egg tarts, which lead character Bella Baxter gorges on. The inside of the chocolate is custard flavoured, with cinnamon on top to give it a baked look.
Barbie is represented by a heart-shaped pink chocolate flavoured with strawberry and rose, but the hearts are “kind of rough ... like her journey through Barbieland into the real world is not a smooth journey,” McArthur said.
For Maestro, about the legendary US composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, she created depictions of musical note bars from cocoa butter.
Before sealing each of her boxes and shipping them by post to Los Angeles, McArthur slipped in a booklet explaining the inspirations behind her sweet creations.
Her Oscars role has led to celebrity status in Campbeltown, so much so that her shop, where her mother helps out, is no longer able to meet local demand for the Oscars assortment. –