The way Melissa Barnett sees it, there's a lot more to chocolate than just that wonderful taste and texture. There's the virtually unlimited potential to use it as an edible expression of one's creativity, and that's precisely what she says she's doing now.

Barnett owns Pixie Dust Chocolates, a Spokane-based wholesale maker of artistic gourmet chocolates that sells its products to specialty food markets, gift shops, and other retail outlets in the Spokane-Coeur d'Alene area.

She launched the business in July 2009 from her North Side home, where it still is based, and says the personal satisfaction she already has gotten from the endeavor has been sweet.

"It's been so fun," Barnett says. Noting the non-candy-making aspects of running a small business that often dominate her time, she says, "I'm not saying it hasn't been frustrating, because it has, but it's been so worth it. I love seeing the outcome."

Pixie Dust Chocolates sells handcrafted and individually "painted" chocolates in a range of colors and shapes, from hearts and frogs to traditional rectangular bars that feature images of Spokane landmarks such as the Monroe Street Bridge and Riverfront Park carrousel horses. It packages them in sizes ranging from one-piece favor boxes that retail for $1.50 and 3-ounce bars priced at $5, to 12-piece tins that sell for $9.50.

Barnett is the business's only employee, and for now also holds down a part-time job as a housekeeper at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children's Hospital. She says she's eager, though, to build up Pixie Dust's revenues to the point where she can focus on it full time.

Meanwhile, she says she gets a lot of support from her husband, Craig Barnett, who owns The Comic Book Shop, which has stores at 1401 N. Division and on the second floor of NorthTown Mall. Also a big help, she says, has been her mother, Cheryl Schreiber, who invited Barnett to convert part of the basement of Schreiber's home into a commercial kitchen and helps Barnett with the bookkeeping and sometimes the chocolate production process.

Barnett estimates she currently devotes about 28 hours a week to the business, but says that easily can double as the important holiday season approaches. She buys premium chocolate made by Guittard Chocolate Co., of Burlingame, Calif., through Spokane Bakery Supply Inc., and gets her molds from a New York-based supplier. She estimates she now has more than 300 molds.

She says she pours molten chocolate into the molds on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays, because those days work out best to accommodate family—she has two children, ages 5 and 7—and other work demands. She currently is doing one "pour" a day, with each pour taking about three hours—counting mold preparation and product packaging time—and each 10-pound batch of chocolate accounting for 300 to 400 pieces, depending on their shape and size.

"As we get busier, we'll probably do two or three pours a day," she says, referring to the holiday season surge.

To vary the look and taste of the candy, she uses a number of different types of chocolate, including dark, milk, creme de menthe, dark huckleberry, huckleberry milk, and huckleberry white, with dark huckleberry being the most popular. To decorate the pieces, she uses luster dust, a finely grained edible powder often used in cakes, or cocoa butter, both of which are available in a range of colors.

The luster dust, which she applies after making the candies, gives the chocolate an attractive sheen. With the cocoa butter, she uses a small air compressor and airbrush to spray a thin layer of it into the molds, and gives each piece a distinctive, artistic look by applying multiple colors and manually adding swirls and flourishes as suits her whim.

"They're literally hand-painted," she says.

She melts and prepares the chocolate in a tempering machine, which is a countertop appliance, sometimes computerized, that's designed to reduce the manual labor and take part of the guesswork out of the process of making chocolate confections.

Raw chocolate that is melted to make candy must be "tempered," or heated, cooled, and then heated again to precise temperatures, to be crisp and smooth. If not, melted chocolate tends to dry to a dull, unattractive consistency, she says.

"There's nothing wrong with it. It just doesn't look nice," she says.

She pours the molten chocolate into the prepared molds, places the molds into a freezer to cool briefly, then moves them to nearby shelves to finish setting. After 20 to 30 minutes, she says, the chocolate is ready to be popped out of the molds and packaged for sale.

Her small, roughly 150-square-foot commercial kitchen and an adjoining storage area, which is a converted canned-good storage area, were spotlessly clean during a reporter's recent visit there, but Barnett says the production process is messy.

"Once you start pouring, the melted chocolate gets on everything," she says.

Barnett says she had been feeling an entrepreneurial itch for a long time before she formed Pixie Dust Chocolates.

"I'd been threatening my husband to start a business, but I wasn't sure what that would be," she says.

She began to settle on a plan when she noticed some chocolate molds while walking through a cake-supply store trying to get ideas for a 60th birthday gift for her mother. The problem, she says, is that she "wanted to do something more with them" than just produce plain chocolate.

"I'm really creative, and I wanted to be making cute, fun things," Barnett says. Mulling how she could inject some artistry into the chocolates, she says, "I just saw them the way I wanted them to be, but wasn't sure whether it was possible to do."

Through experimentation, she says, she found out she could produce the types of candies she had envisioned. She then began taking samples to shop owners such as Susan Davis, co-owner of Chocolate Apothecary, and De Scott, of Simply Northwest, to get their feedback and gauge their interest in her creations.

"The response was overwhelming—yeah, they would like to, and they loved what I was doing," she says. Part of the feedback, though, she adds, also included things she needed to do before she could formally launch the business.

"First, I had to have a commercial kitchen," Barnett says. Also, she says, she was told she should convert to a higher grade of chocolate than what she had used in her initial batches and should tailor her products to the Spokane market.

"After talking it over with Craig, I decided that it was something that I really wanted and could do," she says. Shortly before Mother's Day last year, she says, she informed her husband that she planned to buy a chocolate tempering machine, but he was a step ahead of her, showing her a receipt and telling her he already had bought her one as a Mother's Day gift.

"He knew I needed to do it," she says. "That was where it started."

Barnett embraced the suggestions she'd gotten from the various shop owners she'd approached and says she rented a Spokane Valley kitchen from De Scott for the first six months. When her mother moved into a different home, in northwest Spokane, and offered to let her convert part of the basement into a kitchen, she decided it was time to move.

Christmastime is "really my season," she says, and by that time last year, she had about six accounts, but that now has grown to about two dozen. Along with Chocolate Apothecary and Simply Northwest, retailers here that sell her products include Huckleberry's Natural Market, Made in Washington, Rocket Market, and Auntie's Bookstore, among others.

Reflecting on the first-year anniversary of her business, she says, "I guess my biggest surprise was how many hats I have to have in my closet. There is just so much you do other than making chocolate. I had this fantasy that I'd just be in my kitchen making chocolate, but it doesn't work that way."

Other time-consuming tasks have included repairing equipment, personally delivering all of her chocolates to the businesses that carry them, and setting up and maintaining a Web site, she says. Those tasks are rendered far less burdensome, she says, by feelings of accomplishment she gets when people see and try her creations.

"It's amazing," she says, "People love them."