Nordic Treasure Håkan Mårtensson is a Craftsman
Gifted at Making Chocolate and Sculpting Chocolate
By Brian Cazeneuve
The town of Beacon is a Norman Rockwell special. Tucked into New York’s lush Hudson Valley, 55 miles north of Manhattan, it has easy access to hiking, fishing, kayaking on the Hudson River, strolling on the waterfront, an arts scene, farmers’ markets, cascading Fishkill Falls, eye-catching Bannerman Castle and a Main Street with antique stores and coffee shops, each more welcoming than the next. It’s a cozy place to unlock your doors, put your feet up, walk your dogs and raise your family. Just watch out for the fire-breathing dragons, pipe-smoking trolls and the skulls and gnomes menacing you from every angle.
Tucked among the Victorian architecture in a slice of this 13,000-person postcard, stands Håkan Mårtensson, the chocolatier, serpent master and gracious host who breathes life into the mythical beasts and winged serpents using the sweetest of weaponry . . . chocolate. “It is the perfect canvas to create something that tells a story and takes you somewhere else,” he says in his Norse-inflected patois that is transporting just by itself. Sure, customers may be lured by the treasures under the glass counter at the entrance: pastries, cardamom buns, oat balls and bon bons by the barrelful, with beguiling, unplaceable flavor profiles. But when patrons are lucky, those who patiently wait on line to enter HÅKAN Chocolatier can also look through the glass partition to the kitchen where Mårtensson might just be sculpting a new creature. Why not have fantasy brought to life and a coffee at the same time?
Mårtensson’s award collection is a rarity, even among great chocolatiers. He became a world champion for his sculpting in 2006 and 2008, and for his bon bons in 2013 and 2014. With Mårtensson, there are style and substance, form and function, trolls and truffles, dragons and dragees. “I’m not sure if I actually found chocolate,” he says humbly, “or if chocolate found me.”
The generous serendipity began in the unlikely Swedish locale of Hanaskog, a bite-sized hamlet of 1,200 people, 30 miles from the original Ikea in Älmhult and 70 miles Northeast of Malmö, the country’s third-largest city. Blink, sneeze or chug some glogg and you’re likely to skip right past it. Håkan’s father, Ingvar, had been a butcher in a high-end department store who valued customer service. Håkan recalls Ingvar telling one patron, “Here, I was saving this for my family, but I’m giving it to you because you really wanted it.” Hence was born a loyal customer for life. By watching his dad, Håkan learned not only the technicalities of a business, but also the whole of customer interaction. “He made these exact cuts,” Haken recalls. “They were so precise. I didn’t know then that there was a connection for me. But he also had a way with people. That stayed with me.”
[Chocolate]is the perfect canvas to create something that tells a story and takes you somewhere else.
By sight, Mårtensson seems a classically robust Swede who may as well be chopping wood during his coffee break – give him a beard and he would make a fine St. Nicholas – yet customers soon discover a disarming friendliness sprinkled with humor and cheer. So why the trolls and gnomes?
Perhaps the mischief, depicted in his craft, actually had its origins in the Mårtensson kitchen. The boy was busy playing sports, toiling on swimming and soccer teams, while his body craved fuel to feed his hours of energy. “I was a sugar king,” he recalls. “I was working out so much, my metabolism was off the charts. It didn’t matter what I ate. I had two hours of training every day.” The most frequent targets, tucked into his mother’s kitchen drawer, were balls of chocolate wrapped in coconut. “I tried to sneak one piece at a time, so nobody would notice,” he recalls. “When it was all gone, what story could I tell?”
In fact, story-telling and science were always circulating in the boy’s blood next to the sugar. He liked to draw and he liked the composition of food. When Håkan was 14, a time for Swedes to further their book studies or choose a trade, he opted for culinary school. For almost two years, his mother drove him to a delivery bakery at 1:30 in the morning. He would work from 2:00 a.m. to 7;00 a.m., go to school from 8 a.m. until four in the afternoon, jump into soccer training; then come home to eat and melt into his pillow from around 8 in the evening until 1 a.m. Despite the sleep-deprivation, he graduated No. 1 in his class from the School of Österäng in Kristianstad.
Straight after graduation, Håkan moved to Stockholm to work as a baker at NK (Nordiska Kompaniet), which was Sweden’s leading pastry company at the time. NK’s Executive Pastry Chef, Stefan Johnson-Petersen, took Håkan under his wing and became his mentor. Mårtensson ran ten ovens at once, reveling in the responsibility, but his eyes were especially drawn to chocolate. “It was so petit, so exact,” he recalls. “It was easy to screw up. I wanted that challenge. When I found chocolate, it changed my perspective on what I wanted to do with my life.”
Soon the self-described “average sketcher” discovered a knack for seeing his new craft in its necessary dimensions and transforming a 450-block of mass into a fairy tale. “I realized how to see a figure in 3D, not as a flat surface,” he says. “I could look at the front and understand what I was trying to do in the back.”
When I found chocolate, it changed my perspective on what I wanted to do with my life.
In particular, Mårtensson noticed his mentor sculpting with chocolate, making shapes into people, places and things, and he was transfixed. “How do you do that?” he asked impatiently. Johnson-Petersen knew his pupil well enough to understand this as a call to instruction, but Mårtensson needed trial and error. “The first few times I made something, Stefan crushed them and threw them out,” Mårtensson recalls. It was brutally direct, but also a test to see if the pupil was willing to endure the failures that would ultimately lead to success. The teacher needn’t have worried.
The process entailed cutting a piece at a time in a room set to between 65 and 70 degrees, with humidity between 50 and 65 percent. To get the different parts to blend properly, he could use the heat of his fingers. Then he’d scrape, alternately carving and adding until the magic touch produced the desired creature.
“The first thing I did was a dragon I saw in a magazine,” he recalls. “He was looking down from a throne. The character was not a bloodthirsty animal; he was meant to look intelligent, curious, wise. And the beauty of creating a creature like a dragon is that nobody can say it’s wrong. It’s your interpretation; it’s not a portrait.” Creations can take between an hour and several days to complete. “It isn’t in the head,” he explains; “it’s in the fingers.”
With Johnson-Petersen’s blessing, the Swedish Culinary Team’s leader Krister Dahl tapped the dragon master to be its youngest member, at age 22, with an eye towards the Culinary World Cup in Luxembourg in 2006 and the Culinary Olympics in Erfurt, Germany in 2008. Mårtensson wanted to keep the nomination quiet. “If it didn’t go well, I didn’t want my relatives to see me as a fraud,” he says. But when the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet ran an article about the squad as it made a Christmas ham months before the major competitions, there was Mårtensson’s unmistakable face in the center of the lead photo. “Everybody called everybody,” he recalls. “Friends, relatives, people I only kind of knew.” Mårtensson couldn’t shake a dragon’s tail without someone asking how the competition prep was progressing.
I realized how to see a figure in 3D, not as a flat surface. I could look at the front and understand what I was trying to do in the back.
And that progress was exacting. Loosely translated from some ancient kitchen dialect, surely Mårtensson’s name translates to “all-nighter.” On the final night of prep before one competition, Mårtensson stayed awake for 33 straight hours in the kitchen of the old castle where the team trained and began to sense the pressure. He recalls days when he couldn’t start sculpting until his fingers stopped shaking. Would he even be able to compete without steady hands? “If it was just me, I would have backed out, because I wasn’t enjoying it,” he says. “But I was part of a team.”
In Luxembourg, the team used the theme of the extreme temperatures on a Celsius scale, depicting both ice and melting gold. Mårtensson earned his first international gold for sculpting. In Erfurt, the team’s theme was the Swedish pop group Abba. Hey, if The Winner Takes It All, why not them? The genre tested Mårtensson’s sensibilities. “I’m as far away from that kind of music, that clothing, that style as possible,” he says. He recalls scouting his hands the morning of the event and liking what he saw. “They were solid,” he says. “So, okay, let’s go.” Somehow, Mårtensson channeled some distant inner Dancing Queen and won gold again.
“After that, I was done with competition,” he says. “I needed a new challenge.” In 2009, he began a job as Executive Pastry Chef with Swedish cafe Fika in New York City, a complete U-Turn from Hanaskog. “In New York, there were 1,800 people in the apartment complex where I was living,” he recalls. “There were more people in my building than in my hometown.”
Mårtensson fed off the energy and opportunity. He sculpted live for audiences at the Comic Con, the specialty emporium Dean & Deluca, the Salon du Chocolat show and for the opening night of a Willy Wonka remake on Broadway. Even if you couldn’t see Mårtensson on a crowded show floor, you could easily find him just by looking for the bottleneck expanding around a particular stand or table and count the patrons clicking away on their iPhones. “Once you start sculpting, everything stops,” he says. “I’m not usually aware of the size of the crowd until I look up. Then, Holy crap.”
In combined appearances at the International Chocolate Awards in 2013 and 2014, Mårtensson won six medals for his extraordinary bon bons – golds for Quinoa Hazelnut Gianduja; Salted Caramel; Cinnamon Tabasco; and Yuzu Licorice; and silvers for Goat Cheese and for Key Lime Pie.
Mårtensson helped build the Fika brand in Japan, and by 2015, the business had grown from one store in New York to 18, but it also grew too fast. Fika’s eyes were bigger than its stomach. With financial and practical challenges mounting, Fika closed its last store in 2019.
Mårtensson was at a crossroads. Well before the pandemic hit, he had spoken fondly of Hudson Valley, which was less expensive and more relaxed than the city he’d grown to love. He left behind a home in the borough of Queens that had cocoa beans on the wall and a cacao tree in his bedroom that never quite bore the bounty he had hoped. His family was also growing. Today Håkan and his wife, Laura, are parents to Maddox and Milo – as the chocolatier calls them aptly, “my M&Ms.” Once the fog started to lift from Covid, he opened HÅKAN Chocolatier in Beacon in May, 2021. It was an instant hit.
Apart from the prize-winning Quinoa Hazelnut, there are Kalamansi Cardamom, Sakura and Japanese Whiskey, Wolf Paw (lingonberry caramel and vodka ganache), smokey Laphroaig (scotch), Cognac Hazelnut Marzipan, Norwegian goat cheese (Brunost), and Dragon’s Breath (ganache infused with yellow habanero hot sauce). No, these are not your grandfather’s gooseberries. Belying the whimsy of his creatures, Mårtensson composes his bon bons with exacting deduction. A cinnamon and tabasco bon bon balances both cinnamon’s lingering flavor and tabasco’s heat that doesn’t initially activate in the mouth. It’s a tasty treat in a time capsule.
Once you start sculpting, everything stops. I’m not usually aware of the size of the crowd until I look up. Then, Holy crap.
He curates each shape and color with what he sees as a complementary geometry and color. “I’m always thinking how I can pair this,” he says. “What’s the texture and the sweetness? Should it be salty or sour? If you’re picking five bon bons, it should be a different experience with all five.” As part of a collaboration, Dandelion Chocolate in the Bay Area placed a pre-holiday order of 160,000 bon bons from Mårtensson’s shop last year.
With all the winning combinations, there were also abandoned trials. “Ice cream with liquid smoke and pop rocks,” he says, almost spitting the words out of his mouth. “That was disgusting. I almost quit [experimenting] after that one.”
Mårtensson instructs his staff to learn people’s names, as he does, and the smiles are ubiquitous. A day in the shop may as well be a reading of an old phone book. “I like the customers,” he says. “You become friends, get to know families. I never had that in the city. I’m interested in what people do.” And people are learning more about the details and backstory of what he does. A short film about his life entitled HÅKAN, A Documentary About Chocolate, Creativity and Passion will debut at New York’s Scandinavia House in February.
Though the daytime vibe at HÅKAN Chocolatier radiates warmth, Mårtensson has plans for a more mature aura in the evening. The place has a liquor license, and the back patio area is undeveloped for now. A speakeasy may not be far off. In this corner of Beacon lurks a standard of galactic invention, so listen closely and you can hear some gnomes guarding their treasures and whispering that a Viking is planning even greater explorations.
(This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)
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