An archive of chocolateshells1.com, preserved with credit to its original author, Michelle Gillott.
Published April 2026. Part of JayArr Chocolate's commitment to preserving thoughtful chocolate and pastry writing from the independent-blog era of 2010–2018.
About the archive
Between 2011 and approximately 2018, a UK pastry chef named Michelle Gillott published one of the more substantive chocolate-and-pastry blogs of its era under the brand Chocolate Shells. The site — originally hosted on WordPress.com and custom-mapped to chocolateshells1.com — combined three strands:
- Chocolate work: hand-made chocolates, truffles, pralines, shoe-shaped collection pieces, seasonal boxes (Valentine's, Mother's Day, Easter, Halloween, Christmas)
- Decorative cake work: novelty cakes, wedding cakes, birthday commissions — the genre that earned the blog its viral moments, most notably the Minas Tirith cake (2012) and the Louis Vuitton handbag cake tutorial (2011)
- Sosa consultancy content: professional ingredient education, recipes, and demonstrations tied to her role as Chef Consultant for Home Chocolate Factory, the UK importer of Sosa Ingredients
In early 2026, the custom domain chocolateshells1.com lapsed and became available. JayArr Chocolate acquired the domain in April 2026 to prevent its capture by a squatter or black-hat SEO operator, and to preserve the public archive of Chocolate Shells' work. Michelle's original WordPress blog remains live at chocolateshells1.wordpress.com and is still hers.
About Michelle Gillott's background
At the time of the 2011 posts, Michelle described herself in her site's author bio as:
"Make Bespoke Cakes & Chocolates. Chef Consultant for Home Chocolate Factory UK SOSA importer. Pastry Chef for the last 17 years, previous job 8½ years as Pastry Chef & Senior Sous at Midsummer House Cambridge."
Parsing that credential stack:
- 17 years as a Pastry Chef by 2011 — meaning a career that began around 1994
- Senior Sous Chef at Midsummer House Cambridge for 8½ years — Midsummer House is a two-Michelin-star restaurant, chef-patronated by Daniel Clifford since 1998. Clifford is the only UK chef to earn a new second Michelin star in 2005, a two-time winner of Great British Menu (2012, 2013), and the 2015/16 AA Chefs' Chef of the Year. Senior Sous Chef at a two-star kitchen for nearly a decade is a serious credential.
- Chef Consultant for Home Chocolate Factory — the UK importer of Sosa Ingredients, a Spanish professional-pastry ingredients brand. As Chef Consultant, Michelle's job was training other UK pastry professionals on Sosa's products — a train-the-trainer role above individual-chef seniority.
In other words: Chocolate Shells was never a hobby blog. It was the personal-work output of a Michelin-trained pastry professional with a national B2B education role, written in off-duty hours.
The preserved pieces
Two posts from Michelle's archive have received particular attention in the cake-decorator community over the past fifteen years. One of them has been written up on JayArr Chocolate with full attribution; the second is referenced here pending its tribute piece.
Minas Tirith cake (January 2012)
Michelle's seven-tiered white chocolate architectural cake became the canonical "Tolkien birthday cake" in the cake-decorator genre, featured in Cake Wrecks' Sunday Sweets for J.R.R. Tolkien's Birthday round-up and cited across the Tolkien fandom's annual January 3 birthday celebrations.
Our tribute piece: The Minas Tirith Chocolate Cake — covers the LOTR lore of Minas Tirith as Tolkien described it, the white chocolate tempering discipline the architectural build requires, and credits Michelle's 2012 original as the template for subsequent bakers.
Louis Vuitton handbag cake tutorial (July 2011)
Michelle's step-by-step tutorial for rendering the LV Monogram handbag as a modeling-chocolate cake has been referenced across cake-community forums including CakeCentral for more than a decade, and is the most widely-cited English-language reference for the LV handbag cake built in modeling chocolate with hand-painted monogram.
A tribute piece on the LV handbag cake — covering the brand history of LV's Monogram canvas, the structural problem of the handbag-as-cake, why modeling chocolate outperforms fondant for this specific build, and Michelle's 2011 tutorial as the canonical precursor — is in preparation and will be linked here when it publishes.
Both pieces (the published Minas Tirith tribute and the forthcoming LV handbag tribute) link back to this archive and to Michelle's current WordPress blog.
Michelle's current work
Michelle's WordPress blog remains live at chocolateshells1.wordpress.com. The most recent post — "For full Sosa ingredients recipes check their YouTube channel" — is dated February 24, 2025. Her RSS feed is still active; her archive of Sosa-ingredient recipes, chocolate techniques, and cake-decor work is still there. The best way to follow her ongoing work is directly at her WordPress site.
If you are arriving here because you followed an old chocolateshells1.com link, the individual post URLs from her site are preserved and routed either to the matching pieces on JayArr Chocolate (for tributed pieces) or back to this archive page (for everything else). Her current work lives at her WordPress blog.
Why we preserved the archive
The short version: because Cake Wrecks, CakeCentral, The Sugar Hit, Between the Pages Blog, and Miss Sue Flay all link to specific pages on chocolateshells1.com. If a squatter had grabbed the dropped domain, those links would have routed a decade of food-blog editorial traffic to parking pages, gambling redirects, or spam content. Preserving the archive under credited ownership — rather than letting the history of UK independent food blogging get cannibalized — is a small act of Internet infrastructure care.
The long version: JayArr Chocolate is a content operation focused on craft chocolate, bean-to-bar makers, and the Tasting Room project. Chocolate Shells' archive overlaps partially with our editorial scope (professional chocolate technique, Sosa consultancy, decorative chocolate work) and sits adjacent to it (novelty cake decoration, LOTR fandom cakes, Louis Vuitton handbag cakes). We've preserved the overlap as direct tributes with full attribution, and preserved everything else via pointers back to Michelle's current WordPress site.
To Michelle, if this reaches you
If you're the original author of this archive and you'd prefer a different arrangement, please reach out. We can:
- Redirect
chocolateshells1.comto your WordPress blog directly, at no cost to you - Transfer the domain back to you at our registration cost
- Take down the tribute pages entirely if you'd rather not have your work republished under our attribution
- Revise the attribution copy on either of the tribute pieces to match how you'd prefer to be credited
Our default is the current arrangement (credited archive with tributes), but your preference takes priority. We can be reached at jay@jayarrchocolate.com.
Thanks for the work you put into Chocolate Shells. It mattered to the people who attempted those cakes from your tutorials — the Minas Tirith builds still appear every January 3 in Tolkien communities, and the LV handbag tutorial is still the reference point for home bakers who want to attempt that build in modeling chocolate. The archive is worth keeping findable.
— Jay Arr
JayArr Chocolate
April 2026