Cacao Powder vs Cocoa Powder for Baking

Cacao powder, cocoa powder. It almost seems like a spelling mistake, but these are actually two very different ingredients.

Let’s start with what they both have in common, chocolate!

Chocolate is made from the beans of a cacao tree. In their raw form, cacao beans have a very bitter taste. In order for these bitter beans to become the sweet velvety products we’ve become familiar with, they undergo a fermentation process.

The cacao beans are roasted, ground into a liquid, and mixed with other ingredients like cocoa butter, vanilla and sugar.

Voila, now you have chocolate.