Crash Course

So even though I haven’t been blogging much I’ve been keeping busy. I decided the best motivation is a deadline and went ahead and had flyers printed for Valentine’s Day before I had any chocolates planned or working.

Before I knew it my kitchen was turning out sample after sample of every chocolate I’ve wanted to do…and after four days of absolute misery, I’ve come down to this short menu of 12 items as my intro into the world of chocolate. 

I say misery because there were more like 30 items I wanted to do and I had to settle my choices to just twelve, and then hope they worked out. 

The good news, I work well under pressure. I have twelve recipes that will now be the base of my chocolate company, I have a separate tumblr page to sell them with for the holidays, (smallfavoursvalentines.tumblr.com) I have interested customers and I’ve gotten pretty okay with the photography if I do say so myself. 

Hope you like my selections! 

At least there is chocolate…

You know when things aren’t going great and you just really want chocolate? I mean, more than a hug or nice words…those days when only chocolate is really going to help soothe that ‘the world is ending’ kind of day? 

I’ve had a whole week of those. I’m sure my scale, if I bothered to get on it, would be protesting. 

There’s a reason there are no pictures from the great chocolate experiment…it was a great chocolate flop. The next day I woke up to find nothing but fat bloom and the few turtles that did survive it sat lonely in the chocolate case all weekend with no one to buy them. 

I have this dream of beautiful little chocolates displayed proudly in their case, people walking by not being able to resist…and the reality is that I’m in a market where chocolate covered twinkies sell like mad and champagne truffles get passed over. 

Luckily, I’ve found out that a nice milk chocolate turtle filled with gooey caramel does a lot to combat minor depression (at least for the moment). I will state here that I am not a doctor and my advice is not necessarily good, just tasty.

I do have some successes to report on though.

I have now successfully made one piece of smoked salt, almond and cranberry bark that after four days is still looking beautiful and glossy. If I can just repeat this over and over again with many different chocolates I might be getting somewhere. 

Second, I’ve created a light tent. I went searching the internet for photography tips and found light tents (white boxes) for a few hundred dollars. I decided to be cheap. 

One cardboard box with squares cut out on each side, a yard of white nylon to wrap around it, three clip on lights with daylight bulbs and a piece of bristol board later and I have my very own light box for photography.

Stay tuned…I might actually post pictures of chocolate soon!