Today's delivery

This is what went out today.

Coconuggets, white pistachio, salted caramel, espresso love, dark/roasted macadamia, to name a few. I'm thinking of using a candy cane sprinkle on something for Christmas. Dark, milk or white?

packaging

Ellen is packaging tonight. The pistachios needed a bit of salt so I did a little sprinkle of French grey salt. That's fine but now the ingredient label needs to be changed! I will include that in the next process meeting to make that change and notify production/packaging.

First day of being LLC

The LLC paperwork came today. I have a embossed seal. How cool is that! Now we can get the merchants account and be able to accept credit cards. Then the shopping cart will be up and running!

I made "Tondo's" today. Dark Conacado. Organic fair trade/rain forest certified. Milk chocolate. Also organic with the same chocolate. I made some with Dark and Roasted macadamia nuts, white organic (with madagascar vanilla beans and you can see the specs of it) with pistachios, and one with dark milk chocolate with roasted cashews.

Ellen packaged up some coconuggets for "Dalai Java" in Canandaguia

for their grand opening this Saturday! Congrats to them!

It's here!

Another good day! The larger grinder came! Woo Hooo! Good thing because I was just told I have another big order. This is the grinder, and it's heavy because of the granite base and grinding wheels. 260 lbs. I was able to remove the wheels and lighten it up some and get it in without too much trouble. I'll wire it in and get it going tomorrow.

Started grinding the first batch of 100% organic chocolate. It smells quite nice. Very fruity. The Conacado beans have quite a bit of natural cocoa butter in them so I didn't need to compensate with as much added cocoa butter. When I add sugar it increases the mass component of the cocoa mass/cocoa butter ratio. I only added 7% compared to 20%. That said, the flavor is not diluted. You get a high intense chocolate flavor balanced with the right amount of (organic /evaporated)sugar. I will get this bean again. The sugar is amazing too. It's from Fla. so fair trade is not an issue. It's evaporated cane juice. Fruity, vanilla something else I can't recognise.
Business progress. Had an issue with the meaning of the company name. It's not in English. Ha! Maybe next time I'll push #2 for Espanol. That is now being expedited, and I should have the LLC paperwork in 1 week. That's needed to open a merchants account so the shopping cart on the website can use credit cards.
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Getting ready for tomorrow

This is the biggest box of chocolate I have ever seen!

It's for my first of many. White cashew, coconut, salted caramel, coffee. I also added a few white discs with pistachio's and some dark discs. I'll get a picture of the display tomorrow.

Salted caramels

I'm making salted caramels today. It smells amazing in here. These are the shells.

It's more of a ganache than a caramel but it's called a caramel because of the ingredients.

The sugar is brought up to just the point of smoking and immediately hit with a mixture of hot cream and Madagascar vanilla bean that I scraped into it. I put the vanilla in at the last moment so that it didn't loose any aromatics. That mixture is poured over white chocolate and stirred after everything gets to a happy temperature. Then when it's cool enough, it's piped into the molds. So now the ganache is in the mold. It takes a while to set because it was at a high temperature and lost it's ability to crystallize with stable crystals. Feel free to e mail me with questions about that.

I forgot to mention the salt. It's a grey salt. I like the roundness of it. It's the balance to the sweet component.

It's time to go see if I can cap it yet. It has to be firm enough so it doesn't get pushed out of the shell and cause a mess. Yes, I have done that.

I made 100. 25 are sold. I'm expecting a few to have shell bubbles that will go into a future scratch and dent category on the website with a discounted price. Sometimes you don't care what it looks like, you just want good chocolate. If you would like to put in an advanced order before the website shopping cart is online send me an email with your request.

UPS just came! I love the sound of that truck!

I just got an order of organic sugar from Florida. Now I have all the components to make an all organic chocolate. All organic chocolate! Very excited!

Molding day

I made a coffee ganache with a white stripe in the shell this morning.

That was a bit tricky so I think I'll leave out the stripe next time.

Next are "Tondo's" the chocolate disc. I'll be roasting and chopping up some cashews and hazelnuts to toss on the back side of them for some added fun and yum.

The latest news is that the grinder has been ordered. I went with the Spectra 40 which will grind 40 lbs of chocolate at a time. My smaller grinder will be used for smaller batches of nut paste and white chocolate.

The shipping boxes were ordered yesterday so I will be able to ship by next week.