Polidori Chocolates

My perfectionist tendencies, mini-brains on the way, and a contest!

 The first shipment of Gothic Weekend truffles and other sales from that announcement should be hitting the post office tomorrow. This will be for orders received within the first day or so of the sale, with more shipping on Monday/Tuesday. So there's that.

Everything's still taking too long to ship, and in the whirlwind of getting the last batch out the door, there were a few errors made. I was fretting about this yesterday, and a good friend told me that it's inevitable that mistakes will occur in this beta-testing phase (after all, that's the reason for doing it) and that I've had an over 90 percent success rate, etc. But every mistake, every shipment that goes astray -- whether through my fault or the postal service -- is like a big stab in my frontal lobe.

Yes, I'm an imperfect perfectionist control freak. I admit this.

In other news:

• I've had to make an adjustment on the Shelley truffle. It was planned as a rose geranium/almond flavor, but there have been unexpected complications with supplies. To fill the orders in a semi-timely fashion, Shelley will now be a less exotic lemon-almond truffle, and rose will be shelved for a future concoction. A slip explaining this will be included with each box. This does not make me happy, but it's unavoidable.

• Also, I'm going to have to change the look of the Wrath truffles. I love the way they look with the paprika sprinkled on top ... when it works. But it doesn't always. As best I can tell, sometimes the paprika sucks cocoa butter from the chocolate up to the surface, creating bloom. I haven't been able to figure out what the factor is that causes this to happen (heat? Cold? Humidity?) but it's a gamble I can't afford to take. So future Wrath truffles will have a little red lightning bolt on top, not paprika.

• The molds for mini-brains arrived! So at some point next week I'll be experimenting with molded chocolates, so that I can offer bags of bite-sized chocolate brains filled with either caramel or mint fondant. These were one of the first non-truffle ideas I had when fantasizing about this business a year ago, and now that I have the molds in hand, I'm itching to get started. Mmmmmm, brains.

• As part of the mini-brain development, I have to finesse making caramel. I've looked at commercial caramel that's available, but it's all either too chewy, too runny, or too full of chemical additives for my liking. (See: "Perfectionist control freak" above.)

• I also purchased some 6mm pink sugar pearls, because they're so cool. They'll be the decoration atop ... something. Perhaps the rose truffle, once I get this rose geranium oil problem straightened out.

• Within a 24-hour period, I ran across a website for a confectioner who makes nothing but marshmallows in a variety of flavors, and bags of gourmet marshmallows at Trader Joe's. I seem to be part of a marshmallow renaissance, which is ... interesting. Funny how these things come in waves.

• And finally, a selection of Polidori Chocolates will be the prize for the monthly contest over at Antisocial Networking! If you haven't checked out the latest venture by Internet legend The Slackmistress, it's a delightfully cheeky site which offers relationship advice for geeks, as well as daily updates on all things nerdy. The contest theme is "My Nerd Crush" -- share your story by June 20, and you might win a box of Seven Deadly Sins truffles!

And the cycle of life -- well, chocolate -- continues.

The orders for Sale #3 finally left the building last night, after a number of delays. There were printer-ink issues and Internet outages that slowed the shipping. There were shipments from suppliers that didn't arrive, and general dumbassery on my part. There was the pulling out of hair and e-mailed apologies.

And yet, it's done. With the exception of one large order of marshmallows that has to go to Everett, Wa., and is sitting here waiting to be ferried to the post office. And then on to getting the Gothic Weekend orders filled next week, so that they're timely, getting me back on a do-able work schedule.

The learning continues. The stress comes from the fact that unexpected problems are, not to put too fine a point on it, unexpected. Which means that when X happens, it comes as a big surprise, and I end up feeling stupid because I didn't plan for X in the first place. And there have been far more Xs than I thought there would be.

In other developments:

• I have graduated from plastic dipping tools (better than fingers) to brand-new stainless steel dipping tools (better than anything, save an enrobing machine). Will the chocolates be better because of it? How could they not be? Having good tools rocks.

• I've started picking up odd food items when I'm out shopping or buying stuff online, and then brainstorming what I can do with them. On the shelf at the moment: Chile-powder coated mango slices, partially dehydrated bananas, and coconut milk powder. No, I will not be using them all together. I don't think.

• Experimentally, I've been making "bark" by adding random ingredients to leftover tempered chocolate, letting it harden, then breaking it up. The best so far has been pistachios, almonds and currents added to dark chocolate, although the milk chocolate version is mighty tasty, too.

• And finally, if you've ever wondered what a double batch of marshmallow looks like as it's being whipped in a 5-quart mixing bowl, here's an action shot:

In which I battle the Post Office and tape guns, yet still find joy.

 The second sale has shipped -- way behind schedule, but with cold packs included (with everything in Ziploc bags to battle condensation) for the hotter southern states. I still have a small stack of local deliveries to do, and need to send e-mail confirmations to that effect.

I was speaking to a friend on the phone yesterday, and I told her that I now understand why it takes six weeks to get an order from BPAL -- and they have a staff. I'm just one person, doing the candy making, the inventory and ordering, the shipping and receiving, the graphic design ... it's daunting. I'm enjoying the hell out of it, don't get me wrong. But it's time consuming and detail-intensive, and my inner perfectionist shrieks with rage every time something doesn't go just right, even though these are, in effect, dress rehearsals for the actual website. This is just one adorable way in which I'm insane, according to my infinitely patient husband.

And so, some things have been discovered and considered in recent days:

Dealing with the U.S. Postal Service is an exercise in frustration. Yeah, yeah, like I'm the first person to find this out. I opened a case of large flat-rate Priority Mail boxes and found that some of them were "APO/FPO Address Only" boxes. Not all of them, just some of them. And they were mixed in randomly, which begs the question of how they got in there in the first place (I suspect a warehouse employee who was told to pack X number of cases and just didn't give a damn.)  Also, after already charging my customers about $1.50 less for shipping than I was paying -- figuring I'd absorb the cost to be user friendly -- the USPS raised the Priority Rate price on the standard boxes from $8.95 to $9.80. Nice. Oh, and nowhere in either the PayPal shipping function or on the Stamps.com site is there an option for printing a label for the large shipping box -- in fact, PayPal says that the one rate will ship anything.

There is no such thing as a usable tape gun.  When I was helping my friend Mia pack up a house a few months ago, we battled with the expensive metal tape gun that she had bought, finding that the cheap Scotch plastic things from the drugstore actually worked better. I currently have three different plastic tape thingies, and the most functional of them will do about 8 boxes in a row before the tape slips out of the guide and glues to itself so thoroughly that it takes ten minutes to peel it back off. And the best of the lot is still the cheap red Scotch tape from the drugstore, except that it comes with about a foot-and-a-half of tape on it, and it's not refillable. Forget artisanal chocolates -- if I could invent a freaking tape dispenser that works, I'd be a gazillionaire.

Some things never change.  It's been a long time since I was a pastry chef, but I still hate some basic tasks associated with the job. De-skinning hazelnuts is one of them. After toasting the raw nuts in the oven, you drop them into a clean towel and, in theory, rub them so that all of the skins come off. But they never all come off, so you have to pick through them and scrape off the stubborn bits, and no matter how careful you are there are still millions of little bits of hazelnut skin that gets on the table, on your clothes, in your hair ... it's a testament to how much I love hazelnuts that I'm willing to do this. But I swear like a sailor every time.

I still find joy in making something.  I am, in many ways, what showman Jim Rose refers to as a "jaded fuck." But every day I discover that I still get a kick out of creating things, and I feel a great swell of pleasure with each completed box of chocolates. I love the way the truffles look, all lined up in there. I love the way the ribbon wraps around the box, and the font that I used for the logo. I love the heft of the finished package, and the whole process of packing and shipping something that I made myself. It's sort of sappy, I guess ... but it brings me joy. Okay, I get mad at the tape gun. A lot. But other than that? Bliss.

Phase One completed.

Most of the Polidori Chocolate orders have shipped, with the rest soon to follow. A day later than I anticipated and within an acceptable timeframe but ... not perfect. And I'm a perfectionist. So, yeah, I'm a little jittery.

You know those stories you always hear about new business start-ups?  Like The day we opened the store, there was a power outage so we had no lights, or The seafood purveyor couldn't get us enough shrimp for our restaurant's opening night, or Our first shipment of computers ended up on the wrong truck and went to Boise?

I now know how those people feel. And, like those people, I'm sure I'll find it all hilarious some day in the future. Right now I'm just tired.


Things that went sideways:

• I had no idea that the post office wouldn't just, you know, stock Priority Shipping boxes to supply to businesses. Even the big central post office, where I had been told on the phone that I could "just come down and pick them up," didn't have more than 10 on hand when I got there. And -- I am not making this up --  the first employee I spoke to when I got there claimed that there was no such thing as an 8 x 11 flat-rate box, despite a display on the wall and Priority Mail brochures on the counter. (Oh yes, there will be a strongly worded letter to the postal authorities.) Nothing says fun like visiting four different post offices to scrounge boxes.
  

• I discovered the hard way that I can't use bits of candied orange peel to decorate the dipped Grand Marnier truffles. The sugar and/or moisture in the peel reacted poorly with the chocolate coating and ... yeah. They looked horrid. They tasted fabulous, mind you, but not a single one of the 50+ truffles could be shipped and the entire batch had to be remade. That was an expensive, and time-consuming, mistake.

• Also, an experimental "big batch" of marshmallows didn't set up properly and had to be discarded. And remade, in smaller batches. Again, money and time lost, which ratcheted up the stress a bit.

• When time got tight, we thought we might have to delay shipping one more day ... but we'd already printed (and paid for) the shipping labels, and the post office will only accept Priority Mail shipments on the date on the label. So, yeah. That was a jolt to the system.

• I couldn't remember precisely where the new Trader Joe's location was, so I ended up driving   around and around the same neighborhood for, like, 45 minutes while I grumbled that "it's here SOMEWHERE" until I'm sure she just wanted to haul off and punch me.

• Trays of undipped truffles + bowls of melted chocolate + trays of finished truffles + trays of marshmallow + candy boxes + shipping boxes = A whole lot of stuff crammed into any available space. If I lived in a tiny apartment, I could never have done this. As it was, it was far more chaos than I'm comfortable with. Yikes!
  

Things that went right:

• The U.S. Postal Service is happy to provide large amounts of flat-rate Priority Mail boxes at no charge, delivered to your home or business, and you can order them online. Sure, they take a week to 10 days to arrive, but I won't be upsetting their careful allocation of ten boxes per post office at any given time.

• The finished truffles and marshmallows look and taste terrific. The packaging is nice. I'm okay with the finished product, although I still want to tweak a few things.

• The Portland Airport post office is open until 10 p.m., and it's just 15 minutes from my house. So the boxes got to the post office ... five minutes before they closed, like something out of a bad sitcom. But they did get there.
  

• My husband and my friends are awesome, and indulge my psychosis with patience and humor. If you ever have to put together a last-minute assembly line to pack up chocolates, I know just the folks.

• I did not collapse into a heap of what-the-hell-am-I-doing sobs at any point in the process, no matter how hairy it got. I wanted to, once or twice. But I did not.

Some e-mails will go out later to a few people with an adjusted delivery date, but other than that today is a Day Off. Okay, I also ought to write a review of Iron Man, which I saw Tuesday night (in one word: awesome). And I need to wash a whole lot of dishes. And my living room looks like a chocolate-factory exploded in it. And ... oh, hell. I don't get a day off, I guess.