Out of chocolate!

Yes, I actually ran out of chocolate today!  I was due to get a delivery yesterday night, but the narcs busted my runner and…

…no, seriously.  My partner-in-crime, who will be helping me on Friday and Saturday, got tied up at work and couldn’t get over to the storage area to get the chocolate for me.  So I ran out of dark chocolate around noon today, and because I didn’t have enough white or milk chocolate to really work with (only 10 lbs of white and 12 lbs of milk, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t in the quantities I’m working with), I wound up out of commission for part of the afternoon.  Which was not a bad thing – I caught up on sleep, packed the fudge away into boxes, and cleaned up the kitchen a bit, so it wasn’t really wasted time.  But I didn’t get nearly as much accomplished as I had planned to.

But today I finished dipping the lavender caramels, made and dipped a batch of coconut almond fudge, cut and stored away the mocha cinnamon and lavender-lemon-white chocolate fudge, and made a batch of coconut tequila lime fudge.  Could have done more, but didn’t waste lots of time either.

Tomorrow morning I am making toffee and then finishing the second batch of brandied cherry cordials.  After that I am not sure what I will do – probably scrub down the tempering machine in preparation for making white chocolate shells for the molded bonbons.  I will have to think some more about the logical order in which to do things.  We leave for Thanksgiving dinner at 4pm, so I can get in around 8 hours of working time, which is enough to do a reasonable amount of work.

But Friday and Saturday I’ll have good, solid working days in the chocolate kitchen, with help from Michael, the aspiring chocolatier who I’m working with this year.  I am still pretty confident we can crank out the requisite number of chocolates, between the two of us, our two tempering machines, and the marble slab that’s in the kitchen.

In Weavolution news (no! I have not forgotten Weavolution, even in the throes of chocolate), I have found two interns who will be helping us out with development.  One’s a fellow Caltech alumna and the other is a (Caltech) sophomore with a string of academic achievements about a mile long.  I think that will help us a LOT with our development schedule.

Off to bed, visions of sugar-plums (or chocolate bonbons?) dancing in my head…