Wow! That was fast. Thirty boxes of chocolates were claimed in just 8 hours (a new record!). If you include matching funds, we raised over $6300 for the American Textile History Museum – thank you for your generosity!
Chocolates for Charity!
UPDATE: CHOCOLATES ARE SOLD OUT!!
Thirty boxes were claimed in just eight hours – a new record. Including matching funds, the campaign raised $6300 for the American Textile History Museum. Thank you for supporting the ATHM!
Doing my annual Chocolates for Charity campaign a bit early this year, as the American Textile History Museum (this year’s beneficiary) is having a matching campaign drive that ends June 30.
So….if you would like a box of this year’s chocolates (to be delivered in late November/early December, usually the week after Thanksgiving), please donate $100 or more to the American Textile History Museum here: http://www.athm.org/join-
This year’s limit is 30 boxes, and I usually sell out within 24-48 hours, so don’t wait!
(The flavor lineup changes from year to year, but the flavor list/photos from last year can be found here:
tienchiu.com/2014/11/presenting-the-2014-fall-collection/. Photos and a bit more exposition on my Chocolates Page.)
When donating, please put “Chocolates for Charity” in the notes/comment box so we can keep track of how much money was raised. Send me (tien @ tienchiu.com – remove the spaces before sending) a copy of the donation receipt along with the address where you’d like your chocolates shipped, and I’ll add you to the list.
I’ll take down this blog post when all the chocolates are claimed.
Thank you all for supporting the American Textile History Museum!
A plethora of pleasant packages
Four delightful packages arrived on my doorstep this evening! I got a pair of sandals I’d ordered, six kilos of fine cotton/polyester yarn, and a package from Chocolate World (in Belgium) containing a pair of books both mouth-watering and revelatory:
The first book, which is a large coffee-table book, contains nothing but luscious food porn. My attempts at taking photos with the iPhone mostly failed, but this outstandingly poor photo will give you some ideas of the sensuous delights inside:
Everything in the photos is, of course, made of chocolate. Stephane Leroux is considered one of the grand masters of chocolate, and particularly of chocolate sculpture.
While Book 1 is luscious, it’s the much smaller Book 2 that I immediately snatched from the boxed set, because Book 2 explains how to make all those luscious chocolate sculptures/decorations! The only thing that could possibly be better than gorgeous food porn is the ability to make (and eat!) your own food porn. And chocolate! How much better can you get than that?
Here’s a shot of the interior of Book 2:
Yep, step by step instructions on how to make your very own amazing chocolate satellites, er, I mean decorations. (Did I mention that there’s another satellite launch coming up this year?)
Anyway, I probably won’t have time to read through the books immediately, but I’m putting them on the top of the pile for post-surgery reading. I can’t wait to pore over them!
I saved the best for last, though. The final package contained not one, but two new Bluster Bay end-feed shuttles! I had sent Terry a package of exotic woods a few months back, and he was gracious enough to make me one shuttle each of the granadillo and zircote woods. The resulting shuttles are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Here are some photos that unfortunately really don’t do them justice:
Both woods have beautiful figuring, though you can’t make out most of it in the photos. I am madly in love with both shuttles and can’t wait to use them!
Sadly, the loom is acting up again, so no weaving until it’s repaired. Mike and I are going to make one more repair attempt this weekend, and if that doesn’t work, I’m going to have AVL send a tech to look at the loom. I am fortunate enough to live within reasonable driving distance (about 200 miles, or about three hours’ drive) of AVL, so while it will be expensive to have someone come down, it won’t entirely break the bank. I’m currently checking with AVL to see when they might be able to send someone.
Also in weaving news, I will be delivering two programs at the Seattle Weavers Guild next Thursday. The first one is about evolving designs, the creative process, and Autumn Splendor; the second one is titled “Wedding Dress Adventures,” and is (as you can probably guess) about the saga of the wedding dress. So if you are in the Seattle area, don’t miss Thursday’s guild meeting! I look forward to meeting you there.
Finally, Tigress has started taking an interest in fashion. She started by claiming my clean laundry as her personal domain (actually folding such laundry is verboten, of course):
And now she is taking to lurking in Mike’s clean laundry basket, perhaps to guard against Fritz the Sock Thief, who is fond of digging in the same laundry basket to find socks to steal:
With such fashion-conscious cats stealing my clothes, I may have to take up weaving again in order to have enough clothes to wear! But perhaps I can convince them that their beautiful fur coats are quite sufficient, and they don’t really need human clothing.
Presenting the 2014 fall collection
…with thanks to my friend Lieven for the photography:
A hundred and sixteen pounds of chocolates
Apologies for the radio silence! It has been a busy time in the chocolate factory. I’ve been chocolatiering twelve to fourteen hours a day for the last four days, so had no time to blog. But all came out wonderfully!
Schedule-wise, we wound up pretty far behind on Wednesday and Thursday, due to a miscalculation on my part. But six friends showed up on Friday and pitched in to help! which got things back on track, so we finished up handily on Saturday around five. Special thanks to Susan and Harold, who helped out all four days (and without whom I could not have finished in time!).
As usual, I was too busy making chocolates to take a lot of photos, but here are a few:
Here is my friend Harold dipping chocolates; in the foreground is an empty frame, soon to be filled with a slab of chocolate centers that my friend Susan was mixing up.
And here are two slabs of centers, ready to be cut on the confectionery guitar:
We generated a lot of dishes, of course. Here’s a fairly typical view of the sink at any given point during the chocolatiering:
Once we were done making all the chocolates, of course, we still had a lot of melted chocolate left in the tempering machines. I call these leftovers “chocolate slag” – it loses its temper and becomes streaky while cooling, but is still delicious for all sorts of cooking applications (chocolate chip cookies, etc.). I pour the slag out into a giant sheet tray so it doesn’t harden in the machine – that would be a huge mess!
We dipped the last chocolate around 5:30 on Saturday. Sunday morning I got up early and put all the chocolates into containers, sorting out a few “beauty queens” for the photographic inserts and also pulling out all the ugly “seconds”. I wound up with 100.5 lbs of first-quality chocolate and 15.5 pounds of “seconds” – a total of 116 pounds! A bumper crop for the year.
Here’s what a hundred and sixteen pounds of chocolates looks like:
The picture is a bit disingenuous, though – the containers are actually stacked two deep, and there are several layers of chocolates in each box. Sadly, I’ve never come up with a way to communicate the sheer mass of the chocolates produced – I don’t have enough room in the house to show them all at once! But if you consider that each chocolate weighs almost exactly 1/2 ounce, 116 lbs comes out to about 3700 candies. Probably closer to 4,000 as some of the flavors are much smaller than that – but far too many to count, either way!
In the afternoon, some friends arrived for the chocolate-packing party. Here they are, confronting a giant collection of chocolates:
I had packed a sample box to make sure everything would fit. Here’s the entire contents of this year’s box:
After putting all the chocolates into candy cups, the packers split the containers of chocolates onto two tables – one for the bottom layer and one for the top layer. Here they are, laying out the containers and consulting the reference box to figure out what should be packed where:
Here is a finished box:
Finally, after the boxes were packed, it was time to pillage. I instructed the packing-party attendees to cart off as many of the leftover chocolates as they wanted, and they gleefully did so:
But even after the locusts swarmed, there was plenty of chocolate left. My coworkers will be happy tomorrow!