In short, feel free to shop at www.bonbonbar.com!

The longer story is that the current website design is temporary until my real site kicks in. But I assure you, the candy bars and marshmallows are quite ready to be made for you — and I hope you like them!

I can also assure you that the official website should come into maturity within a week, and it’ll be worth the wait. I’ve received screenshots of different pages from my wonderful website designer, and I’ll admit that when I have a few spare minutes, I find myself opening the files and just looking at them… I can’t help it. There it is — like a new home that’s almost completed!

Almost two years ago, when I moved to Napa with very little idea of my professional future and an impish idea to start a blog to share what I was learning and to chronicle my culinary development, I never thought that it would lead here. I feel like I’ve grown up online!

It’s all so real now — this somewhat crazy idea that I started playing with almost a year and half ago. I hope to be able to blog at least a little bit more now (or maybe after the holidays!), but at least most of the initial footwork work is done. Starting a business has been a lot about research, making decisions, developing relationships, and making things happen, one way or another. Of course, the next phase of developing the business won’t be any less time consuming, but I’m feeling good about it.

This endeavor is not as easy to write about as making desserts, but it certainly is exciting to do. Every day has been a rollercoaster of small victories and sometimes puzzling setbacks. It involves dealing with people a lot more than making a pie in my kitchen (or even in a restaurant kitchen), and I am naturally reluctant to write about people on my blog without their ability to write in kind and with full consent of what I say — it just doesn’t seem fair (and it’s why I rarely mention people by name), even if I’m praising them. So, that makes writing a little harder, too, and I have to develop a slightly new voice to write the blog with.

Also, I’m making 4 products (ahem, the Caramel Nut Bar, the Malt Bar, Vanilla Marshmallows, and Passion Fruit Marshmallows). Altogether, that’s 5 recipes total, plus tempering milk and dark chocolates. Over and over and over again. I learn something new every time I make them — or find out I didn’t know what I thought knew — and that minutiae is also hard to translate to blog posts. And after working so hard to fix problems and improve techniques for such specialized recipes, it’s also difficult to think about just giving that away straightaway. And I hope to have another innocent farmers market day soon - I don’t remember the last time I had a carefree market day.

So, I have to thank all of you for your support and patience! I’ve been neglectful, but without the blog, none of this would have come about. And I’ve truly appreciated all of your comments and feedback, and I hope that you enjoy eating the bars and marshmallows even more than reading about them!

And just so you know, orders have to be received by Tuesdays at Noon PST to go out the same week. Otherwise, they’re rolled over to the following week, so that the confections don’t sit in a warehouse over the weekend.

So, this post feels like a bit of a milestone — like my State of Sweet Napa post last year. Let’s see where all this goes!!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:09 am and is filed under BonBonBar LLC, Candy Bars, Highly Recommended, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.