BonBonBars have arrived at The Sugar Cube in Alexandria just in time for Valentine’s Day!  Not only do they have my Scotch, Caramel Nut, and Orange Candy Bars available individually, but also several gift collections that include handmade caramels as well as candy bars: Scotch, Nutty, and Farmers Market.

I urge you to click on the link for The Sugar Cube, not only to learn about a candy store that’s run by two sisters with an enthusiasm for candy and quality (and that I wish was about 3, 000 miles closer to me so that I could go myself), but also to read their completely wonderful write up about BonBonBars on their front page… It makes me blush and be so grateful that my candy is appreciated.

And I snapped a picture of the gift collection boxes before I sealed the mailing box…  I have to admit, I’m not usually a ribbon and bow kind of person, but I loved the ribbon that I found and would be rather thrilled to get a gift like them myself….

It’s hard to believe that over two years have passed since I started developing my candy bar recipes in earnest. The Peanut Butter Bar that I’m preparing to release was posted on April 18, 2007, and it will be exactly as I posted. I still love the form and design, and I’ve only tinkered with the peanut butter-milk chocolate ratio a little bit to adjust the texture.  So, why haven’t I released it yet?  It took me a while to source organic peanuts that are free from mold issues (turns out that New Mexican peanuts are the way to go — the mold does not thrive there as it does in the southeast US and as far as I know, salmonella has not been an issue), and now I’m waiting for my chocolate molds to arrive (they’re backordered).  At least, they should already be around by Easter, which I vaguely think of as the most peanut-buttery holiday.

In comparison, the Cherry Bar was fast, with ingredients that are readily available and a form that doesn’t need special equipment.  It has a Vanilla Almond Nougat enrobed in Dark Chocolate and topped with organic Dried Cherries.  I thought of it in late December, and developed the recipe and released the bar in January because I wanted to have it for Valentine’s Day.  It’s a simpler bar than the peanut butter bar for sure, because it has one thick filling rather than two thinner layers — in the tradition of 3 Musketeers or Charleston Chew — and it has dried cherries scattered on top.  It’s also the fruit of an exciting luxury that I didn’t have two years ago — a repertoire of my own recipes.  And even better, recipes whose shelf-lives I’m familiar with.

The Vanilla Almond Nougat is an evolution of the Pecan Nougat in my Orange Bar (which also has an orange caramel layer and candied orange peel with muscovado sugar on top).  When I thought about how I wanted the Vanilla Almond Nougat to taste, I looked at the Pecan Nougat recipe, and thought about what should be different, trying to be sensitive to every aspect of the Cherry Bar and the Orange Bar.

Substituting slow-roasted almonds for slow-roasted pecans was easy, although I added more almonds to the recipe, because it’s important for them to be prominent in every bite — whereas the Orange Bar has the orange caramel and candied orange peel on top to offer flavor if there are no pecans in a bite, and the pecans are not meant to dominate the flavor.  I also am using skin-on almonds because I prefer that flavor, and blanching them on my own would be a painful shore besides.

I kept the Orange Blossom Honey rather than substituting a different flavor of honey because I liked that it’s a delicate honey and the subtle orange would be a nice subtle flavor.  Bill’s Bees has Almond Blossom Honey available, but I didn’t see a reason to double up on the almond factor, especially since almonds are strongly flavored enough on their own.

I decided to add Organic Tahitian Vanilla Beans to the recipe, too, because I’ve discovered that I like Tahitian (fruitier) more than Bourbon (creamier) or Mexican (tangier).  I cook the scraped seeds in the sugar syrup in order to infuse it before whipping it with the egg whites; otherwise, just adding it at the end wouldn’t be as strong and I may as well use vanilla extract, which would permeate throughout the nougat in a similar way.

I also added a bit of salt to the nougat, though I wasn’t sure how to go about it exactly.  Salt is kind of rare in meringue and nougat recipes,  and I wasn’t sure if it would react with the sugar syrup (lead to more inversion or lower the boiling point, like it does water?) or the egg whites.  I don’t put in salt in the Pecan Nougat because the orange caramel already has enough salt for the whole bar.  I do use salt in the sugar syrup for my marshmallows, but I always have and they don’t contain egg whites.  So, I tried adding the salt with the sugar syrup as it boiled and at the end, with the nuts, and found that the salt was best with the nuts — the flavor was better and the nougat wasn’t as soft as when salt was boiled with it.

My Pecan Nougat also contains a little powdered sugar, which gives it a fluffier texture over time because of the starch in it.  I decreased the amount, though, because I figured that it could be a little more toothsome than the Pecan Nougat to make up for the lack of the caramel layer’s strength.

I decided to manually place the Organic Dried Cherries (which, like the honey and eggs, are from the Santa Monica FM) on top to make sure that they’re in just about every bite — otherwise, it would be impossible to evenly disperse them in the nougat.  Mars, apparently, has a special way to make sure that there are a certain number peanuts in each Snickers bar.  I like how simply putting them on top ensures the flavor — sour and sweet and bursting with flavor.  They’re really marvelous cherries.  I have to flatten them so that the bars will fit inside its packaging, but when I buy them, they’re rather spherical like their original shape, which would be obvious except that so many other dried cherries I’ve had have been flat and oblong.

So, there it is.  After making the Pecan Nougat for nearly a year, too, I’m more comfortable making nougat than I was when I wrote the Nougat Science nearly two years ago.  Putting the cherries on top solves the problem of trying to make a cherry nougat with real cherries.  And my nougat is surprisingly forgiving, or at least, as easy as I designed it to be (I tried to cut out as many timing issues as possible as is common with nougat), and I’ve never had a bad batch that had to be thrown out (knock on wood).  The sugar syrup once reached 10F higher than it was supposed to, so I added water to it and brought it to the proper temp.  The sugar once reached 5F higher than it should have and I used it out of curiosity, and it turned out just fine.  I always let it set overnight, and putting a Silpat on top of it protects it from humidity.

The only problem is that the tines on the whisk for my new mixer have proven to be weak, and are breaking at an awful rate.  I wish that I could reinforce the tines or reattach them once they break, but no one seems to have any advice for that… Unless you do!

So…  November and December went by in a flash of caramel and chocolate, with some days that ended at 5am and began again 7am, and some days that didn’t end at all.  I was lucky enough to have someone wonderful assisting me during much of the time, and after a year of having my own candy business, I felt pretty good…  I knew my recipes, I knew my packaging, I knew my perils… I had unlimited time in the kitchen… and my body knew that I was going to get all the work done no matter what.

But chocolate always keeps you humble.  For example, one afternoon during the cold week before Christmas, I lost the ability to temper chocolate.  It was quite sudden. My intern finished dipping a batch of Scotch Candy Bars in the chocolate melter that I use for tempering chocolate.  They set with a perfect dark chocolate shine, and she started on the Pumpkin Pie Candy Bars.  The chocolate set completely differently.  It had a grainy, matte-like finish and streaking soon became apparent.   It seemed like it could be over-crystallized chocolate, which usually happens after prolonged use, except that streaking of that sort usually doesn’t happen and the chocolate wasn’t that thick; usually it’s a cloudy-looking bloom.

After some inspection, conjecture, and tabulations, we stopped the enrobing, and set the machine to reheat to 115. It was odd, but I practically expect chocolate to act oddly sometimes, so I wasn’t really worried. I worked on other things and ran a few errands until that night, when I tried to temper it again…. and all my tests set matte-like with strong white streaks, no matter what I did in terms of temp control and mixing. So, I decided to try again.  I simmered some water in large pots, transferred the chocolate to multiple bowls, quickly heated up all the chocolate to 120F, poured it back into the melter, and tried again with less seed.  Same thing.   I called my intern to ask if, by any chance, she’d noticed anything unusual while she was working with it.  As I’d expected, nothing.

Occasionally, I get into bad habits with my confections that gradually make things a little harder (under-seeding the chocolate for a spell earlier this year), so I began to wonder if I’d worked myself into a bad chocolate tempering corner — maybe an over-seeding habit this time.  So, I tried to temper just a small bowl.  Nope. I melted some fresh chocolate pistoles, and tried that.  It set with sharper streaks and a slightly less cloudy look, but it was still wrong.

At some point during this, I started to think about how it was cold in the kitchen, and in LA.  Well, for LA, at least… it was 60F in the kitchen.  For the past few months, I’d tempered chocolate with an ambient temp of 68-72F.  I hadn’t really kept track of it before then, except when it was too hot during the summer.

Since before I’d started my company, it had always been my fear that it would be too hot to temper chocolate properly — the problem is really that the chocolate will bloom because it takes too long to set.  I hadn’t imagined that it could be too cold to temper it properly.  Could that be right?  It had never happened in the years that I’ve worked with chocolate so far…

It was getting close to the middle of the night and I wanted to research in some books at home to confirm my suspicion and contact some chocolate-knowledgeable friends before I continued, so I went to home to sleep.  The next morning, I spoke to the friendly and talented Chuck Siegel at Charles Chocolates (where I once interned), and he confirmed that you have to take precautions when you’re in a cold kitchen… after joking about my SoCal definition of “cold,” of course.  Basically, if you’re working with a melter, the sides and bottom will be warm, but the center will quickly get cold — and the chocolates are usually dipped more near the center than the sides in order to have enough room.  So, you have to stir often and very, very well to keep the temperature constant and in the working range; depending on the chocolate, you could work with it at 92F, but 91F should be fine.  Letting it fall to 89F is not good; the crystals will grow fast, and want to set and probably bloom.  He recommended putting a pan or something to partially cover the melter to retain the heat, since the cold air takes away the heat quickly. You should also bring the chocolate up to 122F and hold it there for a while before adding seed so that all the bad crystals are definitively melted out.

It all made perfect sense.  And seemed more fussy than I wanted to deal with if I didn’t have to.  The other alternative was to heat the working room… except that my current kitchen is HUGE and I didn’t even know if it had heat (I’d made sure that it had AC).  Chad told me that he had a space heater that I could use, but in the HUGE kitchen, I wasn’t sure that it could retain heat in a space.  Speed racks were the best impromptu walls on hand that I could think of…

Luckily, the Chef at the kitchen suggested the last piece that fell into place: a small conference room off the front of the house.  It became my heated chocolate room.  I got a wonderful shine and snap on my next attempt at tempering chocolate, and production was on again.  I had to consolidate my chocolate work time even more than usual because space heaters use a lot of energy and take time to heat the room sufficiently.   And it can be the flipside of being too hot — heating the room in the cold middle of the night is as arduous on the system as starting up the AC in the hot early afternoon.   But at least I could have the chocolates finish setting and stored in the cold kitchen — that’s not possible in a hot kitchen.

So, anyway… there’s always more to learn about chocolate — especially around busy holiday seasons!  But with some problem-solving and good advice, it all worked out, and in the end, I just lost a day of production that would have been very nice to have (as well as a day at a farmers market).  And now I’m enjoying a lovely long vacation with my family — with a fortifying regimen of catching up, eating, surfing, swimming, reading, planning, walking… and sleeping!

My wordpress draft folder shows that I’ve been meaning to write this post since September 5th… Time goes by so fast — week after week! And whatever I wanted to say in September is completely outdated. It’s now nearing the end of November, and I just looked back to see that BonBonBar’s first order was put in on Dec 9, 2007. BonBonBar has been around for nearly a year! For almost 52 weekends and Mondays, I’ve spent my time making, packaging and shipping out candy.

I really do want to share what’s going on with my business with my readers, but it’s a bit more complicated than baking and eating info, and constantly changing… So, I thought I’d just run through and share a few bits about different subjects at this point… And get used to blogging about thoughts again!

KITCHEN

When I rented my first commercial kitchen last November, I had had such a hard time trying to find one that I just grabbed it out of desperation. Little did I know that I’d now be in my third kitchen (and the first with real A/C), and will switch to my fourth kitchen (also A/C’ed) in December.

The new kitchen is probably the biggest element of change since the company started because I will have unlimited hours and unlimited access. Until now, I’ve had limited kitchen time per week. Because of that, I’ve had to try to be busy, but not too busy; and that was another reason for being cautious about wholesale, which is volume-oriented…which, for me, means more time and less money for the same work and ingredient prices.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the unlimited thing, and try to figure out how I can take advantage of it sooner rather than later. A lot of my worries of the past year had to do with trying to figure out how much revenue I could make out of limited production time… And now that issue is practically gone. But I’m not convinced that a lot more wholesale is the answer now, either; there are still issues with it other than time. I think more direct sales is still the answer, hopefully for large orders like weddings, events, and gifts. At least I will have a faster turnaround time so that orders can be filled faster whenever necessary, which will help customer service. Already, I’m shipping Mon-Wed’s instead of just on Mondays. And it’s making me feel a lot less guilty.

Also, it’s been rare that I’ve been fully stocked for my Farmers Markets since the whirlwind of DailyCandy, and it’ll be nice to know that I can always go and make more when needed.

PRODUCTION

I have an intern! An intern who’s a fantastic worker and a wonderful person. So, not only have I not been alone in the kitchen for a few weeks, but more things are getting done in the same amount of time. It’s almost like magic — that things are done well that I didn’t do! And there’s another perspective in the kitchen. It’s very exciting.

In addition, I’ve gotten faster and more efficient with my work. When I started last year with 4 products, it seemed like such a daunting task to make and keep track of everything. Now I have 13 products! And so things shift — instead of making huge batches of 2 bars, I make smaller batches of 5 bars. I think I prefer that variety, or at least not having to make so many Malt Bars at one time. I like them and they’ve been especially popular lately (often beating out the Caramel Nut Bar for the first time), but they take more time and effort than any other bar. I’ve considered discontinuing them, or just offering them in dark chocolate, but I just can’t go through with it. At least, as I mentioned above, I’ve gotten faster with them. Oh, and I finally got a bigger mixer, so things are faster on the marshmallow front, too.

And while I occasionally have problems with what I make, my reject rate has gone waaaay down. I used to plan on so many rejects per batch, but now I don’t so concretely. In a way, I’ve probably gotten a bit cheaper because of this — I try to avoid waste more than I ever have.

It’s a nice feeling, to know how much I’ve improved since I started this blog in January 2006, when I started culinary school. And at the same time, I promise that chocolate and sugar keep me more than humble — I respect that they are complex and temperamental things that we manage to tame occasionally.

And when things do go wrong, I can take it in stride, and apply creativity and logic to fix problems. I don’t have the fear that I had about production that I had when I started. I know I can make it work somehow.

CUSTOMERS

I had vague ideas of having good customer service when I started, but I had no idea what that really meant beyond a vague idea of helping sales. It’s so much more than that. Customers have been so wonderful!!! I’ve met, emailed, befriended, and/or have been helped by so many customers around the world. I’m so touched — and amazed — by how many people are taken the time to email and call me to let me know how much they enjoy the confections and appreciate what I do. And at Farmers Markets, I look forward to chatting with my regulars perhaps more than anything else. Without that interaction, the business wouldn’t be nearly as fun.

FUTURE PLANS

I still think that a handmade candy store is the best form of the business. But with a bad economy, something of a naturally wandering spirit, and a lingering wish to be free from a city, I can’t quite commit myself to it yet. If money weren’t an issue, then sure, I’d go ahead, but it would be a big task now. I’ve learned a lot in the past year about running a business (and that’s really what this first year was for), and I think I could figure it out… Some days, it seems like a very big thing, and some days, it seems quite small. I think if I had a business partner, it would be a lot smoother; I gravitate towards food and recipes, and when I can, sleep. But when I think about what I’ve been able to accomplish as basically a one-person company — like press mentions by Gourmet and Bon Appetit — I wonder what could happen if the company was bigger and had more resources.

I hope that the changes above make things easier. I don’t want to go into all the time-consuming minutiae that I do for the company every week, but it’s sometimes tempting to imagine not having to do anything for it… and not have to think about sales, production, and the weather all the time… To go to a job at someone else’s company and come home and have true spare time. But then I think how would miss the decisions and connections that I get to make now. And I’m not sure what I would do with that spare time…

It’s kind of interesting — I was contacted by a TV production company to develop a cooking show a couple months ago, and as much as I think that lifestyle would be great and less strenuous, I just couldn’t imagine what I would do in front of the camera — I couldn’t even do a simple demo tape. Objectively, I know I could have done something, but subjectively, it just wasn’t something I could bring myself to do. The only viable title I could think of was “Awkward Silences with Nina” with a commensurate picture of me… :s And besides, I only have about 20 of my own recipes — and mostly esoteric candy ones at that. Anyway, it’d be a slim chance that the show would have happened even if I’d gone for it. Part of me is still getting used to being “on” to the public all time just as a business owner, and I think I still have things to do in this role.

So, I’ll see how the holidays go (hopefully lots of orders! you just never know!)… and will try to write about it more often…

The first official review of the Pumpkin Pie Bar is up over at Sugar Savvy!  Sera, who also maintains The Candy Enthusiast blog (and who I was lucky enough to meet at the Century City Farmers Market a few months ago), has written a completely fantastic review of the Pumpkin Pie, Orange, and Malt Bars.  I have to admit, whenever I read the clever and thorough analysis, I blush and bite my lip, and think “Wow… This is really all about candy made by my company?”  It’s so touching to read about how much they are appreciated!  Thank you, Sera!