Do chocolatiers become “chocolated out”?

This is one of the questions we get asked quite often: do you ever get tired of chocolate?

Well, not really. But if on a Sunday afternoon you feel like breaking away and enjoying a great meal and a fine glass of wine, you cannot go too far wrong if you chose the place we found by accident today: Maurizios in Rickmansworth. We selected the special of the day, a Linguine Seafood. Seafood pasta can sometimes be quite light on the seafood, but not this one – it was positively bursting with it! And for people who can be quite fussy about seafood (don’t forget that we get our annual seafood “fix” in Cape Town!), this was delicious. It actually tasted like the ingredients were fresh; even the prawns were crispy and did not have that “life after deep freeze” texture to it.

We will be back. So should you, if you need a break from chocolate!

Open for Macaroons – in time for Valentine’s Day!

We have finally re-opened our macaroon webshop, after having had to close it down before Christmas, due to the very high demand for chocolates.

Here at Ilze’s Chocolate, we hate having to disappoint our customers. But because ours is an artisan business, sometimes you have to accept that in order to deliver quality products, you have to turn down volumes. But now we are back online with our macaroons and we are in time for Valentine’s Day, when we believe macaroons offer an interesting alternative Valentines gift.

My dear other half and me had some serious “differences of opinion” in our earlier years together, with regards to Valentines Day (and many other things). He felt it was just a money making ploy day and that “we should love each other 365 days of the year!” As we got older (and as he learned to pick his fights more carefully), I think we became less opinionated and learned to just accept things (and enjoy things) as they are. So now we also like to make some effort on this day to acknowledge one another (with a card, chocolate, macaroons, flowers – you don’t need to believe me!) without thinking that it is maybe a bit sentimental.

Macaroons are often described as the creme de la creme of pastries. Certainly it is a very sought after delicacy – and very popular among ladies. And it has a few male followers as well; we could see from clients that purchased macaroons last year that there were men among them, but maybe they were buying gifts for female partners!

So why not spoil that special person in your life this Valentine’s Day with a box of macaroons or a box of macaroons and a box of chocolates (even better). It will not only brighten up her (or his) day, but will make a lasting impression. (Females have memories like elephants – we never forget!)

Open for Business

Finally, after a long after-Christmas break, Ilze’s Chocolat is open for business again! Christmas 2011 was a very busy season for us and we had many more orders than anticipated. Towards the last week before Christmas, we were working around the clock to get all the orders out in time.

But we paid a price for working so hard, when Ilze was involved in a car accident on the way back from a market (miraculously, nobody was hurt). This was a “wake up call” for us and we needed three weeks to figure out how to grow the business in a more sensible way, without literally killing ourselves. It is difficult though when you were brought up with work ethics of serving people to the point where you as a person dissappear from the picture. And what can you do if you love so much what you are doing and you so want to see people happy with what they have purchased? Many concerned friends and family have pleaded – please get help or scale down, because we care very much for you! I am hugely touched, but still hope for solutions.

So we start the year with a new production approach and a slightly scaled down farmers market schedule – we will do Reading market once per month. Hopefully this gives us more time to focus on the chocolate making. And in the meantime, we still need someone with the right work ethic and passion to join us…

Christmas Sales

We always knew that Christmas was the time for peak chocolate shopping. In fact, this has been our experience year after year, even last year when our final Christmas markets had to be closed early due to THAT snowstorm. But nothing prepared us for the demand for our chocolates this year…

Of course we are very pleased that there is such a demand for our chocolates. And of course it remains thrilling to be able to produce a product that give people so much pleasure and enjoyment during this time of celebration. If only we could somehow find a few more hours of sleep somewhere. But no, this is chocolate season and ours is a fresh hand-made product. So more demand means harder work and longer hours.

Unfortunately it also means that there are things we cannot do: we had to close our macaroon factory the last few weeks, in order to be able to focus on chocolate. We were hoping that we might be able to start producing macaroons again at about this time, but sadly this is not going to be possible before Christmas.

And for the rest of what we do, things may take longer: Normally, we prefer to send internet orders out the day after we received them. At the moment, we have a backlog and we will dispatch orders received from 13th until 16th December, on the 19th.

But we hope that you will find the wait worthwhile and that Ilze’s chocolates will contribute to your festive enjoyment!

Macaroons and the Weather

It has been some time since we made our last blog entry. This is not due to a lack of motivation, but I guess you can say that we have been in anguish here at Ilze’s Chocolat – and while psychologists would encourage you to talk about your anxiety, we closed the hatch!

It all started when someone made a substantial order for macaroons, to be delivered by a certain date, and we entered into a period when we were completely unable to produce quality macaroons. Every batch would come out of the oven looking perfect – and then start discolouring! We tried to change everything, but nothing worked. We just could not produce the quality that we were used to. In frustration and embarassment, we had to refund all customers with active orders and remove all macaroons from the website.

We went through a similar experience in the summer, where for a full day we were unable to produce quality macaroons and then by evening it all changed and they were perfect. So we thought it was the outside temperature, even though we had air conditioning. This time, it was still warm for October, but certainly not as hot as in August. So what was wrong?

We suspected humidity from the start, but we discounted its effect initially, because of the air conditioning unit we use in the factory. The air conditioning unit was supposed to remove humidity from the air in the factory – the unit even had a “dehumidify” setting. Nevertheless, we knew that the humidity outside was very high – 80% or thereabouts. But we believed that the air conditioning would keep the inside of the factory at a low enough humidity.

So we went through a few weeks of experimentation, while we were getting more and more frustrated. Finally, we did the blindingly obvious thing and installed weather stations inside the three rooms of our factory. And suddenly it all became clear: the air conditioning was not effective enough in removing humidity from the air and we were still trying to make macaroons in humidity conditions above 50%.

This perhaps explains why successful macaroon making is not so common in high humidity England, while in places such as Bordeaux, France, where humidity is lower, it seems that it comes easier!

Whatever the case, we have now invested in a dehumidifier and with humidity levels in the thirties, we have the consistent success we were used to before.

France vs Wales

Tomorrow morning, when our farmers market stall opens at 9 in Reading, the Welsh rugby team will be running onto the field in New Zealand against the French side. For anyone with even the slightest interest in rugby, this is an unusual occasion. Not England, but Wales, will be taking on our Northern Hemisphere neighbours in the semi-final stage of the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

The outcome of this game could be quite critical for Ilze’s Chocolat: after England’s last win of the tournament, our chocolates sales on the Windsor market surged for hours. We are hoping that a good outcome for Wales would have a similar, if not even more positive, effect on the business. A week ago, those who have been following and secretly hoping for some sort of breakthrough – if not for England, then at least for South Africa – had our hopes brutally crushed. And by France…

The French make wonderful things in the kitchen – like macaroons! Or vehicles that nobody outside of France would want to be seen in. But they are not supposed to be good at things that require sustained physical effort, surely?

So let us hope that tomorrow, the French rugby team would be their unpredictable selves: a brilliant performance once everyone had given up on them (a win against England after a shabby game against Tonga) – but then a complete let-down as soon as the supporters had regrouped themselves…

All in the interest of good chocolate sales.

The New Factory

It is probably fair to say that most people underestimate the effort and precision required to make real chocolate without using chemical additives. The chocolate has to be melted to about 45 degrees C and then cooled down while the melted chocolate is constantly subjected to movement, until it reaches a specific temperature in the low 30s C, depending on the kind of chocolate. At that temperature, the chocolate is tempered and will stay in temper as long as the specifc temperature and movement is maintained. And while the chocolate is tempered, it can be moulded or poured to produce the shiny look and the distinctive snap when you break it. In actual fact, it is much more complicated than this, because after a while the chocolate can go out of temper anyway, even if the temperature and movement is maintained. And factors such as the room temperature and humidity also contributes to the success or lack thereof in chocolate making.

So if you were to make you own chocolate, you can melt it in a bowl and then use a granite slab to cool it down while moving it around constantly with two scrapers. This technique is often used by chocolatiers to show off, but in practice very few chocolatiers make chocolate like that on an industrial scale today – you would need very strong arms to maintain that technique. We do have a granite slab at Ilze’s Chocolat, but it tends to be used for very small batches. For the larger batches, we have been using a batch tempering machine manufactured in Holland by Henk Koenen, whose first machine is today on display in the chocolate machine in Brugge. In the picture above, it is the machine in the background.

However, this machine has always had its weaknesses, the most important of which is that chocolate goes out of temper after about an hour and a half. And when you have a large batch of chocolates to prepare, you need much more than an hour and a half’s worth of supply, so it becomes very time consuming to have to stop the process, re-heat everything up to 45 degrees C and again restart the cooling. On top of that, because we only had the one machine, you had to have it dedicated to one kind of chocolate, or had to empty the machine, clean it and refill, everytime you wanted to switch from dark to milk chocolate, for example – all of which would take an hour or more to do.

So this summer, we took the plunge to invest in a new continuous tempering machine, one in which the chocolate does not go out of temper, unless you want it to do so. But of course, this is a much more advanced and much more expensive machine, which we bought in Antwerp, Belgium (in the foreground in the picture above). We also needed a bigger work-in-progress fridge and a warm cupboard and because we needed all this equipment, we needed a new modular building.

The modular building was professionally prepared for us by Gembuild, who constructs modular buildings for a range of different purposes.

This means that at Ilze’s Chocolat we now have a room dedicated to macaroons and a new room dedicated to chocolate-making.  The picture below shows the new chocolate factory, complete with all the new equipment installed.

We took our “new look” to the market

As many of you have noticed, we closed our webshop in August. This year we did not go on a summer break, but instead, we had to implement many changes to Ilze’s Chocolat: We moved into our new factory two weeks ago (we will write about that later) and we also tried to implement some other changes. We started to rebrand the business many months ago and during the warmer months, we wanted to give this a big push. The process is not yet completed, because as you may guess, any branding, even for a small enterprise like ours, is quite a costly undertaking. So last week-end we launched our new look on the Beaconsfield farmer’s market.  At some stage before the week-end approached, we honestly thought that things were not going to come together. The last part of the puzzle was the three banners and our friends Lee and Ariana from DesignbyGoodPeople, who were responsible for the lovely new look of our company, made sure that the banners were hemmed and drove all the way from the other side of London to deliver the banners for our stall personally!

We went to the market the next day almost like a bride and groom that are getting their venue ready before the guests arrive.  (To many of you the comparison might seem silly, but we do have a passion for our business!) We didn’t sleep much because we had to pack, label the products, make some more chocolates and in the small hours of the morning we even had to cut our tablecloths for the tables on the market! With our freshly made chocolates packed in their lovely new “dresses”, the banners, the plates, price tags, our shiny new white gazebo, the tablecloths and the camera, we left for the market at 6am on Saturday morning. We dressed up our little “shop” and then our clients started to arrive.

The reactions overall were quite positive, although some people almost didn’t notice! Now we take that as a compliment, because for farmer’s market clients (who are in general lovers of good food) it is more important what the chocolates taste like and the “look” is secondary. We do know however that the changes were necessary, because a client remarked yesterday that he can’t even remember what the previous logo looked like! We live in a busy world full of choice and we know that it is the “inside” that matters, but like with a courtship between two people, the man needs to notice the attractive girl  and be attracted to her. The “inner beauty” gets recognised later…

Rain & the Farmers Market

Today I realised how I miss my “lay-ins” on a weekend, when I had to get up at 6am to go to the farmers market. When I looked out, it was a grey, wintry morning!

The weather on our dear Island never ceases to amaze me because of its volatility. Yesterday was a bright sunny day and I thought wow, people are going to visit the market and buy the lovely plump red chocolate dipped strawberries by the dozen – to “celebrate summer” with “alfresco meals” on the patio. Oh how wrong I was! The brave souls that did venture out to the market (I salute them!) ignored the lovely plump dipped strawberries and opted for the wintry comfort food – which is the milk chocolate bars and the caramels… stuff that really sell well in winter. The British weather is not only a favourite topic of discussion to break an awkward silence, but it creates havoc for our “ops plans” (Jan’s term for our weekly business planning session). What I really mean is – you can never figure out trends: Which products will sell well in summer and which will sell well in winter, etc, because of the unpredictability of the weather. You just have to guess and hope all goes well.

To High Street or not to High Street

It is interesting how we sometimes still struggle to understand or identify with a retail business that does not have a physical shop location, even at a time when most of us have accepted the way in which the world of books, videos and music are now commonly traded outside of such shops. Many people are still somewhat surprised when we at Ilze’s Chocolat say that we trade only online and on farmers markets.

In fact, one can understand the surprise. There is something old worldly about farmers markets; almost the complete opposite of an online store. Yet, using online and farmers markets as our sales channels make absolute sense to us:

Firstly, because we do not want to be in a position where a significant percentage of the value of every product we sell goes towards costs levied by a landlord. Chocolates and macaroons are traditionally seen as impulse purchases. That implies that they need to be offered to potential clients in places where there will be lots of traffic (footfall). Lots of traffic normally translate into expensive real estate; which in turn drives up the price of the product being sold, in a vicious circle where the only winner is the owner of the real estate!