Live footage

One of the challenges of having an online store rather than a physical one, is that you cannot be there to welcome visitors, answer their questions or just tell them what you are about. Yes, you can write things on the website pages, but somehow it is hard to make those words come alive.

So we have been thinking for a long time about shooting some videos which could be made available through the website and which could take the viewer into Ilze’s Chocolat, to see how the chocolates and macaroons are made. This thinking turned into reality recently, when Liz Smith and her team arrived early on a Friday morning with lots of expensive equipment, lots of wires and lots of connections, in and around the factory.

We wondered beforehand whether we should replace our normal soft lighting in the chocolate factory with strong illumination, but decided that we will rather use natural light from the outside – that is always guaranteed to give the best quality of shots. And so everything was carefully planned for the first videos to be taken nice and early that Friday.

Here is an interesting question to consider: to what extend can one really plan for all the eventualities that might occur in any venture? I don’t know the answer, but what I do know is that most of us think in terms of eventualities that can be anticipated and those that cannot. So for example, a good eventuality to think about if you were planning to shoot film on location, is whether power supply would be sufficient. And this was clearly considered and planned for. TICK! But if there were a power failure on the day? Well, lengthy power outages are mercifully very rare in Northwood these days, so it was a risk with a low probability and therefore could be ignored.

And then there are events that we know will happen and therefore we can plan for them: if there is a major event planned for Wembley, then one will avoid the roads leading to the venue in the hours before the start.

Nicolaus Copernicus is today credited as the person who first understood that the sun was in the center of our solar system and that the earth revolved around it. His observation arguably set in motion a major branch of science where thousands of people over hundreds of years set out to understand that a lot of what happens around our planet is actually predictable. Including solar eclipses!

But of course, despite the dedicated efforts of Copernicus and all the clever men and women all over the world who stood on his shoulders, none of us realized that a rare but very predictable solar eclipse was going to take place on the very morning when we were planning to make the Ilze’s Chocolat videos, using as much as possible – natural light!

But in the end, as has happened so often in the history of the world, the human spirit conquered! And with lots of activity, more equipment and more connections, the videos were made and the shots produced. And from what we have seen so far, we are very excited!

The food journey continues…

Travelling can be very costly and time consuming, but this summer I had the privilege to travel to two very different destinations.

In early August, I visited my daughter in Sydney, Australia. She went there on a working visa stay in February, but would love to remain for longer. And now that I have also seen the city with its numerous fresh produce markets, cafe’s, tea shops, restaurants and yes, chocolate and macaroon shops, my judgement is also that it must be one of the most exciting food destinations in the world.

Australia is completely self-reliant and do not import any fresh products. And I suppose it is because the food does not have to travel far that it is so much more tasty! I visited a fresh produce market with my daughter – a market that she, being a vegan, frequents. With vibrant colours, huge variety and opportunity to taste, it became an exciting experience – and I must confess that we got a bit carried away with our shopping. But who can blame us, being foodies, and with prices so much more modest than in the UK! She cooked us some amazing vegetarian dishes – pumpkin and blue Cheese risotto, melanzane alla parmigiana, to name but a few, and it made me almost convert to vegetarianism!

In early September we stayed as the guests of our sister-in-law and her family, in a villa in Tuscany – close to Montepulciano. And there we just continued the food journey! We enjoyed wonderful local red wine, ate pasta dishes, tasty local veal and insalata caprese around a long table on the patio at the villa, or deep into the nights around the table upstairs in the palatial dining room.

In Pienza we tasted an array of wonderful local pecorino cheeses, amazing red wines at Boscarelli, a local winery, and the local panforte cake in Siena.

But of course we had to finish our five days in Tuscany at Amadei, the famous Italian chocolate makers in the tiny village of Pontedera, close to Pisa. The owner’s son Alessandro, clearly inspired by his mother Cecilia, the founder of Amadei, took us on a tour of the factory and then a taste journey of mostly 70% chocolates. Their enthusiasm must have rubbed off on me, because I am more than ever motivated to make unforgettable chocolates and to enthuse and teach others to also appreciate good quality chocolate.

Why not join us on the chocolate journey. For all of you that are fascinated by chocolate, we will offer a once off chocolate course in November, where you will get the opportunity to make your own chocolates and also the opportunity to taste a few amazing dark and milk chocolates. After the course you will hopefully have a better understanding of the complexity of chocolate and perhaps also a more discerning palate.

We are still making macaroons in our tiny factory in Northwood and we once again invite you to our next course in October. For all of you that wanted to get the technique of making the perfect macaroon under your belt, this course is for you. We will patiently take you through all the steps and you will go home with your own perfect selection. We end the course with a delicious home cooked meal and more discussions about food..

I hope I have the chance to share some unforgettable food experiences with you soon!

New Year Resolutions

We have to apologize for not blogging for a while. This is the problem with a small business like ours – you simply don’t have enough hours in one day!

We can at least make that a new year resolution – to communicate more regularly. And although we are already in the fifth week of the new year, please allow us to wish all our customers a very happy New Year. We hope you will have lots of joy and that we will play a small part in contributing to that joy and happiness by providing you a consistent good service and good products! At the same time, we would like to thank our loyal customers for their support over the last year. We saw our sales soaring over the Christmas period and in order to maintain a good standard of delivery, we had to shut down our internet shop twice during December, just to keep up with the demand and to give you, our clients, good and fresh products!

Now, after a wonderful holiday in sunny South Africa, we are ready to face the new year with all its challenges. We have big plans for Ilze’s Chocolat and promise you that we will communicate those plans to you over the months to come. We will still be at the Beaconsfield Farmers Market on the fourth Saturday of every month (weather permitting) – if you want to meet us and see all our products on display. Many of our products had developed over the years because of feedback from clients on our markets. During a market we chat, we taste, we compare and we laugh together! Then we go back and we experiment and improve our products until we and our clients are happy! In the end we want to make and sell chocolates and macaroons which our clients really enjoy and that they wouldn’t find elsewhere. It still gives me immense pleasure to see that people enjoy our products and we believe that if we prepare our products “with love and compassion”, people will somehow taste it! And even when we grow more as a business in 2014, I have promised myself that I never want to stop being an artisan – someone that prepare their product with compassion and care!

We don’t only want to reach clients through our markets, but also through the classes that we are planning to offer this year. We are situated in the greater London area and it is easy to reach us by car or by train. We will offer a few macaroon and chocolate courses over 2014 and will post them in the “Courses and Workshops” section of our website (the first few are already there). We have been offering macaroon classes for a few years now, but would like to also offer our first chocolate course just before Easter. During this course, you will be able to make your own Easter Egg or Easter Bunny! We will only take 6 persons at a time and will share a nice meal afterwards. We will also offer a series of chocolate courses later for those who want to really get a better understanding of chocolate. We will teach you about temperature, chocolate tempering, making ganaches, experimenting with flavours, chocolate enrobing, handrolled truffles, etc.

The macaroon classes are always very popular and we are offering a macaroon class that will be fun for mum and daughter or son, just before Mother’s Day, on the 29th of March. If you want to have a nice day out with your friends, the classes are offering you the opportunity to share a wonderful creative opportunity to bond and share a meal afterwards.

Taste

A comment that I received from a wonderful customer and friend recently made me want to say something about taste.

Years ago, I attended a wine tasting course. It was quite the thing to do at the time, and to some extent it probably still is. Wine tasting remains a popular “team building” activity for corporates and a good way for the upwardly mobile to add that cultural dimension to their make-up.

I do sound cynical now, but I do not want to be. In fact, I would like to encourage that we go a little beyond the commercialised facade and think about what is really behind the whole tasting experience, in order perhaps to make it more meaningful to ourselves. And before I give my view, please remember that this is not an attempt to try to impose a belief, but rather to explain myself.

For me, the tasting experience is a way of communicating with other people. If I create a chocolate or macaroon and succeed in realising the taste that I had in mind, it has to be shared with someone else. And if someone else experiences the taste and “gets” what I had in mind, then there is real communication; and real communication means shared joy, even shared love.

It is for me profoundly important to achieve this real communication in what I do.  I spend hours every day preparing chocolates and macaroons and I sometimes get very tired, even very depressed if I have to sacrifice sleep and “me time”. But when I then get even the simplest word of feedback, I am suddenly revived and ready for more – because I know that we communicated taste.

Equally, it is very discouraging if someone does not taste what you wanted them to – it happens in any form of communication. Often, it is because I did not put the taste together properly, or it could be that the other person is just not sensitized enough. While it is disappointing, I understand it and can deal with it. I would often let them taste something else, to see if we can communicate another way. And this works well, particularly on the markets, where you have the opportunity.

But there are two kinds of responses that really wakens the worst in me: The first is that of the random taster, the person who rushes past your table and grabs a quick taster without making eye contact and rushes on. They don’t really want to communicate with you, they just want the general drone of background noise – the sweetness of chocolate or whatever… It is like talking to someone at a social event while you notice them looking at someone else over your shoulder.

The second response that I find difficult to deal with is that of the pretender. You find them often at wine tastings, where they pretend to detect subtle tastes when they don’t, only to sound “sophisticated”. What is the point? I wish that you would be true to yourself and to me when you taste the things I make – so that we can communicate through a shared experience. And it may be that you taste something that nobody else does, but if you truly do, it may be something that we share uniquely and this brings even greater joy!

Easter, etc.

Since I last wrote a blog, we have made a few changes to our macaroon page. I had a change of heart with regards to the tiffany coloured mango macaroons. Even for me (and another good honest friend) it felt that to match the blue colour with a mango flavour, was going a bit too far. So we have given the tiffany coloured macaroon a wonderful vibrant blue berry filling now. Our mango macaroons – also bursting with flavour – are now a nice orangy colour.

We have also added to our macaroon selection a rocksalt caramel macaroon, which has a natural flavour with a delicious caramel filling (made from scratch in our macaroon kitchen), with some dark chocolate added to it to break the sweetness – and a sprinkle of rock salt.

To celebrate Easter with chocolate, we decided to keep it simple this year and repeat the popular praline centred bars topped with roasted nuts or fruit (we had it at Christmas as part of a hamper). We now offer the trio of three bars in our environmentally friendly box  – see our seasonal page. It is not an Easter egg, but it is delicious and will make a loved one happy at Easter.

We would also like to thank all our wonderful clients for buying from us again and again – whether it is for yourself or sending it to someone as a gift. Above all, thank your for the very kind feedback, especially the feedback on our Amazon page. Nothing makes us happier than knowing that you were really satisfied with your product and above all, that it arrived in time!.

Happy Easter to you all! May it be a time of peace and reflection.

Honouring Mothers

Mother’s day is a few days away. And we haven’t said a word about it yet! For some it is just a money-making opportunity, but for many it is a day to say “thank you mum”. Over the last few days, we had hand-written a few touching cards that went with a box of macaroons or chocolates or a few selected bars and truffles, to a “mum” or a “ma” or a “mummy”. With many of the messages, I experienced a bit of nostalgia, but also had some admiration for the son or the daughter that thought “I am going to send my mum something nice, something sweet, something special!” In a way, we feel proud to be playing an intermediary role in writing the card and wrapping the gift – knowing that someone’s day is going to be nicer and brighter and in making loved ones “feel closer”, even if they live on the other side of the country.

It does not come as a surprise to us that macaroons are still for many people their favourite, their object of desire, something with that “it” factor. Recently, we received a request from a bride-to-be for “Tiffany” coloured macaroons.  I was lost, but my daughter who is a young adult and aware of the “it”, could tell me exactly what it was and that the colour was quite in vogue at the moment. We wanted to do a new flavour for a while now, and I thought maybe we should use this “Tiffany” colour.

I love mangos (we had a few mango trees in our garden when I grew up and I had the privilege to eat them straight off the tree) and so my thinking was to produce a mango flavoured macaroon. Unfortunately though I had already used the natural colour of the mango for our passion fruit macaroons. So I thought why not make the mango flavour macaroons with the Tiffany colour (thinking outside the box)!

Well, this week we are launching the new Tiffany coloured macaroons with a vibrant and real mango (with a hint of orange rind) and butter cream filling! Try it for mother’s day or maybe Easter that is just around the corner. You will not be disappointed.

In a moment of boredom (yes we agree, we should go out more) during the winter holidays, we thought we should also do a new chocolate bar. For some time now, many of our clients asked for chocolate with macadamia nuts. And because we wanted to please them, we “filed” the idea in our memories – until a few weeks ago when I thought of a new combination of roasted macadamia nuts, caramelised lemon peel and pieces of stem ginger – in a dark chocolate bar!

The combination is sensational and it got the thumbs up from all our farmer’s market clients. I think it will not only please the palate in winter, but if will be equally refreshing in the warmer months. The flavours are vibrant and tantalizing. The good news is that it is suitable for vegans or people with dairy allergies. Check out the “Bars” section of our website for some other sensational bars.

And remember that if you want to talk about chocolate, we are just an email away…

Enjoy the last few cold winter nights…

Macaroon Everest

I’ve been asked many times over the years to do chocolate or macaroon courses, but shied away from it, saying that we don’t really have enough space or I don’t know how we are going to manage it with our already full schedule. And I always felt with chocolate that it might not work if you try it at home – without the right equipment – but somehow, the idea of macaroon classes made the whole thing more appealing. And then, with the new chocolate room extension, I finally ran out of excuses. I was raised with the idea that if you learn something, you have to pass it on. And that thought stuck in my mind, so that our first macaroon experience workshop took place last Saturday!

We came up with the idea of offering a “macaroon experience”, because we always resisted the idea of cooking or baking being a “spectator sport”, where you watch it and then go home and forget. An experience is more than watching, it is also tucking in and being hands-on, living through it such that it doesn’t really matter whether you are going to do it at home – the experience was a goal in itself.

I felt we had achieved that experience on Saturday. The group of three (we deliberately keep the groups small) started off with coffee and introductions. Then we put on our aprons and hairnets and got started. I could see that the group of friends were focused and enjoyed themselves – they weighed off ingredients, mixed, prepared the baking sheets, learned how to make a proper Italian meringue, piped neat little macaroon circles (I didn’t see anyone licking their fingers – I promise!), chatting excitedly, taking photographs. I gave them the opportunity to select one flavour or combination of flavours each – and the results were stunning! If you let go, it is amazing how the creative juices can really flow.

Three hours later, with the left sides of our brains almost completely inactive, we admired the work of our hands – everybody’s own interpretation.  All the macaroons that came out had a perfect “foot” – the benchmark for a perfect macaroon – and proud smiles were exchanged among the friends. YES! Together we have conquered Macaroon Everest.

Macaroon Workshops

Maybe it is the spring season, but we seem to have so many new ideas at the moment to take Ilze’s Chocolat into new areas of business!

On the other hand, there is very little new about the idea to offer a macaroon workshop at our studio in Northwood. Apart from the fact that we have been wanting to do this for years now (and never had the time or determination to actually do it), we have had a very successful cookery school “with a difference” in Pretoria, South Africa, in the 90s.

The difference of this cookery school was that we were aiming to offer training, but also recreation: The people that attended our evening classes were typically professional people who joined us to wind down while preparing a gourmet meal. And usually the evening was then concluded with a sit-down dinner to consume what was prepared and really relax and socialise. None of the time pressure and stress of cruel judges that we are used to seeing on TV these days!

So our idea is to create the same atmosphere in our macaroon workshops: Yes, you will learn the techniques and the recipes, but the idea is also that you should socialise and relax, because for us, food is about beauty, passion and friendship, not stress, abuse and performance!

In July, we will be running two trial workshops, one on a Wednesday evening and one on a Saturday morning. And then, depending on the interest and how we feel it is going, we will schedule some more sessions. We will keep the numbers down to 4 attendees, so that everyone will be able to have a meaningful learning experience – and to make it also a more personal event. If you are interested, please click on the link under BLOGROLL below.

New ideas…

On Saturday, we received a visit at our Windsor market from a student (we did not ask her permission to use her name, so she will remain anonymous for now) who was interested to sell chocolates at markets in another part of the country. It was an interesting discussion, which was made even more interesting by some great conversations we had with our friends and customers on the market. Generally we left the market tired, but with our minds racing.

See, we have been looking at various ways to reach a broader market with our products. With last year’s investment in additional manufacturing capacity, we are in fact able now to produce much more than before, but we have not yet expanded our market, other than of course through the steady growth we have been seeing in our number of farmers market and internet customers. But why not try something new?

The idea that developed in our minds was that surely there must be an opportunity to offer our hand-made, preservative-free chocolates in small portions at universities and workplaces across the country. Our experience is that many people have become a lot more health consious, yet would sometimes like to spoil themselves with a small but high quality treat – let’s say a chocolate-covered organic fig, a chocolate-covered caramelised orange slice, a delicious macaroon or even one of our Signature Range chocs. We are convinced that this will be a real winner with many people at their workplace, maybe after having had a canteen lunch or together with a cup of coffee.

And rather than stuffing the coffers of one of the many retail brands that already dominate our consumption everywhere, for example with overpriced coffee, why not actually offer the opportunity to sell our product, for a generous profit, to ordinary people who are looking for an opportunity to earn an income or augment their income?

Today, we are putting the idea out there. We are ready to do it. But we are interested in your comments, so why not comment here or write to us at sales@ilzeschocolate.com?

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.