A summer-y

Good morning everyone,

I have been enjoying the sunshine and the quiet season for chocolates, May and June are generally quiet for chocolate sales in the season of strawberry and berry abundance, cherries on the trees and other delights of the spring/summer.

There has been lots to tell you, but as you know by now, l am not one of those who will send a newsletter every week to send you recipe ideas or articles about the growing of cocoa beans in Nigeria. Being inundated with newsletters from other people and companies, l choose to not do it to you. I haven't got time to read newsletters! Mostly, they are aimed at increasing their sales, and l do not need new hemp socks every 2 weeks, nor another order of organic meat while still waiting for the one l ordered a few days ago. (and the said organic meat company will send me a newsletter AFTER l ordered, saying 14% off your next pigs trotters order for 24h only - do they think l have a warehouse full of empty freezers?) Let's go back to what l wanted to share with you.

Those are Continuum Conceits chocolate tablettes, which l have heard, have been selling very well, at the...(read below)

First news, the business Carriages, The Sidings farm shop are now selling my chocolate. They are located on the road east of Hereford, only 10 minutes away. The farm shop is inside a stationary train carriage and the restaurant in the other carriage. They have outdoor tables and well made patches of gardens.

If you like fancy food, you can also dine at the Carriages restaurant which sounds very quirky and is inside a warehouse a bit further. The tasting menu is £75 per person. Tasting menus are so exciting!

Inside the Sidings farm shop - you can see hte miniature train set at the back!

This is an (there are better) excellent photograph of Carriages at the Sidings, showing you the 2 carriages.

Their courtyard/garden!

If you would like a nice afternoon tea and excellent "fluffy pancakes with berries and vanilla mascarpone", I also recommend this as it is delicious. We went there with Barry for afternoon tea and this had locally made cakes and savouries, good quality tea (Tea Pigs). The service is friendly and the produce in the shop is local. You can even admire a little train set inside the shop with a replica of the carriages!

"l am not here eating this non-keto pancake" says Barry, hiding behind hte menu and sitting on the luxurious Carriages , comfortable chairs. Have you ever seen such a beautiful fluffy pancake? l haven't, and l was all for French pancakes (of course) but now l have seen this...

Label news:

I am waiting for more wagtail labels at the moment for my tablettes and medium bars, which I have chosen to be of "removable label" kind, so they hopefully wouldn't tear the foil packaging when you open the gold foil and you will be able to (hopefully) stick it back together. I went overboard and chose gold foil printing, I have not seen any samples but much enjoyed some foil printed labels I had a few months ago temporarilly, they were beautiful.

I am also waiting for business cards labels, to replace those printed at home on my laser printer, which rub off with the touch. They will get stuck on the blank potluck cards like the other ones were.l kept the same design but changed the writing, hoping it will be easier to read.

Those little things are very exciting to me! New labels!! Wow.

I have thought of ordering nice packaging boxes from the Belgium company l had ordered for before Brexit but l was dissuaded by my friend who said the customs may search the car and impose delays and import duties if it looked the transaction was done for business. So l will again not do that and make do with the boxes l can buy in England.

Because..

You have read right! I am going to France next week with my friend Neil who is driving us through the Eurotunnel, to visit a common friend in Normandy, and from there, a family member will be giving me a lift to the South-West to visit my family, whom l have not seen since 2017. In fact, I have not been to France since then. It is a big adventure!

This is why l wanted to write to you so you know that l will be unable to send any orders between the 8th and the 22d July. If you had an emergency, I could ask a friend to send an order but you would have to wait a few days, till l could organise it with him. It isn't impossible.

In the meantime, if you are short of your favourite chocolate, you could place an order which l will post up to Tuesday next week.

This is another subject: l have sold out of several items. Some, I have tried to renew and others, l will wait until l come back from France.

"Trying"? What do you mean? You will ask.

I was going to share this with you. I have made 2 batches in the last 2 weeks, of dark fruit and nuts and dark fig, pistachio and cardamom, and both have the Summer Tempering.

Both have failed to temper to satisfaction and are white. This happened at the end of July last year when it was hot. Despite using my thermometers as l do to the right temperature, it seems that the chocolate is too 'cold' hence why it goes those shades of white. I will join a photo.

The Summer Tempering. The fruit and nuts on the right is the least worst one, as one side looks fine, but the other side is way too white.

Sometimes it is a beautiful artistic temper (I did sell those fruit and nuts dark last year as artistic, they were like a starry sky) and other times it just looks (like this) wrong.

I haven't got the time to redo the white tempered tablettes before going away which means l only have 6 tablettes of fig, pistachio and cardamom to sell.

Another delay in this is the last batch of pistachio l bought, I had to return, because there was a large amount of low quality pistachios in it, and sorting through them took so long. It is difficult to buy good quality raw pistachios, and the stocks do vary. Mostly, l find the stock of yellow pistachios, which, not knowing about their culture, I suspect are yellow because of a long storage and the chlorophyll changing colour over time (think of any dried herb or grass, the bright green changing). I could be wrong.

Yellow pistachios are not necessarily unpleasant to eat but some in this batch were. I have not found as many bad pistachios in one place, before.

Good pistachios underneath and bad pistachios on top. There is a colour different but also a taste difference. Does anyone know about pistachio farming who could linform me on what is happening here?

My plan is when I get to London, hopefully on the way back to France, l would go to Southall in the Indian quarters and look for good quality, pink skin raw pistachios kernels (pink skin and green flesh, avoiding the overly yellow flesh ones) and buy a large amount to see me through for a few months. I hope I won't be too tempted by all the other delicious fresh fruit they have there, or the ever exciting fabrics at £3 per meter, as my fabric cupboard is full.

Before I post this blog l will go and do a stock take to make sure there is what the website says is on sale (mistakes do happen regularly, just to keep you confident in my director's abilities!).

Products wise, I am running out of ginger in dark, as well as a low stock of fruit and nuts in dark.

However, I have some new items, some small boxes of home candied citrus peel (lemon, orange and grapefruit) and I do have some of the medium bars are back in stock (most of them but not all).

The candied citrus boxes

l have also made some boxes of 2 prunes with rum raisin ganache or almond praline centres, which you can find on this page.

The ganache filled prunes

There has been some changes in the fabrics used for certain products, like the fruit and nuts is going red,

The new fruit and nuts fabric "digital print" they said. l am not sure what they meant as l didn't study fabric printing at art foundation college.

and the fig pistachio cardamom, having ran out of my favourite fabric it had for years, is going into a medley with many bright colours, a bit messy but quite beautiful.

Some of you will have already seen this new fabric for the fig, pistachio and cardamom. "How dare she change the fabric without telling us to expect a change!" says a custumer.

I was also experimenting with a tablette of Arbitrary Fruit, but they have been selling so fast at my local markets that l didn't get a chance to sell them online. "They contain 4 or more of the following fruit" it says on the label, and it lists all the fruit l have used once to make the bars. Including sour cherry, physalis, banana (the crunchy sort) mulberries, raisins, apple, etc.

This bar isn't exciting for those who like to know what they eat, and as a market customer said, her husband hates that bar as he is a philosopher and likes everything written down and all square in a box. I think she meant he is an accountant? Having studied philosophy at school, l don't see it at all like a subject which is contained and set in its ways, on the opposite. It flows, and allows one to expand their thoughts and discuss various aspects of life as a human being and consciousness. I shall query her again. She must have misunderstood what her husband meant, and he just enjoys choosing what he eats.

Talking about complaints, I have an exciting one in my Google reviews feedback,(have a look!) someone who calls her review "constructive criticism", and has not much constructive about it, which is amusing.

The person did not contact me to complain about the product she had bought, she didn't write about which flavour it was, it what was so wrong with it, and the funniest is I cannot reply to it because dear bigbrotherGoogle has decided my business, after being verified [which was a pain in the neck to do, done a few years ago] is now suddenly "not verified"any longer, and they want me to go through another verifying video and protocol, which, until l oblige, I will be unable to reply to my own business comments. I have tried contacting someone on Google but I cannot find any contact, it is all robots, I did apply and send a question online and the question was answered in 24h in some stupid way by some ai Q&A which had nothing to do with what l asked, so l was quick to give up and go outside enjoying the garden in the sun, while mumbling insults at the globalists who own google and are removing human interaction on this important platform and who mess about with people who are not bowing at their malinformation.

I could enjoy being paranoid, let's do it. GlobalistGoogle do not like "my point of view" very much, and hence "Oops the robot pressed a button and you cannot get access to your business nor change its location and there is no human to report to until you do what we want".

Because this is something else: despite knowing that Croft Farm where I work, is in Knapton, google had repeatedly moved the location of my business to Burghill, near Tillington so even though l have kept changing the location and the red cursor where it should be, it still changes my business address to Burghill at the back of a modern brick bungalow with no door. (however it shows the right address at the moment, hooray!)

If l was a good obedient citizen and didn't post so many globalist agenda warning comments on the internet and on youtube...

This is however going into delirium, l am definitely rambling on there and instead, I should go and do some work for you and take a few photos of my white tempered summer chocolate.

I think l told you everything I needed to say right now, other than, keep your eyes open to anything which may restrict your freedom of movement in the future, and l wish you to follow your passions with no expectation or resistance on the outcome, so you can be the best of the version of yourself in this parallel reality! (As dear Bashar the ET channeler would say. )

l must leave you now as this has taken all day to write, and the sunshine is waiting! Thank you for reading and for being the best version of yourself, with most joy, wellbeing and balance!