Month: February 2021

The efficiency of this Valentine’s order pleases me. Not only did the recipient pick five fabulous sweets (dragonfruit chocolates, passionfruit-honey-lime marshmallows, chai meringue kisses, Sri Lankan cashew milk toffee, and chocolate-dipped crystallized ginger)…

…but she ALSO ordered masks (in two of my favorite patterns, “Calculating the Moon” (by Vincent Desjardins) and “Chasing Fireflies” (by Becca Smith))…

…AND pre-ordered Vegan Serendib. Woot!

I like it, people. I encourage you all to order sweets from me AND lots of other things too. Masks, tea towels, books, etc. You save on shipping this way too.

Pre-orders of Vegan Serendib are especially encouraged, because you’ll get a digital sampler right away, so you can start cooking, and since I’m not shipping physical items for a few months, it helps quite a bit with cash flow, which I’m learning is key to managing a small business, if I want to actually pay my staff.

I started with packing up lots of the ‘pick 3’ orders, because it was simpler to batch them that way, but now I’m starting to move on to some of the larger orders. Here’s a ‘pick 5’ from someone who loves marshmallows — they went for three different kinds of marshmallows + passionfruit gummies and cashew milk toffee. Yummy.

Here’s a funny note — the gummies don’t use any preservatives — they’re just fruit juice, gelatin, and a little sugar. So they start to dry out if stored at room temperature for more than a few days — which means that I keep them in the fridge, and then, if I pack them up before I’m ready to ship (in this case, it’s waiting on one of my staff to make me a postage label), I still want to store them refrigerated until I put them in the mail (right now, it’s pretty cold out here, so the mailbox should work pretty well as refrigeration too). So there are a couple cardboard shipping boxes in my fridge right now, which is just funny.

I don’t think I’ll do this again — if I offer gummies in the future, I’m going to want to develop a shelf-stable recipe. But that will require adding some chemical ingredients, I think, and a bit of experimenting. We’ll see. Chocolates are simpler, but the gummies are awfully cute. Hard to resist!

One of the interesting things for me about doing the ‘pick out of 15 options’ for the Valentine’s orders was that I got to see what was most popular very clearly. Anyone want to guess what the favorite sweet was?

…

…

…

…

…

Sri Lankan cashew milk toffee!

I don’t know if it’s the Sri Lankan in the name setting it apart from the rest? Or just that cashew milk toffee is clearly insanely delicious. But it was sort of funny to me that it pulled so clearly ahead of the pack.

I think the second favorite were the dragonfruit chocolates (which are, I have to say, stellar), and then the gilded rose cayenne chocolates. I’m going to need to make second batches of all of those this weekend, I think, to finish fulfilling the Valentine’s orders.

And then the marshmallows line up after that, with the passionfruit dipped in dark chocolate coming slightly ahead of the others. I should make notes, so I remember to offer them again next year, if I’m still doing this kind of thing.

I’m actually hoping that by next year, we’ll be set up with Stephanie Bailey helping me with sweet-making, which means I probably should take some time to go over making Sri Lankan milk toffee with her this summer; it can be a little tricky, as all of my cousins will attest, I think.

The number of times I scorched it in my 20s and 30s, trying to get it right — it would make a Sri Lankan aunty weep!

Writing workshop yesterday evening was followed by a few hours of sitting on the couch packaging up treat boxes, which actually does take time — it’s funny, there’s a part of my brain that really has a hard time internalizing that certain things take time. Apparently, I think that:

• probably lots of other stuff I’m not aware of

…just happen instantaneously. They do not.

Packing up just five small treat boxes, for example — putting the sweets in cute little containers, adding stickers and ribbon, Valentine’s hearts and tissue paper, double-checking to make sure the right things are in the order, sealing them up, printing out a shipping label and putting it on — all of that took a solid hour, for only five orders.

I mean, it was a pleasant hour, accompanied by the season 4 finale of The Magicians, so it didn’t feel like very hard work or anything. Kind of a nice break after a long day of brain work; I didn’t want to think anymore, and dropping little pink hearts into boxes was just about my speed right then.

But it definitely took time. I imagine if I did this as a full-time business, I would find ways to be more efficient about it, with batch packaging, but still — packing time is real time, and should not be discounted.

Little business lessons just keep coming.