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You Can Be the Neighbourhood Chocolatier
by Janet Overy
Chocolate is one of few dessert items known to be consumed with great delight.
Cheap chocolate candy bars aside, there are chocolates out there to roll your
eyes and make you shiver with delight. Truffles, chocolates, fondants, so many
treats, and often at crazy prices.
We dip our fruit and nuts. We make fondue. We make it into hot drinks, and
sauces and drizzle it on anything that we think will taste good. We even put it
in sandwich spreads! With all the love there is for chocolate, what could hold a
better, unchanging source of income than producing chocolate delights for sale?
Five years ago, at home with a small baby, I grew a little bored. I decided to
try my hand at baking some chocolate desserts. There was no way I would have
ever eaten it all, but it was a lot of fun. With every experiment, the end
result improved. I read, watched shows on it and looked for recipes to build
from. What did I do with all those chocolate treats? I sent them to work with my
husband.! He has 600 co-workers and they were positively delighting in my baking.
That first fall, my husband came home and asked me if I could make up a menu and
price list. His co-workers wanted their own. They didn't want a piece, they
wanted whole orders! I was shocked, but tickled too. It gave me a purpose again,
outside of being mommy.
I worked on the menu and price list for days. The harder it was to make, the
more I charged for it, and strangely, the hardest things to make were often the
cheapest to produce. For example, it cost me a grand total of $9.00 to make 6
pounds of creamy English toffee, I sell it for $30.
Compared to purchasing a mass produced equivalent in the store, that's pretty
cheap. The clincher is, when these things are made at home, they are still made
with , real butter, real cream, real everything. Most confections in the stores
today can't even compete with the tastes and textures. When they do it costs you
an arm and a leg.
The orders poured in right through to Christmas! That first year I profited
$3000 in two months. What better time of year to have extra cash on hand, and
all my own baking done at the same time. As years went by, things picked up.
I started selling mixed platters, which brought the expense down because they
also contained assorted cookies and fondants which are cheaper to make. My
family found out and then everything went crazy! Platters for showers and
parties and I was attacked when there was a potluck!
I was never a good baker, until I took some time to learn the tricks and
experiment a little. Today there are places like ChocoFactory to help people get
started on the road to becoming the neighbourhood chocolatier. Offering recipes,
videos and a course in all the tricks and tactics for pumping out chocolate and
candies with ease, ChocoFactory is the best resource for the aspiring "Choco-
prenuer" that I have ever seen. My menu has expanded ten fold with things I
hadn't even attempted. Being able to see what was being done on video made it
even easier.
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