New Flavors for Fall

So September snuck right up on me! Who said the summer was gonna be slow?
So here's the update for our newest products and the return of some Fall Favorites.

NEW FLAVORS
We have added some new flavors to the case recently and they will probably be available right through to Christmas. Our new Lisbon Lime is a dark chocolate lime flavored ganache coated with our X Dark (70%). It is molded in the same square as the Sugar Shack with a different transfer sheet. If you're a lover of dark chocolate, this is a dream.

We also now offer our Cornwall Turtles in the display case to be added to a custom box! These were only available in a box of 8 but we've added them to the case as another showcase of our wonderful butter caramel. The Cornwall Turtle consists of our homemade butter caramel with chopped walnuts rolled into it then dipped in milk chocolate. They are small, rich and they melt in your mouth! A perfect addition with the cooler weather on the way!

Ellen has also added a caramel made with that energy drink that "gives you wings". Our new Madrid Bull Caramel will certainly be a hit. Do you get it? Mad-red...madrid bull? Fun and funky for our expanding college crowd!

For clusters, we added the X Dark Almond clusters and Red Gunner Bites. The Red Gunner Bites are just like the bark. Red Gunner is the name of a friend's chocolate lab who just loves to eat pretzels. So Red Gunner Bark is a slab of milk chocolate with crushed pretzels in it. Now Red Gunner Bites are a cluster available in our display case. Chunky pretzels are globbed with milk or dark chocolate. So how do you eat your pretzels? Bark or Bite?

I've also experimented with Chunky Monkeys. We have a good sized Monkey mold that doesn't seem to be too popular. So I took a bunch of leftover chunks from various barks (those that don't include dried fruits anyway) and mixed them into a batch of milk chocolate. I, then, molded this mixture with the Monkey mold we have. Thus, we now have Chunky Monkeys. This is a good way to us to recycle those little bits that break apart when we cut up our other barks without having to throw it away. If I ate all those little bits, I wouldn't fit through the kitchen door! Talk about Chunky! So the chunks include a lot of different things from nuts to oreos to pretzels! Every bite is different.

RETURNING FAVORITES
Autumn and Thanksgiving signals the return of a popular Truffle: The Pumpkin Truffle. Our fresh pumpkin ganache is the filling for a white chocolate shell. We have customers that have been waiting patiently all summer for it. We'll start making this flavor in Early October if not sooner!

Our Halloween Goblin Eyes will make a return. I called them Krispie Eyes last year but figure I'll upgrade the name since they were very popular. Goblin Eyes are a sphere of rice krispie marshmallow treat dunked in white chocolate then painted with cocoa butter to look like an eye ball. They are a fun touch to a custom box! Imagine your friend opening the box of chocolates you picked out for them to see an eyeball staring back at them! I'll start these in early October as well and they will disappear after Halloween.

Our chocolate pops will now take on various shapes for the Autumn holidays. We will have our pumpkin/jack o'lanterns wrapped in orange foil. Our Skull pops will be ready to go soon and various little solid shapes of Halloween figures like ghosts and cats and tombstones. Our foil wrapped Autumn Leaves will be bagged with a ribbon to make great favor bags for a dinner party or to scatter around on a platter. They look so festive and taste even better! Let's not forget our wonderful 3-D Skulls as well. These hollow chocolate skulls look too real to eat! Sorry, these hollow skulls just can't be shipped as they are too fragile.

WORKS IN PROGRESS
I'm going to list some new flavors we are thinking of adding. They may be only seasonal or they may be permanent. We haven't decided yet.

Hopefully, for Autumn we will have figured out a chocolate chip cookie dough flavor. I was originally thinking of putting an actual cookie dough together and adding it to our Creams and Clusters. But Ellen suggested making it a truffle that tasted of brown sugar, vanilla, and butter with flecks of dark chocolate. I'm not so certain of the truffle. Our fondant fillings may be more of the base with which to work since it is based in sugar. Using brown sugar instead of white and adding a vanilla and butter flavor may make the right taste for a "cookie dough". I would really like to add this flavor to the line but I'm not sure if we will have the time to "make it work" before our Holiday Rush begins.

Wanakena Rangers have been put to the back burner since we opened. This chocolate was one of Ellen's signature chocolates at the onset but we never had a mold to make them in and never got around to buying new. Now that we have a couple molds that are versatile, it may finally be time to break out this unique flavor. This milk or dark chocolate (we haven't decided which!) will be filled with a cranberry/orange fondant. Ellen uses cranberry juice instead of water to make the fondant and adds finely chopped dried cranberries to it. A splash of orange flavor takes away some of the tart flavor and mellows it out a touch. They are named for the Forest Ranger School in Wanakena which is located out toward Cranberry Lake in St. Lawrence County. These pieces will probably use the Raquette Raspberry mold with different coloring, green perhaps to symbolize the forest that the Rangers preserve.

Our other new flavor in development will be introduced for the Holiday season this year, around early November. We will again use the Sugar Shack mold but with a snowflake design transfer sheet. The white snowflakes will show up wonderfully against our dark chocolate shell. We shall fill them with Wintergreen filling and they shall be called Waddington Wintergreen. And it will be good!

Also joining our Bark line-up for Christmas will be the Peppermint Bark. We use white chocolate and throw in crushed candy canes for a silky holiday treat.

One other flavor I'm considering is along these Peppermint Bark lines. I'd like to use the Bear Paw mold for a piece of white chocolate that is sprinkled with crushed mint candy, maybe spearmint. I'd love to call them Polar Bears but am not certain if the candy would mold well. I suppose I'd have to crush the hard candies to a very fine consistency and if crushed so well, would they even be noticeable! Of course we do have a Bear Pop mold that might work just as well. This idea needs more development.

We have new ideas and flavors to try out all the time. We still make our Wine Truffles but they are hit and miss in the display case. We don't make them consistently but once in awhile you can find the PJ's (merlot) and the Brandybrook Blueberry Truffles. Our Wine truffles are made with Rivermyst Wine, a local winery located near Ogdensburg. All are done in dark chocolate as milk chocolate makes a terrible pairing with wine unless the wine is a sweet dessert wine. But if anyone has a request for these truffles (which we make by special order for Rivermyst), we can whip up a batch in no time! Or you can try your luck at the Winery itself which sells them in 6 piece boxes. Then, you can pick up the matching Wine as well!

I could go on and on about all our Christmas plans but that makes for another later posting!
Here's to cooler weather, back to school, and the changing of the seasons!