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Recently I’ve been getting so bogged down in all the crappy details and shitty business bits of trying to set up a chocolate shop that I almost forgot the reason why I’m doing it…
Making chocolate is the best thing ever!!!
Maybe once I get really into coffee I might get the same satisfaction out of making a really good cup of espresso, but for the moment nothing even comes close to the amazing satisfaction from making a chocolate taste completely new and very very delicous. Making a new flavour is like that feeling you get, I’m sure you can remember it, when it’s the end chemistry class and you pour everything into a really big pot and hope that it explodes or fizzes or catches on fire or something, except that the explosions are explosions of awesome taste and it always catches on fire.
I’ve always felt a bit let down by the way that if you go into a good restaurant their menu will completely change with the seasons, but no matter how good a chocolatier you go into seasonal chocolates are half arsed and unimaginative. So today, since I was in the cooking groove, I tried making a couple chocolates for spring and summer and they’ve turned out really really well. Floral flavours and white chocolate rock, they’re really something special. I made two white chocolate and floral chocolates (because there were only two flower essences that sounded tasty in the local health food shop) orange blossom and honey for a spring flavour and rosewater for a summer flavour.
From here on flowers beware! As soon as you pop your pretty little heads out of your leafy bodies I’m going to come racing down and try to turn your deliciousness into an essence I can add to chocolate. If I get started now I can make sure that I can get every single flower that blooms this year and see if I can make it taste delicious so that by next year I have an exhaustive encyclopedia of flower flavours and can properly serve up the taste of spring… in chocolate form!
Well the plan for today was to make a decent start on a business plan, sort out a business bank account and possibly start suggesting to banks that I might need a loan. I’ve failed massively on all three counts, but on the plus side I think my coffee obsession is growing nicely… no wait, that’s bad!
I’m still just stuck on the machines, but I think I’ve just about made up my mind and I just need to think about one last thing.
How much of the goodness in coffee comes from the taste and how much comes from the experience? I personally think that the setting and how a taste is presented is more important than the actual flavour, but I’m not quite sure how much of that is a personal thing. Patrick put it quite well when he said that he didn’t so much like the taste of tea, but the idea of a cup of tea. I think I feel the same way (except I’m not so enamoured with the concept of a cup of tea unless it’s a social cup of tea) but I think it applies to everything you ever eat far more than most people will give it credit for. Just think about the most delicious thing that you’ve ever tasted and I bet that you remember lots and lots of things about the situation, the way it looked, the way it arrived, the way it was so perfectly in tune with how you were feeling at that moment and not so much about the exact way it tasted, probably you can remember it was really really good. The things that stick aren’t the taste of perfect technique in caremalizing or the particular blend of herbs and bones in the stock, but the whole experience of eating it. I could, of course, be massively wrong.
So, here are the three likely hopefuls ranked in order of how awesome and weird a coffee experience they will provide…
1. Elektra Micro Casa a Leva: oh my god… oh my god… this thing looks like a god. (not quite The God of Coffee since it is only a domestic machine, but certainly some sort of minor deity of espresso, or possibly a fairly major saint) I really would love to play at being a barista and this is the machine to do it with. I’ve never been to a place that has a coffee machine that looks so awesome and I’m sure that if I could learn how to use it properly then people would come back for more. It is more than a little impractical and hard to use and needy and temperamental, but all of those things just make it more great.
2. Francis!Francis! X3: I love the way this looks, it’s not quite the same as having someone pull your coffee out of a giant brass demigod, but it’s still pretty cool.
3. Gaggia Synchrony: the cheapest and easiest to use out of all three since it’s factory refurbished and completely automated. It’ll probably also make the best tasting coffee for at least a couple of months until I got into practice with the other machines. Still, having your coffee come out with a press of a button is just somehow so unsexy.
anybody got any thoughts?
Got an email back from lovely Laura from Planning and Development saying that I’ll be ok with an A1 licence, yay! According to some planning revision law thing it’s ok to do stuff in an A1 unit just so long as I don’t cook stuff (I’m just reheating things already safe for eating) and that the main purpose of the shop is retail. Goodbye £20,000 a year huge and unginly cafe rental, hello £8,000 a year uberstylish chic boutique… of chocolate!
I think there’s a serious danger I might develop some sort of strange and definitely unhealthy obsession with coffee (to add to and not in any way reduce the stranglehold of the unhealthy chocolate obsession). I haven’t even been to a shop to try out all the fabulous espresso machines I’ve been reading about, but just reading about them has got me wanting to sell everything I own just to buy some sort of obscene coffee making monstrosity, arcane bit of imcomprehensible machinery or something that looks like it should be able to rip apart small children and then brew a beatiful and elegant espresso from their bloodied remains. I’ve actually drunk a couple cups of coffee, which is a pretty big step for me, then was upset because it was only cafetiere brewed and gone out to the little Itlalian place around the corner and ordered a double ristresso, I was a little shocked, but my body seemed to do it automatically after spending past 5 hours reading about how to get the perfect crema.
Only yesterday I couldn’t see the point really in buying one of the really expensive espresso machines and was thinking that I’d easily be able to pick up something stylish that could make a few good cups of coffee without too much fuss. But now I know! It’s really hard to see how a cheap machine could even start to produce a decent espresso once you spend ages and ages reading about how awesome the expensive vacuum displacement pumps are and how important it is to have as many bits as possible made of solid marine grade brass and how it’s not really espresso until the machine has at least 9 atmoshperes of pressure and how you must use a burr grinder and not a blade and… I think I should probably stop now…
After whipping myself into a coffee machine induced frenzy I ransacked my room for anything vaguely valuable that I haven’t been using recently and with a bit of luck I think I’ve come up with enough old clothes, dvds, warhammer and magic cards to get a really nice espresso machine (domestic not commercial grade, unfortunately) and all the stuff I’m going to use to present/serve chocolates in the shop.
It feels a little sad to be getting rid of most of the remnants of my massively geeky past to pay for the only mildly geeky future, but I really want to try and get a whole load of old bell jars to put over the chocolates and they’re going to cost a painfully large amount and I really really do need a good espresso machine. At the moment I’m leaning towards one of these Gaggia factory refurbished machines because they’re really good value, or the Francis!Francis! X3 because it’s simply outrageously cool. Now I just need to go and find a place that’ll serve me free samples of coffee from them.
I didn’t even get started on the business plan today, I’ll do it tomorrow… after I read a bit more about coffee.
