Follow The Herd

Willow's naming day party

Posted by James

Posted on Sunday 15 August 2010 at 19:54

Well. Well, well, well. That was an interesting day. Family stuff was brilliant as always but, seeing as this blog is about this new business venture, and anyone friends with me on Facebook will momentarily be able to see some pics from the day, I'll stick to musing on the successes and learnings of the day, brownie-wise.

First off... it seems, even if it's just at a local, domestic level, that there is a strong desire by humans to eat these brownies. Family and friends are, naturally, prone to polite encouragement but you can't simulate the sort of ecstatic responses some of the flavours were getting. In the end we did six flavours, all with some tentative names: Pioneer was the standard recipe with the pecans; Goldrush has the caramel layer; Connoisseur was the standard recipe but with 85% dark chocolate instead of the standard 72% (niece #1 kept on sneaking pieces of this, don't tell her mother!!); Clementine was the standard nut-less recipe, suffused with orange oil and studded with mandarin segments; Atomic (hahaha, oh I'm so very witty) is the blondie, which came as much of a surprise to everyone else as it did to me; and finally a very experimental blueberry brownie with a cream cheese frosting, studded this time with yet more blueberries. That last one is the sort we could do if we got into events catering but isn't the sort of thing that would post well - doing the icing etc. introduces the twin devils of Fussiness In Production and Difficult To Transport, but it looked spectacularly cute! Definitely worth doing more for, for special occasions. For the initial start-up, though, I think we can safely stick to the range of standard (but easily manufactured) flavours, especially if we can make them all easy to get through the post. We've sampled some other British mail-order brownies in recent weeks, to see how other people do it, and there certainly seems to be money in it. Imagine if you have a professional outfit behind it, keeping costs down but maintaining quality (of production and of raw material) - sounds like a winner!

Some of the flavours done today won't immediately translate well into a postal format, particularly things like Goldrush, with its tempting layer of caramel. Going to have to work on several of these to get them into a mass-producable state. Flavours like Pioneer, Pure (the standard 70% chocolate recipe without the pecans), etc., would work quite well, though, in their current form. More on this as I work it all out!