Shipping Woes

I don't normally ship my confections. Sure, I've done it on a few occasions, but there's a lot that can go wrong. And the cost to ship small packages is exorbitant. But this year, if I wanted my family to have a box of chocolates for Christmas, I had no other choice. 

The first challenge in shipping chocolate is making sure that the individual pieces do not move around in their box. Step one is packing them tightly. Sometimes this results in more chocolate than intended (or paid for) because the box has been stuffed to prevent lateral movement. My four pieces were fairly snug thanks to the polar bear paws, which took up more space. 

Step two is adding candy pads to protect the surface of the chocolate and cushion it from impact. While most boxes of chocolates have one insert, many chocolatiers will double up if they know a box will be shipped. Because I've never shipped my chocolates before, I don't have any padding. My solution was to steal a pad from a box of Lindt chocolates at work. I cut it into squares that would fit my ballotin boxes and placed one under the chocolates and one on top of the chocolates. The boxes were pretty snug as I closed the tops and sealed them with stickers. 

Then I undertook the challenge of packing the assortments into a shipping box. Knowing how expensive it can be to mail small packages, which are charged by both size and weight, I chose to purchase a flat rate box because at least then there wouldn't be any heart-stopping surprises at the cash. The extra small box from Canada Post was sufficient and cost $18.99+tx. I packed it as tightly as possible so that there was no movement inside, employing skills honed through hundreds (maybe thousands?) of hours playing Tetris as a teenager and university student. The assortment boxes went in first and then around them I added a few small gifts, a few Ooey Gooeys from Cape Breton Fudge Company, a jar of Christmas jam from a local Christmas craft fair, and a few pieces of salt water taffy. To make everything even tighter, I added a few greeting cards and some tissue paper. Once I was confident nothing would move inside the box, I sealed it. 

Beyond the physical damage from movement, the biggest enemy of chocolate is heat. For this reason, many chocolate shops require customers to purchase cold packs for their shipments to ensure the chocolate doesn't get too warm and melt in transit. They are certainly mandatory when shipping between April and October. In the winter, however, you can usually get away without adding them (at least in Canada). I decided I would take the chance. (I'm not sure there is any cold pack that could last long enough for a box handled by Canada Post anyway...)

The shipping method I chose had a delivery standard of 5 days. I dropped the box off on December 4th and began tracking its journey. For the life of me, I will never understand why packages must travel hundreds of kilometers west only to turn around and return almost to their point of origin before continuing east. But I watched the package move through time and space before checking in at a depot in Dieppe. From there the shipping delays began. Thanks to weather conditions, I'm pretty sure that the package sat for about a week at the Marine Atlantic ferry terminal. By about day 13, I began to worry that the package would never reach its destination, but on day 15, it was finally delivered to my family.

Thankfully, it appears the chocolate survived shipping. There was no damage to the package and my mother confirmed that the chocolates all appeared to be fine. 

If this is to become an annual event, though, I'm going to need to purchase additional packing materials.  

The 2025 Assortment

The time has come to unveil this year's four-piece assortment!

It includes:

Toffee Cup - Toffee pieces mixed into milk chocolate. It replaces the traditional nut cup.

Polar Bear Paw - Macademia nut "turtle" enrobed in white chocolate. It replaces the traditional salted caramel. 

Wild Blueberry Truffle - A silky dark chocolate truffle made with Newfoundland blueberries.

Sunbutter Swirl - Sunflower seed gianduja in a dark chocolate shell.

Each recipe made between 42 and 53 pieces, so I packaged 42 boxes of chocolates and have a few left over to enjoy over the holidays. 

I'm not going to lie, this year's production run was a bit of a challenge. It was glorious to make chocolate in my new kitchen, which has much more space. As a result, it's very easy to set up stations and move through the process seamlessly instead of moving between a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room. But it took longer than I care to admit for me to adjust to the power of my new microwave, which I use to melt chocolate when working in small batches. 

And two pieces didn't quite turn out as I'd imagined. I think the polar bear paw flavour is dead on. The toasted macademia nuts are absolutely delicious and a great variation on the "turtle" chocolate theme. My caramel, however, is just a shade firmer than I'd like. It's still good -- just not gooey. On the truffle front, it was a challenge to get a robust blueberry flavour, I suspect because the dark chocolate overpowered it. In the future, I would either use white chocolate for the ganache with a dark chocolate shell or I would pulverize freeze dried blueberries and roll the truffle in them to bolster the flavour. This sort of thing is bound to happen when developing recipes, so I'll make notes in my master recipe binder and try them again sometime. 

All of this is a matter of personal preference, of course. I've had several people tell me the polar bear paw was their favourite, while others appreciated that the truffle wasn't more fruit-forward. Chacun à son gout!

I had hoped for an update to my packaging this year, but that didn't quite work out as planned (a story for another blog). That will be a project for 2026. 

For now, I have a few more boxes of chocolate to deliver.

I Ran Out of Chocolate

This week, I made the final piece for the four-piece assortment -- a truffle. It required dark chocolate, for both the ganache and the shell. As I measured out 350g for the ganache, I was surprised that it took the entire bag of leftover chocolate pieces from the week before. I glanced at the callets left in my Cambro container and had a moment of concern before proceeding. I'd never run out of chocolate before. Surely I wouldn't this time...

I prepared the ganache and let it sit for about 90 minutes before scooping the truffles. Once the chocolate had crystallized a little more, I refined the shape into spheres. While they chilled in the fridge, I turned to tempering the chocolate for the hand-rolled shell. This is when panic set in.

I knew I'd need to coat all 50+ truffles twice. I also knew that the more chocolate you temper, the longer your working time is. I figured I'd need about 400-500g to accomplish the task. I had 350g. There was a good chance that I could make it work if I had to, but it meant that there was no room for error. If the chocolate wasn't perfectly tempered, I wouldn't have any chocolate remaining to fix it by seeding. I started contemplating workarounds and concluded that I could always add milk chocolate to the dark if necessary. It wouldn't be ideal, but it was an option in the worst case scenario.  I took a deep breath and told myself to be patient. 

And so I started. Heating and stirring, heating and stirring. When I thought I had the chocolate at the right temperature, I tested it with parchment paper. While waiting for the results, I continued stirring the chocolate. Uncertain if the first test was going to successfully set, I tested the chocolate a second time to confirm it was indeed in temper. It was was ready for coating. 

Armed with a pair of latex gloves, I put a small amount of chocolate on my fingers and rolled each truffle by hand. In the past, I've gotten impatient or tired going through this process, so I kept telling myself to keep it a small amount of chocolate and do 3 truffles before adding more chocolate. After the first coat was done, I repeated the process, this time doing 2 truffles at a time. As I progressed, my upper back started to hurt and I slowed down. By the time I was coating the last five truffles, the chocolate remaining in my bowl was rapidly solidifying. I was out of time.

I moved the two trays of truffles into the fridge for 5 minutes to help the crystallization process along. And after that, I popped them into paper cups so that they would be ready for packaging. 

While I managed to finish the fourth piece for this year's assortment, I still had a few more seasonal chocolate projects to complete. I had run out of chocolate -- not milk or white, but dark -- and on the day after all of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales ended. Of all the luck! I checked each supplier I could think of. All of them had raised their prices again and their offers of free shipping were just a memory. Not only would the price be exorbitant, but it would take at least a week or more to receive the shipment. 

As a final Hail Mary, I checked Costco. When I looked at their site last week, they only had milk chocolate callets available. Much to my surprise, the 811 formulation was suddenly available. I added it to my cart and checked the shipping estimate. It would arrive within a few days. Naturally, I checked out as quickly as possible. 

So production at the chocolate factory was temporarily paused. The weather on Thursday and Friday delayed the delivery, but UPS came through and a 5lb box of chocolate appeared on my front step on Saturday. 

Costco has saved Christmas!