Did you guys see this yet? I don’t get too excited over press (no, don’t take this the wrong way. It’s always a thrill to see your name in print, but when it comes to translating to direct sales, press isn’t what it used to be), but I have to admit I was really excited when I saw how our Valentine collaboration with West Elm turned out! It’s SO fun. And they did such a terrific job styling the 3 recipes we gave them: a cardamom spiced hot chocolate with orange whipped cream, star anise panna cotta with ginger poached pears, and a meyer lemon cake with blueberry lavender sauce. I LOVE it, so be sure to check it out.

Also in biz news, we have more new retailers who will be carrying our products. This Wednesday we’ll be delivering to Foragers Market in Dumbo and The Plaza Food Hall by Todd English, inside the Concourse level of The Plaza Hotel (yes, *the* Plaza Hotel).

Our marshmallows are also on the shelves at the just opened Haven’s Kitchen, a specialty food shop and cooking school, on 17th Street in Manhattan. Don’t forget we’re also at Gourmet Guild over at 110 Broadway in Williamsburg – all locally sourced products.
 
I think that about covers it, whew!

I love our Valentine’s Day Gift Box for this year. We have all new cookies and a new flavor marshmallow too. Mark’s been making passionfruit marshmallows for years, even before we started the business and I think it was actually the first flavor marshmallows he’s ever made, but we’ve never sold them before.

The chocolate hearts are made with chipotle so they have a spicy kick and then it’s topped with coarse sea salt. The sandwich cookies are lemon rosemary shortbreads and filled with a Meyer Lemon icing.

Order deadlines are February 5th.

Another year…and 2012 will be our 5th year in business. What was that about businesses having a better statistic of surviving every year that it stays in business? Let’s hope so. I was reading the year end tally of businesses that have closed around our neighborhood, mostly restaurants which I guess is not surprising, and it was a depressingly long list. The majority of business owners stated that they simply couldn’t afford the rent increase. Any way you spin it, it’s sad to think about people losing something they worked hard to build. Likewise, a few more of my friends – not brick and mortar stores – decided to close up their businesses last year as well. Makes you think about your own current affairs and why we decide to push on.

 
Maybe you’ve noticed (or maybe you haven’t since we did it quietly), but we increased the prices of our products when we restocked after the holidays. It’s a modest 50 cent increase on most packages and the first price increase since we started in 2008. After 4 years we decided it was time (any maybe overdue). The price of ingredients, particularly butter, have increased each year, yet we just absorbed it rather than passing it on to our customers. Our kitchen rent last year has impacted our numbers as well in a big way. When I really look at the books, it’s a bit disheartening to see how much we actually get to keep as small business owners, after our expenses are paid off. Food businesses have it the worst, I think, and it just seems to get tougher. It makes me think that our goal of having the business support us in full is harder to achieve than I thought unless we make some big moves. It makes it that much hard to quit designing, not when the earning potential and the lack of any real expenses make it so much more profitable. That reality is settling in, but our method of operation has always been slow and steady and while it isn’t really taking us anywhere extraordinary, we are still here…and profitable.

2 other bits of news: There’s a new store in South Williamsburg at 110 Broadway called Gourmet Guild that is carrying our products. The store focuses on local and regional products and has a different arrangement with their vendors than normal wholesale. As a result, we are able to sell some products in the store that aren’t available in other retail outlets such as our Earl Grey Sandwich Cookies (fresh delivery made today!), our calendars, prints and tea towels. We may also be bringing in the Classic Sampler Gift Boxes which many people have asked about in stores, so go check it out and support our local businesses and purveyors.
 
Also for this weekend, Mark is joining a bunch of other local small businesses in an Artisan Market hosted by Williams Sonoma Columbus Circle from 12-4 this Saturday, January 7th (yeah yeah, I realize the irony in posting this right in the same post about supporting the small guy. SIGH)

We’ve built up a nice collection of ornaments the past couple of years and it’s fun to pull them out and have the girls get excited about each one.
 
I have to fight from having guilty feelings every year for being so busy in December that the girls don’t get to do any fun holiday activities until Christmas Eve – or even have our attention, for that matter. This season so far has been particularly hard and it seems so unfair to them, but they don’t really know December as being anything else I guess. Family helps. Grandma comes to visit for a week to give them the attention we can’t give them and Mark’s sister has started the tradition of giving each of them little presents to open all month.
 
We also make sure to get a tree (thank god for free delivery in the neighborhood!) and little things like seeing Claudine’s face completely light up when she comes into the living room to see christmas lights strung around the mirror above our couch remind me that we probably don’t need to do any of that other stuff like visiting Santa (C would probably get scared anyway). But seeing her cry because neither of us have time to play a game of cards with her because we are up to our stressed eyeballs in getting these orders out and work deadlines met makes me sad.
 
December schedules are brutal. Any small business owner who is busy during the holidays knows this. It’s not just us. We’re at the point where we’re pretty delirious from sleep deprivation and working 18-19 hours a day. It’s a game of playing catch up so you don’t fall behind (disastrous!) and through it all, thoughts on how to make next holiday season easier start swirling around. We’re a few days away from a more sane schedule (I hope).

Mark made 1000 marshmallows on Sunday.
 

He also baked about 5000 cookies on Monday. He usually gives an update with a precise count – which he did at 4515 – but then he lost count.
 

I wrapped 400 brownies in 2.45 hours Monday night. I never wrapped that many brownies in one siting before. Here’s a little piece of trivia for your Wednesday evening: I’m the only person who has ever wrapped the brownies. Every single brownie that has gone out in nearly 4 years was wrapped by me.
 

I tied 260 ribbons so far this week with probably 130 more to go before the week is over.
 

I assembled 100 gift boxes today. It took me about 4 hrs. I cut and folded all the paper and cut ribbon before hand to make it go more like an assembly line. I have about 120 more boxes to assemble tomorrow and Friday.
 

Mark and I were remembering our first holiday (which you can find in the archives if you were so inclined to read about such things) and we laughed at how freaked out we were. Our websites weren’t even open for online orders! We were just focusing on a few large corporate orders and we didn’t do nearly as many holiday markets, but we were so sleep deprived and completely overwhelmed.
 
I guess we got faster. I’m glad we can laugh at those olden days now.

Oh, December…you are here. And we are in the throes of Holiday!Cookie!Madness! for our 4th year. Thousands of cookies will be baked per day, hundreds of bows will be tied (have you ever had to tie 200 little ribbons? It always takes longer than you think. 4-5 hours to tie 200 ribbons, for real – and by the 50th ribbon, your fingers forget what to do. I have looked up “how to tie a ribbon” videos on youtube, true fact), paper will be trimmed, folded and stacked for wrapping, and hundreds of packages will be made and stamped. It’s true, every Fall fills us with a little bit of dread as we head into 16 hr work days until the Christmas holiday, but at this point in our 4th year of business, we know what to expect and how much we can handle so we can minimize the crazy at least just a little bit.
 
This year we’re lucky to have a little more help than the past 3 years as two of Mark’s old pastry staff from his restaurant days are coming in 2 days per week on their days off all month to help him bake those thousands of cookies (although Mark can and does bake up to 2000 cookies himself and I still don’t understand how that’s humanly possible, I really don’t). Hopefully that means that we can extend our ordering deadlines by a few days and not turn away some of the larger orders that we sometimes need to in order to maintain our sanity.
 
And the holiday fairs! The season is here and we’re kicking it off by participating in the West Elm/Etsy Handmade Holiday Fair tonight at the West Elm Dumbo store in Brooklyn from 6-9pm.
 
Next weekend, Dec 10 & 11, the Bust Magazine Holiday Craftacular expands to 2 days with a new location in Soho, and we’ll be back at the Brooklyn Flea One Hanson for 5 dates starting December 16th. We’ll have calendars, prints and tea towels available at all 3 events (and thanks to Epicurious for featuring our calendar in their gift guide)
 
The holidays wheeeeeeeeee……zzzzzzzzzzzz

If you haven’t taken a look at our etsy print shop lately (and why would you? I never talk about it here!) there are a ton more new kitchen conversion poster and print colors (like hot pink!).
 
Also in the shop are a bunch more photos, some from our travels to the Outer Banks for those of you who’ve asked, and a few more you might recognize from around here.
 
Use code: BLACK11 for 15% off until Sunday.
 
Did you all have a nice Thanksgiving? Are any of you crazy enough to get up at 4:30am to go shopping at the mall? I think I’ll sleep in…zzz….

The holidays are coming! The holidays are coming! Can you believe Thanksgiving is less than 2 weeks away? Oh…the craziness is about to start. Some biz news to share with you now that some holiday events are being confirmed.
 

We’ll be at the West Elm/ Etsy Holiday Mini Mart on December 1st, 6-9pm in the West Elm Dumbo, Brooklyn store.
This year, the Bust Holiday Craftacular is an entire weekend with a new location! December 10th & 11th at 82 Mercer Street in Soho.
 

We’re also excited to announce that our products are in a new Brooklyn shop in our very own neighborhood. Valley Shepherd Creamery is a NJ based creamery who just opened a store on 211 7th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Support our new local cheese shop!
 
…And Philly friends, more marshmallows and cookies are back on the shelves at Green Aisle Grocery in Philadelphia.
 
For a list of all of our current retailers, visit our retailers page. We may be adding a few more soon.
 
Have a great weekend, friends. We’re having a few girls over from school for Claudine’s Birthday, take 2. I keep forgetting we’re throwing a party. Oh, and my crazy freelance work schedule is over for now (until the crazy holidaze kicks in, that is), so hopefully I’ll be around the blog more next week. I recently passed 1000 posts (this is post 1017)! Craziness!

Mark’s the kind of guy who randomly finds himself on TV (by comparison, I have never been on TV and I’ve lived in NYC most of my life). Within 3 months of moving here way back in the 90s, he was randomly videotaped by a news crew coming out the doors of the train, and one day he saw himself on a news story about subways. That clip got a lot of mileage because he saw that same clip on other Subway stories a few more times. During his time as a Pastry Chef, he did some cooking demos for news shows – you know, where you see a chef on TV cook a dish in under 3 minutes for the “lifestyle” segment or whatever. And then of course, there have been some other brief sightings for the few times our business has been featured on TV.

On tuesday night we tuned into the Cooking Channel’s United Tastes of America’s show about cookies not really knowing what kind of footage we’d see. Well, rather than the usual 30 second mention, they showed the host chatting with Mark at the Brooklyn Flea for quite a few minutes about the Massaman Curry Peanut Butter Sandwiches and the Chocolate Chili Cashew Biscotti. The clip was long enough for me to go get my camera and snap like a million screenshots. Of course Mark and I sort of watched with eyes half closed. You ever watch or hear yourself speaking? It’s nervewracking!!

So we’re doing a Fall sale on our Etsy store. You can use code FALLSALE to get 15% off your entire order. [edit: The Sale is now over. Thanks everyone!]

And lastly, I was interviewed on Donny Tsang’s Great Food Photos. Go check out the site and read about other great food photographers. This interview was particularly fun because for once, it wasn’t about cookies or parenting!

We have 2012 calenders! And they’re are now available for sale here or here. Hope you like them!