Apparently, for a $175.00 set up fee, you too can trick your friends that you indeed own a chocolate factory, or bestow elegant, tasteful chocolate business gifts to your clients. Somehow if your other fantasy of being as successful as Bill Gates comes true, the question of whether you have a food handling license would probably come up if you decided to go your own way, actually make truffles for 5,000 people and stuffed them into foldable boxes from Joann’s Fabric.

The $175.00 includes the set up of your logo to print on golden-sheened boxes. After that, its all up to you, you just purchase as many different boxes from the tiny to the huge. Of course, you wouldn’t pay $175.00 if you only wanted one box. You would need to order 150 boxes right away, or at least in a 12 month period. If you do not take delivery in that window, a $2.00 storage fee per box will be accrued and the rest will be delivered directly to my house. Not really. But I can keep dreaming, can I?

Do you think custom chocolate products will impress your friends and clients? Or would you do it for your own vanity?

See’s has a Valentine’s Day fundraiser programs that schools, teams and nonprofits can take advantage of. It involves selling select items from See’s regular stable of offerings with a V-Day slant. Chocolate fundraisers can sometimes be a lesson in personal tooth decay or a crapshoot. It is well worth it to groups with a set in audience of candy lovers, but not worth it if the profit margin is low. Chocolate candy bars sometimes have the highest profit margin if you are earning half of the sale price, but let’s face it: You have to sell a zillion to make those fifty cents add up. When you sell larger ticket items, you may sell fewer, but you may profit more on items people might decide to buy at the pharmacy or grocery store if it wasn’t for your team.

Honorably, See’s has a profit calculator. You enter the number or participants, and the number each participant is projected to sell.

With my absolute slacker example with only 5 participants selling maybe one of each item, none of the high ticket items and maybe a few of the low ticket items, the group made $400+ profit. You can use the calculator to speculate as much as you like to see if it makes sense. For groups where there are 50 active participants, the fundraising ends up in the thousands. Of course, this does not take into account that some of the participants might actually be stockpiling the goods for their own future use.

Okay, what the heck is a Pop Up store? Even though most “Pop Ups” happen in hip downtown districts, they are really just temporary storefronts. Like in the mall. But the folks who are even more fashion forward than I am (is that possible?) need a new buzzword and a less utilitarian name to trick everyone into thinking its something new and not a limited-time temporary mall kiosk or storefront.

Yes. This temporary store…I mean Pop Up…is not just “like” in the mall. It is in the mall. But its a better mall. It has a 20 screen movie theater and only half the shoppers come in pajama pants versus in the old mall.

I digress. Back to the chocolate. For those who have cleansed the sugar palate and are now only eating 100% raw, slow boiled cocoa from Malaysia, you might find some of the milk chocolate slightly on the sweet side for you, as I did. The true star here is the bridge mix. I normally don’t like to toss an assortment of chocolate of unknown filling in my mouth, but all of the fruits and nuts are easy to differentiate from each other with their distinctive shapes. The finicky guests who won’t touch dark chocolate, thinking it tastes like ExLax, and the other finicky guests who won’t touch milk chocolate, fearing they are being robbed of important antioxidants and don’t want to waste calories will all duly be satisfied. Yes…there can be peace.

That sounds like something that should happen in one of my weird dreams, though its not too far to reality. I just haven’t tried “toppings.”

There actually is a company in the UK that delivers chocolate the next day if ordered by 3:00 PM. You can get tins of “Emergency Chocolate” (I’d call every day an emergency), and all sorts of gifts to either stand alone or to precede flowers.  (They recommend to order the chocolates to come the day before the flowers as a rule of thumb.)

All of my readers nestled cozily in the United Kingdom (who are the lucky ones here) neglected to inform me of the delightful terminology differences. I can follow you on “loo” and “lorry,” but my eyes grew a lot wider reading about chocolate hampers. That must be the motherload. On the contrary, the “hampers” are not giant laundry baskets full of chocolate, but merely a name for gift baskets of any size and shape.

Chocolate pizzas and single items are generally free to deliver, with the hampers that I looked at requiring a £4.99 standard delivery fee in the mainland, though there are some free delivery offers and some may be more based on size. It couldn’t be easier to send the gift of chocolate to my English friends rather than posting them a gift and worrying if they’ll get it in time for Christmas. Who is on your list that is deserving, or will you order one for you, and one for you…then another one for you?

Chocolate does help you live longer, after all. A study of 8000 Harvard graduates, according to Chocolate.org, suggested that those that were in the habit of eating chocolate lived longer than their chocolate-abstaining friends. So a card along with chocolate should read: “I bought you chocolate instead of a Porsche because I value you as a person and want you to live longer. Sorry about the car.”

In college, a girl I knew dyed her hair in red Koolaid. I don’t remember if it was supposed to be cherry or raspberry, though I had the distinct impression that there was such a flavor as “red” in the Koolaid universe, at least when I was little. I mean, Ecto Cooler was “green” flavored, wasn’t it? I opted to stick out of the candy aisle with my refrigerator-raiding food remedies and Cosmetics Tips, such as the occasional cucumber or exfoliating honey mask (Messy!).

But now… there are “candy eyes.”

The season of writing “eyes” and “candy” in the same sentence pretty much ends at Halloween, save for a few more nights of sugar-induced candy scarfing revelry: The Halloween Hangover. How little I am informed. Apparently, “candy eyes” are actually a trend in Make Up Unlike the powder blue and pink eyeshadow of the early “Valley” area, there is not an 80s Western Barbie doll blue eyelid to be had. You can create a pastel “bridal” look with wispy cotton-candy inspired hues or go for hard candy with colors that could look garish in the wrong hands.  According to YouTube makeup Tutoralista, TiffanyD, “It’s Blue, It’s Pink, It’s Purple!” For the truly daring, add gold and silver.

I think I might skip this candy face trend and go for the more “organic” look as befitting my over-22, yet under-40 age. There must be a bran muffin beige color. With chocolate sprinkles.

Somewhere around 1983, I realized that you could flip to MTV and still watch someone shaking their rear or jumping up and down when mom and dad left the room. That’s not quite accurate. Not to many folks were shaking their rear at that time. They were mostly standing around with spaghetti strainers on their head and moving from the shoulders up only. Sadly, today you can flip on the telly box and not even realize the President is on, since station programming is so splintered.

Commonfolk can relive, I have found, the feeling on being on three different networks at once if one only had a Chocolate shop. Here’s what you do: You somehow get the Food Network to come do a segment of unwrapped featuring your chocolate covered ants, scorpion lolipops or chocolate dipped tipsy cakes. Once that’s in the can, you can flip on the Discovery Channel at a later date to see footage from the same visit on “How It’s Made.” Well, you might get more shots of machines cranking than face time for employees, but heck, it’s publicity. After that, you might trickle on to “Modern Marvels,” lumped in with several other establishments. I forgot. There has got to be a travel segment in there when the Travel Channel discusses your town or city. You could be perpetually the same age on television for the next ten years.

My mouth was watered by Modern Marvels this weekend when they reran a segment at See’s Candy. I saw myself in the background when I was there six years ago. No. I really didn’t. The segment featuring their small curios of boxed chocolate was packed amid other candy making establishments that worked on the small scale or operated the old-fashioned way in some way. I made a mental note to visit them all. I grabbed some See’s at a pop up mall store during Christmas time and was enticed by free samples. The milk chocolate varieties are a bit sweet for my tastes, as I think my taste buds have been complete spoiled lately on $7 organic dark chocolate bars, but the dark chocolate was better suited. My grandfather enjoys the bridge mix, with a variety of nuts, caramels and other goodies thrown in for good measure. He likes to try to guess and decipher each one before he takes a bite. Try it. But don’t lose your dental work!

So, the moral of the story? There really isn’t one. Oh, I guess it is that you don’t have to travel to the factory to try See’s, and you most definitely must find an insider to try to appear as “background shopper person” so that you can laugh at what you wore “back then” ten years from now when your segment is repackaged on all the stations the folks that own the Discovery Channel have their mitts on.

My Favorite Guy and I sometimes joke about miniature ice cream bon bons. A requirement of eating said dessert is to eat them right out of the box while sitting in a scented bubble bath and watching soap operas or Oprah on a wall-mounted bathroom tv. We just aren’t the demographic for that. However, we both love Dove chocolate and Dove Ice Cream bars and by default just cannot say know to Dove Miniatures. They are more of a mini-bar than a bon bon.

We just have to eat them in a manly way, such as putting them on ice and throwing them in the back of the wood trailer and eating them on a break. Just make cutter oil from the chain saw doesn’t get near it. Gravel contamination is fine. Then, there is the woman on the go method. Since dark chocolate is good for you, eat one as a necessary dietary supplement along with your iron pill, and to those who it applies to, half a prenatal vitamin. Suddenly, when it is thus rationed it doesn’t seem so indulgent. I know. With the new Cafe collection, you can replace your morning coffee with Java Chip miniatures.  At 70 calories, you can just jog around your office a few times and it would be like you never had one.

Dove is running “My Mini Moment” contest, where ladies can submit a dossier of their mini moment of escape. A lucky winner will get a mini-getaway to Napa Valley, a mini room makeover or spa treatments for a year. Sounds decadent. I wonder of Dove would give me a year’s supply of Dove if I won, or should I say WHEN i win?

To win…I mean..to enter to win… visit DoveIceCream.com/myminimoment and submit your essay by June 7, 2010.  That is only 21 days from now, so hop to it.

Three days later, the candy aisle at Whole Foods still is pilfered.  The only bar to be had, if the chocolate scanner picked things up correctly, is the Milk Chocolate variety.  That is just plain boresville to a dark chocolate aficionado. My worse fear was momentarily toyed with: what if Endangered Species bars were being discontinued and this was there way of giving us our last fix?  I don’t think so, based on the empty slots remaining on the shelf. If they were truly gone, the whole area would have been remerchandised.   I don’t buy these bars every day or week as it would appear, but since I can’t have them, it makes me want them even more, especially the Goji Berry bar.  I can’t remember what it tasted like.

In the meantime, I guess I will have to be happy with the Kroger sale, but I don’t want to be. They have a limited variety of varieties and they are more expensive.  Sure, its time versus money but perhaps the thrill of the hunt is worth more to me. Perhaps the true answer is that I am just somewhat insane.  Ascribing this task as a worthy pursuit just makes me feel a bit better about my condition.

The moral of the story? If you see said dark chocolate varieties of candy bar, just clean off the shelf.  It may be more chocolate than you need right now but its cheaper than paying full price in the long run. Get thee to a Whole Foods or Kroger’s.  Just stay away from mine.

Happy Good Friday everyone. The above view is from the lofty rafters of Peep Cathedral, where goodwill is wished upon Peepkind. (Note the Darth Vader Pez dispenser head filling in as a gargoyle). You can almost hear the bunny choir as the Bunny Bishop proceeds up the aisle.  The scene is part of the Washington Post’s annual Peep Show: a competition for dioramas featuring JustBorn’s Marshamallow Peeps as the theme. Across the land of the greater District of Columbia area came EEP! (A tribute to the film, Up), The Mad Hatter’s Peep Party, Freedom is Not Free (Korean War Memorial), and Goodnight Peep, based on the children’s book Goodnight, Moon, a tribute to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and many more.

To see more of the delectable dioramas, visit last year’s SnackHound coverage by CLICKING HERE,or hop to the Washington Post.

Because the package is pink (for breast cancer awareness) and brown (for chocolate, of course), I had a bit of trepidation on how the make part of the species would perceive it as far as desirability of packaging.   Of course, they say real men wear pink, but will they buy pink.  To find out, I asked My Favorite Guy.

“What do you think?  Does it look too girlie?”
“No, not at all.  I would buy this.”

Well, that settles that.

Upon opening the bag, we were floored by the aroma.  The most magical, thick and heady smell of dark chocolate bursted forth.  I wondered if it was just one of those situations where the contents were concentrated and it would just go away after a few minutes.   On the contrary, on repeated smellings this was not the case, if “repeated smellings” is even proper English.   While the initial surprise had dissipated, the aroma still lingered after shoving the bag in our faces an hour, and even a day later.  We were also, once again, intrigued by the wrap of the individual candies and the machine that must wrap them.  Does the wrapper bind so tightly that the embossing on the chocolate is translated to the wrapper, or does the wrapping machine indent the symbol on the chocolate?  We are still trying to figure that one out.

The wrap on the candies was a bright, brilliant pink.  Instead of the usual thoughts to ponder, all the quotes were from actual breast cancer survivors from all over the country. While some of the thoughts were specific to Breast Cancer (“There is life after Breast Cancer”), there were inspirational quotes that could be applied to broader circumstances and challenges.   As an added bonus 10% of the sales of Promises of Hope will be directed to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure.   Not only does chocolate make you feel good in general, you can feel even better about making a difference.  On a side note, studies have shown that foods rich in antioxidants, such as dark chocolate, may help prevent cancer.  How appropriate.

I have sampled a lot of different chocolate, due to my status as a chocoholic.  There are cheap candy bars and some chocolates that will cost you $10 an ounce.   I would go as far as to say Dove dark chocolate, in general, is one of the best values in dark chocolate out there.  It isn’t waxy, the ingredient list is short and pronounceable, the consistency is creamy, it is not bitter, the price point is affordable, and it is readily available at grocery stores and pharmacies.