theredheadsaid

These cookies were a big hit when I sold them at the Greenpoint Food Market this spring. I can’t take credit for the recipe though, it was given to me by my friend Meg many years ago (though I changed the name)!

Chocolate Kick Cookies

1/2 cup currants
2 T Kahlua
2 oz. unsweetened chocolate
4 oz. bittersweet chocolate
3T butter
7T flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
pinch cayenne pepper
2 eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350.
Combine currants and Kahlua in saucepan; warm over low heat (I just put them in microwave for 30 sec).
Combine the unsweetened and bittersweet chocolates and the butter in a saucepan and melt over low heat, stirring frequently. Set aside to cool.

Combine the flour, baking powder, salt cinnamon, cracked pepper, and cayenne in a small bowl; stir to blend.

Beat the eggs and sugar until page and thick, about 5 minutes. Add the vanilla and melted chocolate; stir to combine.

Fold in the flour mixture. Gently stir in the currants, any remaining Kahlua and the chocolate chips (the dough will be loose). Drop by spoonfuls onto the lined cookie sheets.
Bake 8-10 minutes, until the tops are shiny and the cookies slightly puffy. Let cool 5 minutes before before transferring to racks to cool completely.

Yields about 18 cookies.

I remember watching Sex and the City before I lived in NYC and they would joke how “you’d better go to this restaurant before the Times writes it up and ruins it.” I had no idea how literally that is true. (more…)

I didn’t have many deep thoughts last week so how about a roundup of some cool stuff I discovered?

Cool Neighborhood Stuff

Little Soap Shop in Astoria

On Saturday I hung out with my good friend Meg (of weheartastoria.com and harmoniousbelly.com) and we puttered around Astoria. She took me to her favorite soap shop, aptly called, The Little Soap Shop, located at 22-07B 36th Street, Astoria. In a space no bigger than the average New York bedroom, perky owner Vivian Dritsas has assembled a lovely cache of handmade and glorious-smelling products: soaps, soy candles ($8-$22 in scents like honeysuckle, lavender, raspberry & guava), shea butter creams (seriously decadent), homemade lip balm, and other delightful things. Her soaps smell fabulous and they lather upwonderfully, and leave my skin so so soft. You can find basic scents like gardenia and lavender, but also orange grapefruit, brown sugar & fig, and a secret scent in such demand I would have had to wait WEEKS to get it, vanilla lavendar patchouli (it’s a BLACK soap which is a little intimidating).

Stop in and treat yourself! And peek into Vivian’s little soap lab in the back, especially on her steel table that she’s decorated with positive sayings!

Cool foodie stuff

Coconut Sugar

Meg had the great idea to do a brownie experiment using coconut sugar.Coconut sugar is made from the sap of coconut flowers. It has a lower glycemic index than regular sugar, and has a lovely mild taste – even a little maple-y. It comes in several forms – in a jar (where the top is covered with wax) – and the BIG ROCK kind that you need to grate.

Nourishing Gourmet has a great write-up on the different kinds of coconut sugars.

and that’s about it. Hopefully deep thoughts will return this week!

I’ve been making treats for years, and I’ve even sold them casually through retail, but this is the first time I’ve sold them at a booth at a food market. Here are some of the things I learned from being a vendor at the Greenpoint Food Market.

Before the fair……………………………..

Plan Plan Planity Plan

I was making baked goodies for the fair, and I had to make it the night before so it was fresh, so I really couldn’t do that in advance. But you CAN do things in advance like:

• buying ingredients
• buying supplies (plates, utensils, napkins, bags, tablecloth)
• getting change

But in terms of doing the cooking/baking, plan for errors. Test any new equipment ahead of time. I did NOT do this with a new pan I got, and it turns out I need a lower oven temperature for it because it burned the bottom of my bars. I had to spend extra time salvaging the ones that were still edible AND making other items to make up for the bars that were ruined. FAIL that could have been avoided.

Make sure everything is priced

Some vendors didn’t have prices on their wares. When you put the prices out, you make it easier for the visitor to decide whether they might buy. If you don’t have a price, there’s another hurdle they have to get over. However, I found that if the sample is KICK ASS this is less of a problem.

Bring a friend

I was planning on manning the booth all by myself, but my friend Laurel showed up (I thought just for support) but she stayed with me the whole afternoon, and i was GLAD SHE DID! I didn’t realize that things like manning the sample flow and just chatting and bagging is better with two people. Plus, if things get slow, there is someone to talk to!

Don’t forget the extras

You need to bring more than just your food. Don’t forget:

• a tablecloth
• a dish to put the samples on
• bags to put product in to take away
• napkins (both for cleanliness and for food consumed right away)
• utensils if needed
• knife (for cutting samples if you’re doing it onsite)
• paper towels for yourself (they never have enough onsite)
• tape for hanging signs or various things

Bring enough change

I had foreseen this issue, so I brought with me $100 in change (I did however, bring too many quarters – $30 in quarters was entirely too much!) Bring many ones, and a bunch of fives. Better to have too much than too little, and you don’t want to lose sales if you have to tell someone, “Sorry I don’t have change for a twenty!” (because EVERYONE wants to pay with a $20!) But keep your money bucket out of range of people as they pass by! I was nervous someone would swipe it!

If you are a legitimate business, have a business card with your website on it

Especially when it comes to food, people like to gab about some new food they found. If that new food is you, make it easy for them to do that! Have a business card with your contact/website info on it, people can a) tell their friends about you and b)tweet/blog/Facebook about you when they get home! Make it easy for them to do that!

At the fair………………………………………………………

Have a gimmick to get people to come over

My gimmick at the booth was frosting shots. I had big pastry bags of frosting, and then we had doled out some pretty little sample cups of frosting for 50 cents! (a bargain!)

Stand – don’t sit at the booth if at all possible

Laurel and I stood almost for the entire time of the fair, because we didn’t HAVE chairs. Towards the end, we noticed some free ones, but I soon realized I didn’t like the position it put me in, lower than the buyer’s eye level. It’s easier to engage someone if you are at the same level.

On that note, price realistically, but not foolishly

If possible, visit that particular fair in advance to find out what the other vendors are charging for similar items. You don’t want to be charging $3 for cookies when others are only charging $2. However, if you are using more premium ingredients, your prices shold reflect that (also so you can make a profit). There’s nothing worse than taking money for an item, and kicking yourself when you know you should have charged more.

Greet the booth visitors!

I’ll admit, as a booth visitor I even get nervous roaming over the tables, sometimes hoping the booth babe won’t make eye contact with me JUST YET. But if you say something funny, it breaks the ice. I have food at my booth, so I like to say, (in a slight whisper), “You know, samples don’t have any calories!” It’s a new joke to every visitor but I’m sure Laurel got sick of it after the 100th time! No matter, I shut her up with some cookies!

Also, don’t be afraid to flirt with your visitors. Play a game with them. For a while when guys would come over and view the frosting, I’d say, “are you MAN ENOUGH to try a frosting shot?” Interestingly, more women were man enough than men.

Accept that you might not know what the heck will sell

Maybe you thought for SURE an item would be a hit, and no one is buying it. What went wrong? It might be the flavor of the market. It might be a season thing (my friend gave me some homemade coconut macaroons to sell, and we only sold a few.) I thought they were delicious, but they didn’t sell well. Laurel told me “not many people like coconut.” All my other items were chocolate-based, and chocolate is an easier sell. That’s not to say niche items wouldn’t sell. But it’s all a crapshoot.

About the frosting shots. I was SURE I had a hit on my hands. And in a way, I did. I had tons of people taking PICTURES of the “frosting shot” setup. But few bought frosting. The ones that did were PSYCHED that frosting shots existed, however. More men bought frosting than I would have expected.

Things ARE going to go wrong. Go with it.

Accidents happen. My biggest chocolate frosting bag exploded when I tried to dole out samples. I forgot to get napkins so I gave away more bags than I needed to. When the frosting exploded it ruined one of my signs. All i could say was OH WELL and just have fun with it!

Towards close of the fair, slash your prices!

No one wants to drag the unbought goodies home, and  a little money is better than none. For the last half hour of the show, offer half price, or just “massive discounts” to your prices. Do a two for one!

Also at the end of the day, see if you can do a trade with other vendors!

This is a benefit I didn’t plan on! One of the other vendors came over and wondered if they could trade with ME. WHAT AN IDEA! By the end of the day I had gotten some homemade soda, wasabe pate from Cobra pate, and Bacon Marmalade.

I love it when my friends have birthdays because it gives me an excuse to decorate a cake for them.

This time it was my good friend Elliot. Elliot is OBSESSED with his little hedgehog Maru. So it was obvious what kind of cake I was going to make. Now Maru has many shapes, from round to pie-like, but I thought this pose would lend itself to a cake the best.

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Hitting a “taste of” event is much like going to a craft bazaar, you have to careful not to blow your wad on the first few tables inside the door – and I was up to the challenge when I attended the fourth annual Taste of Long Island City last night at the Gantry State Park Grounds. The Taste of LIC, while a foodie’s funtime, was a benefit for the Chocolate Factory Theater, and also included a silent auction.

The first nibble I tried was a great start – shredded barbeque pork from Lucky Mojo’s. It melted in my mouth, but it’s where I first encountered what would be the night’s trend – the vendors running out of forks and plates! Everyone was friendly though and neighboring vendors were more than happy to share plates and utensils.

While taking a break from my nibbling of the first half of the room, I chatted up the event’s organizer, Sheila Lewandowski, (also executive director of the The Chocolate Factory) about the event’s history. This is the first year the Taste of LIC has been held at a state park location (and the first time such a thing has happened in Queens). The setting was really lovely – it was a magical, hazy evening and many tasters retired to the pier benches to talk, munch on their edibles, and enjoy the New York skyline.

Every year the Taste of LIC has been held, the attendance has doubled, and she estimated there were a 1000 attendees this year! While many “taste of” events focus on an area’s high-end restaurants, Sheila feels it’s important to showcase all types of food/drink establishments that make a neighborhood vibrant, from small places that take pride in their “food art,” to take-out, cafes, and wine/spirit sellers, all of which were represented at Taste of LIC.

See my Flickr picture set.

Some food highlights:

• Sage American Kitchen’s tomato, basil & goat cheese soup, not to mention the miniature versions of their pink snowball cakes, cheesecake brownies, and fake-Hostess cupcakes. I told them that selling of such not-so-naughty servings of their yummy treats would be a goldmine!
• Blend’s latin fusion was a tickle for my tastebuds – “tapatizers” from “sopes,” cornbread with cheese and a black bean sauce to lime-rubbed chicken.
• Lounge47 delivered a juicy, floppy luscious vegetable lasagna, which was perfectly refreshing with a Blue Moon ale.
• Taste of LIC is a big fat food tease because they gave me a sample of Testaccio’s culinary expertise but are making me wait until September until their official opening! Chef Ivan Beacco gave me a sample of something so simple and wonderful you marvel that you hadn’t thought of it yourself: mission fig topped with marscapone cheese and pine nuts. Testaccio’s menu will include “Roman dishes and Northern Italian cuisine.”
• Vesta Vino’s chilled zucchini soup with prosciutto and white bean bruschetta. Though technically not in Long Island City (Vesta is in Astoria), they let them sneak in to share executive chef Michelle Vido’s creations! (I won’t tell if you won’t tell…)
• Manducatis Rustica Italian restaurant wins dual prizes for strangest name and most perfect tiramisu this side of San Francisco. I had to wrestle another girl for one of the last servings! Chef/owner Gianna Cerbone-Teoli told me that she learned the recipe when she was ten years old living in Italy, and she has not changed the traditional recipe in all these years (thank goodness!)
• The longest line I saw was for Bella Via Restaurant’s coal-oven thin crust pizza!
• Court Square Wine & Spirits offered up something new and different – Veev – “the world’s first Açaí spirit.” Açaí is the new trendy health berry that is popping up in juices and smoothies everywhere. While the Veev representative admitted that VeeV can’t be touted as a “health drink” because the distillation process removes some of the berry’s “punch,” I had some straight up with ice & lime and found it to be a most refreshing spirit!

Of course, food is only one part of any dining equation – I look forward to checking out the ambiance of the vendors I sampled.

NOTE: Edited version published on queens.about.com