Book weekend begins at…

Thanksgiving dinner is not quite digested, yet we are off on the morning boat today! Today starts a weekend packed with book signing events from here to Portland, Kennebunk, Freeport and Camden. But I am extra excited about today, because I get to spend time signing books and sampling chocolates with some of my favorite people in the world down at SeaBags just off of Commercial Street on Custom House Wharf in the Old Port. Of course their Black Friday Sale starts at 8:00 am, but I’ll be there signing books and sampling chocolates from 2-4. Will we see you there?

A chocolate package outside the box

Natalie’s Restaurant at the Camden Harbour Inn

Stays include a champagne breakfast

Camden Harbour Inn

I love November, and now I have one more reason to add to long list of reasons why.

The month began with a surprise phone call from Dessert Professional Magazine editor Matthew Stevens, informing me that they had chosen Black Dinah Chocolatiers as one of the top ten chocolatiers in North America for 2011.

To receive the frosting on the cake (the cake being, of course, the magical month of November), before it’s even baked is astonishing, if somewhat disconcerting. This is an honor I never in a million years expected. I mean, really, four years ago Steve and I were looking forlornly out our second story office window, onto a winter-worn, snow-patched yard, wondering if anyone would ever know where we were or what we were trying to do way out here. In some ways, it didn’t matter. We were embarking on another adventure together! A very favorite pastime of ours, and one in which we take great, big, fat pleasure. But, in more ways, it did matter. We weren’t just bootstrapping this new venture to make ends meet. There was something to prove here. That our communities, far and wide, could embrace creative industry. And that creative industries could not only survive and thrive; but survive and thrive on a remote, year-round island.

Of course, we’re still trying to prove it. And we are completely and utterly floored sometimes by the support we get–not only from our island community, but from our communities on the mainland and beyond. Like the great stores that carry our products. Like the inns and clubs that open up their kitchens so that I can teach chocolate workshops. Like the Maine businesses and individuals that are willing and eager to work collaboratively with us to make this idea burn brighter. Like the publisher who asked me to write a book. Like the editors at Dessert Professional.

And most recently, an incredible offer from the hosts at the award-winning Camden Harbour Inn and Natalie’s Restaurant who are offering a weekend stay package November 26th & 27th in honor of my book Desserted. Get all the delicious details at the Natilie’s website, or at the Inn’s. But I recommend that you shoot straight to the menu for the special Au Chocolate dinner scheduled for Sunday the 27th. Designed by Natalie’s chef Geoffroy Deconinck (nominated as Best New  Chef in the USA by Food & Wine), the menu features a three-course dinner inspired by the essays and recipes in my book, and celebrates chocolate in every bite. There will be a Prosecco reception beginning at 5pm, during which I will give a brief cooking demonstration from one of the recipes in my book. The dinner preparation will then be passed on to Geoffroy’s more expert hands, and I’ll have honor to visit with the evening’s guests!

This dinner will wind up an entire weekend of book events from Kennebunk, up the coast, which I will be highlighting in the coming days. However, seating and space at the Inn is limited, and I wanted to get the word out as soon as possible. I hope you can join, myself, DownEast Books and the Camden Harbour Inn and Natalie’s team at this very special event!

Desserted: Recipes and Tales from an Island Chocolatier

Desserted: Recipes and Tales from an Island Chocolatier by Kate Shaffer

It’s here! My new book features a foreword by best-selling author and fisherman Linda Greenlaw, beautiful photography by Stacey Cramp, lots of chocolatey recipes from our kitchen on Isle au Haut, and essays about my slightly wacky life as the village chocolatier.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting where I’ll be for signings, tastings, etc, as we get closer to the holiday season.

If you would like to buy a signed copy of the book, and can’t make it to one of my signings, then you can purchase a signed copy by clicking here, or on the link on the right side bar. I hope you like it as much as I do!

Performance anxiety

When I was a sophomore in high school, I sang my heart out in a 1940’s-style rendition of “Blue Moon” in the annual school-wide talent show, with my buddy Sean playing saxophone as back-up.  It was fun, and I got to wear a sexy dress and make-up (otherwise, forbidden in my household) and I didn’t worry too much about how well I sang or how silly I may have looked up there on stage. I have never been much of an actor (too awkward, bad posture), but ever since I was little I’ve found it easy to completely tune-out my surroundings and engulf myself utterly amid the story in my head. And though I was aware that the goal was to entertain, I guess I was so elated at the act of entertaining myself, it never occurred to me that there was an audience waiting to be entertained, as well.

Selfish, I guess. Self-absorbed? Maybe. But when my mother and sister and brother and friends came to congratulate me at the end of that performance on that spring night 24 years ago, I found myself dubious of their accolades. “Wonderful?” “Stunning?” I repeated to myself. But I’m not a singer. Not a performer. I wasn’t trying to be wonderful. It was just fun.

In 1987, there were no iPhones with which an audience could casually and instantly record a school auditorium performance. The only cameras allowed were the ones that the yearbook staff borrowed from campus offices to record both the mundane and climactic events of every school year. When the yearbook for my sophomore year was released several months later, I was shocked to discover a ginormous (a word that did not exist at the time) picture of a long-legged, microphone-wielding young woman wearing my friend’s sexy black dress. The girl was clearly in the act of singing—her mouth a sultry, lipsticked “oooo” (as in “bluuuuuue” or “moooon”)–with my buddy Sean grooving on his sax in the background.

Oh, it’s Sean! I thought. Cool! And then I read the caption: “Sophomore Katie Gerteis tries a performance of ‘Blue Moon.’”

Right. Double-whammy. First, to realize, after looking back at the picture of the strange girl, that she’s me. And second, that odd, odd choice of word, tries.

Yearbooks, for the sophomore in high school, are sort of like People magazine is for me now; a guilty pleasure at viewing the photographs of our contemporaries, more than the words that accompany those images.

The caption of that photo flitted in, then out, of my brain. What stuck was the thrill of associating that glamorous black-and-white photo with the plain girl that arrived at class clad in baggy shirts and jeans, or her swim team-issued sweat suit.

It was some years later, after I had returned from a year abroad and was preparing to move across country to attend college, that I found myself in my childhood bedroom looking through my high school yearbooks with an old schoolmate and another, older girl she had been hanging out with. The pages of my 1987 yearbook fell to the black and white picture of me in the sexy dress, and the older girl exclaimed that she had been at that talent show.

“Oh,” she said, with all the wisdom of a girl in her late teens, “she was just awful. I was embarrassed for her just watching!”

“That’s me,” I said, flatly, in an attempt to prevent further embarrassment on both our parts. I had learned a lot about communication that year, having had to navigate my teenage angst in another language. Sometimes, with words, less is more. It shut her up, and we went on to do other things that day.

But her unwittingly candid critique haunted me that summer before my first year at college. It haunted me, and it rang about as true as the compliments my family and friends had gushed a few years before. “Awful?” I considered. But I was having so much fun!

Today, I was filmed for a cooking segment on a local TV show as part of the promotion for my new book. I’ve been filmed for TV a handful of times, and I’ve been surprised to discover that I don’t get all that nervous. In fact, it’s a little unnerving how much I don’t get nervous. I guess a big part of me knows that I will get lost in the moment, in the act of whatever I’m doing. And though, it’s not so much about entertaining myself anymore—and more about just getting the damn job done—the effect is much the same. I forget there’s an audience.

I guess that’s what culls out the entertainers from people like me (that, and many, many other things). It wasn’t until after we had finished filming the segment, and I was halfway up the coast from Portland, that I remembered about the audience. “Uh oh,” I thought. And then, unbidden, that long-dormant memory of the caption on that 24-year-old photo, and that sticky, heavy word, tries.

I found myself wondering who wrote that caption. Did they mean what I thought they meant? And what exactly did I think they meant? And then, as I passed the service station in Gardner and the need for gas shook me out of my reverie, I thought, “Am I really this concerned about a caption written a quarter of a century ago?”

Moments come and go. And so does unnecessary worry. But pictures—and the written word—stick around for a good long time. I lost that yearbook years ago, in one of my many moves back and forth across the country. So, consumed with curiosity (and at the risk of appearing egocentric) I appealed to my high school friends on Facebook for a copy of that photo.  It arrived in my mailbox moments later.

It was much as I remembered it. Time has not erased too much of the truth. But upon reading that mysterious caption again, I smiled. The author, though they had the right idea, got the word wrong. That moment on stage was much like many throughout my life—successes and failures alike. I did not try that performance, no. I tasted it.

PS: If you’d like to see me forget about the audience on TV (and learn how to make my chocolate cinnamon buns), tune in tonight to “207″ at 7:00 pm on WCSH6 Portland. Or check out the link when it appears on their website.

Frogletiers take the Smithsonian!

Just the other week, as the orders were pouring in for our chocolate Frogletiers (thanks to a super cute, full-page photo in Martha Stewart Living’s special Halloween issue), I turned to Steve and said “We need to figure out a way to thank the frog gods, or something. They’ve been awfully good to us.”

So I couldn’t help but get a little giddy while listening to a phone message from a customer that day. “We’d like to use your frogletiers as a favor for the premier of a film about the amphibian crisis.”

To be honest, I had no idea there WAS an amphibian crisis. So, when we called back the customer, a lovely woman named Pamela, Director of Communications at the Smithsonian National Zoo, and asked for more information, she chuckled. “Information? Oh, we have loads of information!”

Pamela directed us to the SNZ’s website, where we learned that, of the world’s 6,000 amphibian species, 42% of them are disappearing at an alarming rate, and we will see their extinction in our lifetime. This rate of decline is absolutely unprecedented, and Smithsonian is working hard to educate the public and rescue breeding populations of species most at risk.

Tonight, the Smithsonian Channel (yes, they have their own network) will premier a documentary about the amphibian crisis at an invitation only gala at the National Zoo. And each of those guests will leave with a small favor of colorful chocolate frogs from a tiny little chocolate company, seven miles out to sea from the rocky Maine coast, where there is a tiny human population that cares a lot about frogs, too.

Cider doughnuts so good, they warrant a second posting

So in a fit of online self-congratulation for a near perfect execution of cider doughnuts yesterday morning, I promised our FB peeps that I’d finally break my long blog silence and post the recipe.

Later, as I was enjoying my second cup of coffee, and slowly recovering from the previous nights escapades in wine and ABBA (if that sounds fun, it is: but I caution you on mixing the two), I began to have an inkling of a memory of posting this recipe once before. Almost exactly a year, ago, in fact.

I wish I had remembered that I had already developed a cider doughnut recipe, when, 3 weeks ago, I started developing a cider doughnut recipe. You know what I’m saying? Anyhoo, this latest version is much like last year’s (nothing like re-inventing the wheel), with just a few little changes. The changes, I think, warrant this second posting. The resulting pastry is dark and crunchy on the outside, and soft, buttery and apple-y fragrant on the inside. But if you can’t find boiled cider (read a great article on boiled cider here), and don’t have any apple sauce on hand, the recipe from last year will stand in as an almost-as-delicious substitute.

Apple Cider Doughnuts, redux

1 cup sugar (I use organic evaporated cane juice)

2 eggs

1/2 cup boiled cider

3/4 cup unsweetened apple sauce

1 teaspoon baking soda

3 tablespoons butter, melted

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

3-3/4 to 4 cups flour

Roughly 6 cups vegetable oil for frying (I use safflower oil)

About a cup of superfine sugar

Method:

With an electric beater, the paddle attachment of your stand mixer, or by hand, beat together 1 cup sugar and the eggs until the mixture is light in color.

In a medium size bowl (or a large measuring cup), mix together the boiled cider, apple sauce and the baking soda. Don’t let all that foaming and frothing worry you. That’s just the baking soda reacting to the acid in the apples. Beat this mixture into the sugar and eggs.

Next, stir in the melted butter, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder and vanilla. Finally, add 3-3/4 cups of flour and mix just until the batter is combined. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for several hours or overnight.

When you’re ready to fry the doughnuts, heat the oil in a large cast iron pot to 375 degrees. While the oil is heating, turn your chilled batter out onto a well-floured countertop and pat or roll the batter to about 1/2-inch thickness. Cut as many doughnuts as possible with a 2-inch doughnut cutter. Scrape the scraps together gently, re-roll and cut one more time.

When the oil has reached the correct temperature, fry the doughnuts, a few minutes on each side, until they turn a burnished golden brown. Remove them to a cookie sheet lined thickly with paper towels and allow to drain.

Mix about a cup of superfine sugar and the remaining 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon in a paper lunch bag. Before the fried doughnuts are completely cool, toss a few at a time into the bag, and shake to coat.

It’s a Schmoolie!

After the Boston Globe ran a very nice story on BDC last Wednesday (haven’t read it? Click here), I’ve had many requests for the recipe for our Schmoolie that author Amy Sutherland mentioned in her article. And here I thought that everyone would be thrilled with the Banana-Coconut Chocolate Swirl Bread from my upcoming cookbook. Wrongo!

So, here it is: in all it’s delicious, humble, bundled up glory.

Schmoolie

3-1/4 cups flour

2 tsp. instant yeast

1-1/2 tsp. salt

3 tbsp. sugar

4 tbsp. butter, melted

1-1/4 cups milk, warmed slightly

3 roasted red peppers (I use the kind that come in a jar), diced

8 oz. feta cheese, crumbled

1 14-oz can quartered artichoke hearts

1/4 cup pitted kalamata olives, chopped

a handful of parsley, chopped

3 or 4 green onions, sliced

Combine the flour, yeast, salt, butter, sugar and milk in the bowl of a stand mixer and knead with the dough hook for 10 minutes. Add more flour as necessary to create a soft, elastic bread dough. (You can also do this by hand, of course.) When done kneading, form the dough into a ball, and place it in a greased bowl. Cover the bowl with some plastic wrap or a towel and allow the dough to rise for an hour, or until it is doubled in size.

While the dough is rising, combine the roasted red peppers, feta cheese, artichoke hearts, olives, parsley and green onions in a medium size bowl. Set aside.

When the bread dough is ready, heat your oven to 350 degrees. Remove the dough from the bowl and, on a lightly floured board, roll it out into roughly an 11″x18″ rectangle. Cut this rectangle into 8 smaller rectangles by cutting the dough in half, lengthwise; and then quartering each half.

Place about 1/4 cup of filling onto the center of each little rectangle. Use up all the filling.

Next, fold the corners of a rectangle of dough up over the filling; then the sides, and pinch together the edges to adhere. I always imagine that I am making a hobo bundle. Repeat this with each dough rectangle.

Place the bundles on an 11″x18″ cookie sheet, and pop them in the oven for about 20-25 minutes, or until the dough is golden and puffed. Serve them immediately, or, pop one in your pocket and go for a long hike. Schmoolies taste best when eaten under a tree, streamside, in the middle of a mossy island woods.

South Station

I bought a new suitcase at the end of February; a bright red number with wheels and a handle. It has since followed me to Zurich, over and through the snows of the Swiss and Italian Alps, after which it soaked up a lot of spring rain in Tuscany. In April I packed it full of bowls, rubber spatulas, and chocolate and dragged it onto a ferry to Swan’s Island to teach a chocolate making class. Last weekend, it rode shotgun to Vermont to spend the weekend in a lake house while I introduced the tiny town of Vergennes to our chocolate.

This morning it sits beside me at Boston’s South Station, as I wait for the train to New York City. It’s early on this Mother’s Day Sunday, but everyone here seems to be in a fabulous mood, after witnessing a mind-blowing Celtics game last night.

In a few hours, I will meet my friend Krystal at Penn Station, and then will embark on 6 full days in the city; commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan each day to attend a workshop for women and multi-cultural owned businesses, hosted by Macy’s. I can’t imagine a place more different from the island, than this other island a 6 hour train ride–and an entire world away. All aboard!

Home is where you hang your mug

The very first dwelling that Steve and I shared as a couple was a 1981 Volkswagen van.  It was October in Santa Cruz,  and I was in the middle of writing my senior thesis for my college graduation requirement while moonlighting full-time as a waitress at a downtown breakfast and lunch joint.  Steve was in the throes of a troublesome business partnership, managing a busy computer retail and repair store.

It was the late 90′s, and Santa Cruz was–like much of California–experiencing the great housing boom of the 20th century.  House purchases and rentals, alike, were completely unaffordable for young couples like us (though, in retrospect, we probably could have gotten a bank to give us a loan, but we never even entertained the idea.  I was barely 25, a student and a waitress; the thought of purchasing a half-a-million dollar house?  I mean it was beyond ridiculous.).   Our communal living situation had just dissolved, and though we had managed to secure a rental (a sweet, not-far-from-downtown two bedroom for $1350/month), the timing was just a wee bit off.

So, the Volkswagen was a month-long interim living situation while we waited to occupy our house.  We had a dog each, and little practice at co-habitation in such close quarters (who does?).  Let’s just say, it was an inauspicious start to our life together.

The plan, at least as much as there was one, was to spend the week nights in a campground in the mountains just above town, and then take full advantage of our mobility by exploring the rest of the coast on the weekends.  We began in earnest; I even purchased two coffee cups and a small french press for the van–our very first dishes.  And we did manage a couple of out of town trips during the month.  However, most nights we were both so exhausted from our respective work days, that we ended up bunking down in the parking lot behind Steve’s downtown computer store.

Strangely enough, despite what turned out to be an undesirable living situation, I found that there was one thing that made the van feel like home.  The coffee.  Every morning, Steve and I shared a pot from our French press, in our two newly acquired mugs, and it magically made everything, well, normal.

The month-long experiment finally ended when we let ourselves into our dark house on Halloween night, laid down on the living room floor with our dogs, and listened for hours as costumed revelers passed our unlit porch by.  The next morning, we got up, retrieved the French press and the mugs from the van, and made coffee in our empty kitchen.  Even before we poured the thick hot brew into our mugs, the scent of the coffee alone had magically transformed the empty house into a home.

Since those first weeks of co-habitation, together Steve and I have rented two houses, slept on a many a friendly couch/floor/spare bedroom, spent six months on the road in a leaky camper, and bought a home.  The mugs and the press pot travelled wherever we did.  They moved from California to Maine, mainland to the island.

A few months ago, we exchanged a certain amount of money for the deed to the house we have occupied and run our business out of for almost 5 years.  Ownership is a funny thing.  The place, of course, was home the first time we made coffee here.  And then home to countless other people who enjoy a cup in our attached cafe.  But after returning from Portland in late January, it feels different.  A kind of responsibility that extends beyond paying a mortgage every month.  A responsibility as home-owners to care for the house in a way that celebrates our values.  To live in and around our home with respect to our neighbors and our community–our communities here on the island and in the big wide world.  How will we move through this world?  How will we negotiate the differing landscapes of island and mainland? Will we choose to live isolated?  Or will we welcome and work for the fact that we are part of a larger whole?  It is a new and challenging and wonderful adventure.  And I look forward to telling you about it…over a cup of coffee.

Monday, Monday

Steve throws a mug of boiling water into a below zero breeze--Insta-Snow!

“Boat running?” I facebooked to Dixie Boon this morning.  Dixie delivers the mail to and from the boat every morning, so is usually the first to know if the boat schedule has gone awry.

And there was certainly reason for schedule upsets this morning.  With the mercury below zero and wind chills at minus twenty, the boat captains hesitate to risk poor visibility or a broken windshield from freezing spray.  Factor in a dead low tide, which forces the captains to abandon the protection of the islands and thorofare, and instead venture around the open head of Kimball’s island, and I was thinking there might be a possibility that the Monday morning schedule would be pushed back a few hours for the tide to come in.

“Far as I know they’re underway,” Dixie sent back. “Still picking me up?”

“Will do!” I typed, then jumped out of bed to throw on long underwear and wool  socks.  Dixie’s truck won’t start when it gets this cold, so Steve usually picks her up on his way to deliver our UPS shipments to the boat.

But this morning–as with most Monday mornings–was a little more complicated.

After funding our new kitchen build out of our own pockets for three months while we wait for all the little details of our business loan to get sorted, we’ve finally got a tentative closing date for this Friday.  Unfortunately, this means there are a lot of documents that need to be mailed between mainland lawyers and us and back again, which require notarized signatures and certified post.

So after filling the woodstove, Steve and I loaded up our UPS shipments and ventured out into the frigid morning together.  First stop was the popsicle stand-size post office, where 83-year-old postmistress, Delores Dunn was kind enough to certify and pre-cancel postage on our envelope of documents.  Next, we slid into the town dock, where we got assistant school teacher-cum-Notary Public Louise’s truck un-stuck, started and scraped just before the mailboat pulled in.  Louise ended up loaning her truck to the school district superintendent who had travelled down for the monthly schoool board meeting, and so Louise, Steve and I all piled into our truck and rushed back to Louise’s house, where she witnessed and sealed the signing of four documents.  From there, we drove to Dixie’s, delivered her to the post office (for, it turned out, no reason since the boat captain got squirrely and ended up hiking to the PO to get the mail himself), then back to Dixie’s, then again to Louise’s where she had finished making her lunch, and then to the school to drop Louise at work and back to her truck.

On our way home, Dick Hines waved us down to tell us about a cold-day trick to try (see picture above), because you gotta have a little fun on a day like today.

Happy Monday!