This fun chocolate making project shows how to make a gingerbread house using chocolate in place of gingerbread. It makes a great centerpiece for the holidays andyou will want to bring one when visiting.

The step by step project instructions are heavily illustrated and take up four pages.

See: Chocolate Gingerbread House Project

Back in 1998 I did this project with my son’s Cub Scout Den. It was so successful that I wrote it up and published it to the web in December of that year. I have just rewritten and modernized the project article.

Beeswax makes a surprisingly durable Christmas tree ornament and we still use these on our tree each year. The materials are few and they are very easy to make. They are a great alternate use for your candle making materials and are made in low cost chocolate molds.

By warming these gently with a blow dryer after unpacking them each year, the shine and beeswax aroma is renewed.

This technique also works well for other seasons and occasions.

See: Beeswax Christmas Tree Ornaments Project

I have just finished modernizing my Tie Dye Candles Type 2 article which was originally published to the web in September of 1998. Although it makes very beautiful candles and was one of my most popular articles, one of the original materials use by it is no longer manufactured and it took some experimenting to come up with an alternate.

This is one of the most vivid candles I have ever designed and they are a lot of fun to make. The updated project contains two heavily illustrated pages.

See: Tie Dye Candle Type 2 Project

Many chocolate makers have always pulled up short when deciding to make cream filled chocolates due to the amount of time and effort it takes to make the filling. Traditionally this would include gathering materials, preparing / cooking it,  and cleanup - often with a recipe that required precise measuring and timing to work properly and has a short storage life.  All in all, a vast amount of work for somone looking to make just a few dozen chocolates.

I have recently been working with ready made fillings designed specifically for chocolate and have come up with a great set of basic filled chocolate instructions using Cremeco Centers (fillings).  This great product looks and tastes great, is easy to use, and has virtually no cleanup.  As an added bonus, leftover filling is easy to store.

See: Cream Filled Chocolate Making Instructions

Ever have a situation when it was vital not to laugh, but nearly impossible not to?

About 25 years ago I owned a small tropical fish store. One evening a sweet little old lady walks in because her goldfish was sick. When I asked her to describe its symptoms, she explained that her fish was constipated and needed some medicine. As you might imagine I nearly ruptured some internal organs trying to hold back the laughter.

Being a true professional I managed to keep a straight face as I explained that they do not make fish laxatives, but she was quite insistant on buying something to help her constipated fish. So after a long hard look at my merchandise, I decided that a small package of a vegetable based fish food might provide the necessary fiber (I still felt bad about selling her anything for a fish that was probably not sick other than in her mind, but at least I kept it down to 59 cents or so).

Several days later she stopped in to thank me, saying that the new food did the trick and Rover (or whatever the fish’s name was) was feeling much better. After further conversation it turns out she may not have been as strange as my initial impression of her seemed. She had been feeding Rover a tropical fish food which is much higher in protein than goldfish food, although to this day I can’t figure out how she determined the fish was constipated.

To sum this up - Even when a customer seems to be irrational, they may actually have a legitimate problem. So always treat every customer problem or complaint as a legitimate problem. Sometimes they are using your product in a way not intended, it may be a defective product, or maybe they just know something you don’t.

Being an avid outdoorsman I spend a lot of time in the forests of New York (don’t look too suprised - New York is huge and encompasses much more than NYC and suburbs, there are parts where you could walk for days without seeing people, roads, or houses).

Over the years I have seen a lot of interesting stuff:

• Mountain Lions have literally walked past me (within 40 feet) on 2 occasions.
• Black bears have walked within 25 feet of me.
• Bald Eagles have hung out in my back yard.
• Owls have landed within 5 feet of me and hung out for a while on 3 occasions.
• I’ve seen  Red Tailed Hawks snatch up chipmonks twice.
• I’ve watched a Bobcat pounce on a squirrel and miss.
• An otter likes to hang out on a rock by my cabin and eat freshwater clams.
• I’ve watched Bald Eagles doing some fishing.
• I’ve had a pair of Porcupines walk across my boots.
• I’ve had numerous birds land on me.
• I’ve shared a snack with a red squirrel that was sitting on my boot.
• Several deer have walked to within touching distance (no I wasn’t stupid enough to try and touch them).
• Skunks have walked up to me several times.
• A skunk once entered a screen tent I was sitting in.
• I saw an Ermine in the wild carrying a field mouse it had just caught.
• Twice coyotes have stalked up on me.
• I have a family of flying squirrels living in the attic of my cabin (they are really cute and very rarely come down into the actual cabin, although it is fun to sit on the deck at night and watch them coming and going from the attic vents).

You may be asking yourself whats the point already. Well tonight I saw the strangest thing ever - a skunk that was over 3 feet long from nose to tail and nearly all white - just a thin black stripe down its back.

I know I am accurate on its size because I was looking straight down on it from my deck and it was at least 3/4 as long as my armspan and I am 6′2″ so I have a big armspan. At first glance I thought someone had lost a persian cat, but there has never been a persian cat this huge.

It just goes to show - you may see or learn something new every day if you are open to it.

As many of you are aware, I have been offering a free Introduction To Candle Making course on this site since 2003. That course is immensely popular and I have decided to expand the course offerings.

In preparation for the expanded course offerings I have set up a new domain to enable upgrading the course software without interruption of the existing course. The free candle making course has been moved to it’s new home and additional courses are now under development.

The new course site is Artisan School

Here is a direct link to the Introduction To Candle Making Course in its new home.

We are planning to expand course offerings beyond candle making as well. If you are interested in designing and teaching a course at Artisan School, look over the site then use the teach a course link to apply. We will consider courses in most artisan, craft, and art subjects.

Tonight while trying to research legitimate charities, I wound up at the FBI web site in the Freedom Of Information Act area. It was exceptionally slow to load, so I didn’t really wait for most of the stuff to download, but I did see a name that struck me as out of place - Audy Murphy.

Now for those youngsters reading this Audy Murphy was the most decorated hero of WWII and even a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Truly a man to admire and who gave above and beyond the call of duty to his country.

Imagine my suprise when the FBI synopsis of him read as follows:

“Audie Leon Murphy was born June 20, 1924, in Kingston, Texas. Audie was an actor and a Hollywood producer. During World War II, he served in the United States Army and was decorated with many honors. Murphy was also in the United States Army Reserves on “standby” status. Before achieving his stardom status, he was a sharecropper, a clerk and a gas station attendant. Murphy was appointed to the State Board of Examiners in Veterinary Medicine by Governor Edmund G. Brown. On his farm, Murphy raised quarter horses and cattle. He later sold his farm to Bob Hope. Murphy died in an airplane crash on May 29, 1971, near Roanoke, Virginia.”

Although I am rather suprised that the FBI felt a need to keep tabs on this patriot, what I find appalling is the way they summed up his life. No mention of the CMH, or the fact that his true claim to fame was not acting or farming - but the that he was an outstanding soildier and patriot.

Really, the Congressional Medal of Honor is so rarely awarded that nothing he did before or after could possibly mean more in the eyes of of US citizens. Except perhaps his own, since heros rarely view themselves as such.

For years I have been saying that candles touch people on a primal level and truly believed it, but tonight really drove that home.

I am on vacation and my cabin is somewhat remote. It sits on a small lake near the top of a mountain 200 miles north of New York City and normally you don’t even see airplane lights. Tonight is overcast and not even a star was visible so after dinner, so I  lit a bunch of candles on the deck railing (in glass holders) and turned off the house lights.

It is amazing how comforting those candles are - especially when no other lights are visible in any direction. The silence was deafening so I cranked up some Jefferson Airplane, Yes, and Pink Floyd - the primal rythms of my generation.

It’s a coccoon of warm light and comforting sound. Probably not far removed from what my distant ancestors experienced in cave dwelling days. As a modern day caveman, I can close my eyes and envision a fire and drums beating.

Call it racial memory or instinct, some things the human race will never outgrow.

Many chocolate makers are not aware that chocolate coating wafers may be mixed with each other to create custom colors. This has some great applications when making wedding favors or other things that might require an exact color. A color mixing chart for Merckens coatings has been added to our web site. It shows the blending proportions for over 60 popular colors. Far more combinations are possible, however that will require some experimenting.

See: Chocolate Coatings Color Chart