NEW: Vanilla-Kissed Strawberry Bark for Valentine’s Day
It’s hard to believe, but Valentine’s Day is in just three short weeks, and we’ve already received a lot of orders! Don’t leave this important holiday’s gifts until the last minute. With our delayed delivery date option, it’s never too early to order our unique valentine gifts for everyone you love.
Despite the winter season keeping us extraordinarily busy in November and December, we’ve been scheming for months to come up with something new and exciting to offer for this sweetest of holidays. We love creating festive and swoon-inducing vegan chocolates for Valentine’s Day and this year, along with our new line of Artisan Truffles and Caramels, we’re also very excited to introduce you to our latest creation: Vanilla-Kissed Strawberry Bark. As gorgeous and delicious as it sounds, this smooth and creamy vanilla-strawberry bark will have you dreaming of strawberry fields.
Don’t wait to order your own unique valentine gifts for all the most important and chocolate-loving people you hold dear. Other February favorites include cherry chocolate organic brownies, double chocolate chunk organic cookies, and our elegant Chocolate Lover’s Gift Set. Order now!
For the Love of Chocolate
You’ve waited patiently all summer while we tested and perfected our new line of vegan fair-trade chocolates. Well, your wait has finally come to an end. This week we’ll be unveiling our completely reformulated and even-more-gourmet vegan peanut butter cups, peppermint creme patties, luscious artisan truffles and caramels and peppermint bark just in time for the holidays! 
But why, you may ask, did we go to all this trouble reformulating chocolates that were already top of their class? The answer is perfection. Here at Allison’s we’re always striving for perfection and we knew that, as good as our chocolates were before, we could do better. As Allison put it a few days ago, “Our chocolates before were great, these are as close to perfection as I’ve ever taste (and I’ve tasted a LOT of chocolates)!” Amidst all the craziness of launching a new product line, I sat down with Allison last week to get the whole chocolate story from her. Here’s what she had to say:
I love chocolate, but until recently my love affair extended only to tasting and enjoying chocolate in its many forms. Over the past 15 years, as Allison’s Gourmet has grown from a simple vegan bakery to a complete confectionary and gift boutique, I have delighted in creating new decadent goodies to add to our repertoire. The only thing that seemed beyond my patience to master was chocolate. Although I am a supertaster and an accomplished chef and baker, when it came to the realm of the chocolatier, I was intimidated. It’s true.
You see, chocolate is complex and temperamental; it needs to be treated with great care and respect to allow for the fullness of its beauty to unfold. Perhaps that’s why women adore chocolate so–it’s our mirror! There are numerous subtleties involved in chocolates and one false move could land one in the dreaded territory of seized chocolate. The exactitude of the craft make it pretty much impossible to create quality vegan chocolates exclusively by trial and error, and in the past I wasn’t prepared to learn everything I needed to know to be a true chocolate expert. So, in 2005, when I decided to add chocolate gifts to our Allison’s Gourmet family of sweets, I turned to a professional chocolatier to create our products.
This worked well for some time, but as the years passed, I continued to dream about offering chocolates of my own creation with varied flavors and ingredients that matched my predilection. I have a well-developed palate and had eaten enough chocolate in my years of business that I could taste something and tell you what I liked about it and what I would change. I had even helped a friend perfect her chocolates, but still, I hadn’t experienced the art of making chocolates myself. So what’s a perfectionist to do in this scenario? Obey the nagging of my palate and take a Chocolatier course, delve into volumes of research, hours of practice, and weeks of recipe testing of course! And like a good palatal (of or relating to the palate) slave, that’s just what I did.
The chocolate course I embarked on proved immeasurably useful, and the sheer scope of information I learned about chocolate was astounding. It’s been months in the making and I’m pleased to announce my new line of vegan chocolates, lovingly handmade with only the highest-quality ingredients in the exact flavor profiles that delight my palate.
Throughout the last couple of years we’ve sampled a lot of vegan chocolates in our quest for chocolate greatness, and in my opinion, the truffles and caramels she’s created are by far the best I’ve ever had. If you loved our chocolates before (or even if you didn’t) you simply must try these new versions of our classic favorites and some exciting new flavors that we’ve had so much fun experimenting with. 
Our abundant 20-piece chocolate assortment includes eight alluring varieties. Four truffle flavors: Coconut Joy, Orange Blossom, Peppermint Snow, Raspberry Blush and four caramel flavors: Pure Vanilla, Salted Chocolate, Butterscotch Pecan, Mocha. We’d love to know what you think of our new formulas for luscious vegan peanut butter cups and peppermint creme patties, too.
Welcome to the AG Chocolate Revolution!
Vegan MoFos Meet Vegan Monsters!
October is Vegan MoFo month and already just a week in our incredibly talented guest vegan chefs have recreated several of Allison’s “Veganize It!” recipes in mouth-watering detail. 
Congrats to Heather Blackmon and Julia Moran Martz (aka Snarky Vegan) for their commitment to make at least 20 vegan meals this month! We’ll keep you updated on Twitter and Facebook as they submit new recipes and we’ll feature their faves here on the blog too.
This week Allison also announced a very special limited edition Halloween candy: Hard Caramels. They come in four ghoulishly good flavors for your little vegan monsters: Vanilla, Chocolate, Mocha and Butterscotch Pecan, and make the perfect Halloween treat for tricksters of any age. The all organic ingredients are a much healthier choice than the corn syrup laden junk sure to be the
predominant option as door bells are rung across the country by costumed kids this year.
We announced this week that we’ll be officially moving from our Facebook friend page to our Facebook fan page. Many of you already “like” us there, and we hope many more of you will join us! The shift happens officially on November 1 and will allow us to better manage our time and interactions with you in one Facebook home. We look forward to seeing you there and on Twitter! Until next time….
Salted Confections Gift Set: The Photo Shoot
Little known fact: we do all our own photography here at Allison’s Gourmet. And I don’t mean we hire some pro photographer to come take pictures for us. Nope, all those gorgeous photos you seen on our website? All us (not to toot our own horns too much, but I do think we’re pretty awesome for amateurs). Recently we had a photo shoot for the new Salted Confections Gift Set. You can see the finished photos along with our other holiday gifts online at our website and in last week’s post.
Here’s a little peek behind the scenes:
Allison and I seem to be ridiculous perfectionists in similar ways, which makes us perfectly matched to work together. Everything we produce is absolutely top quality whether it’s corporate food gifts, heavenly confections or monthly cookie flavors, so we want the photos of these things perfect too. 
This photo shoot of just one image took us several hours. That was partly because we’re breaking in a new camera and had to learn how to use it. But seriously, the process goes something like this. We take a few photos, go look at them on the computer, go back to the studio table, make minute changes, take a few more photos… And the process continues with tiny changes in angle, number and spacing of salt crystals, plumping up and balancing of caramels and carefully melting chocolate with a heat gun.
Luckily, we’re great friends and we love the work. We also have similar tastes in chocolate (which really keeps us going). Between the chocolates on the side, and the peanut brittle and caramels that were lying around everywhere, we were pretty loopy by the end of it all. 
In looking through the final photos, we had a fit of hysterics over this photo, see if you can figure out why…
NEW: Salted Confections Gift Set
Something new and exciting has been brewing for several months here at Allison’s. Ever since we began adding new tantalizing confection flavors to our inventory last year, we’ve been meaning to make a new collection to show them off. Well, we finally got around to creating the new Salted Confections Gift Set this week, in perfect time for the winter holidays, which, believe it or not, are just around the corner! This fabulously delicious collection takes confection perfection to a whole new level.
Now, I know this whole salted sweets thing is still kind of a newfangled idea to many people. But I say it’s important to try new things and expand your taste horizons. 
In this case, you certainly won’t be disappointed. These confections are sweet and a little saltier than their classic counterparts, but they’re also more peanut-y, caramel-y and chocolate-y, too. You see, salt is a flavor enhancer, which is why it is an ingredient in many foods, both sweet and savory. So, for our salted confections all we’ve done is added a little more of the very best pink Himalayan salt to our already exquisite sweet treats.
Want to try some salted confections, but think a whole set might be too much for you? You’ll also find our salted confections making new appearances in several of our vegan gift baskets along with our vegan cookies, brownies, chocolates and organic coffee.
And now for a small confession. While cleaning up after the photo shoot for this new collection, I ate some of the Salted Brittle that was left over. (Eating delectable treats every day is just one of the many perks of this job.) 
I hadn’t had our Salted Chocolate Brittle in a while, probably since I first tried it when it was a new product, and I had actually forgotten just how outrageously yummy it was! It has now become my new favorite, all over again!
