In my dream I see the CookieCabana.com stopwatch as it has reached 003 Days 00 Hours 00 Minutes 00 Seconds. I am full of excitement... I don't know what will happen in three days' time when the countdown reaches zero... You know, it's sort of like children waiting for Christmas to arrive and open the presents that have been sitting under the tree for the past few days... you don't know if your presents are what you want and expect or... and you'd rather not think about the "or...". Waiting for Christmas is always so painfully exciting.

I just checked, the stopwatch shows 96 Days 17 Hours 19 Minutes 13 Seconds. Then again, a few seconds have already past as I type these words.

Anyway, a few days ago we visited a professional bakery equipment dealer we had visited a couple of months before. We wanted to order our ovens, but we found out that before we order ovens, we must find out if we have a 400 volt outlet where we want to put them.

Also, we wnated to find some sort of a solution for our (my) biggest problem, breaking chocolate blocks into samll enough pieces suitable for cookies. The people had a couple of suggestions, which we will try. You see, we have already selected chocolates from a very well known supplier. This company offers wonderful organic (bio) chocolates, and with great service. The only thing is they sell chocolates in 2.5 kg blocks, which must be broken into pieces before being used in the cookies. Have you ever tried to break up a 4 cm thick piece of chocolate? It's not so easy. I talked with their General Manager to see if they would make our chocolates thinner. He said they would, for orders of minimum 1 ton. At this point, that's a little too much for us. However if we don't find an easier solution , I have designed a tool for this, which we will be discussing with a Werkzeugbau specialist (a toolmaker, a German toolmaker at that) right after the holidays.

So far, for our test batches, I have been breaking chocolates using a simple hand tool originally designed for chopping onions. It does a great job, and every few minutes I can break about 50 grams into small pieces. But, a block of chocolate is 2500 grams, which means 50 grams x 50 chop operations of about 2 minutes each. Oouu my wrist.

By the way, CookieCabana.com is now transferred to us and is connected. A few hours ago we accepted the transfer as complete and authorized escrow.com to pay the seller.

Happy Holidays... and ho ho ho (as Santa says in old movies).