Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s02e13 Episode Script
Love Is In the Air
You're gonna love this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" We're talking heart-shaped cookies with a sweet coating of pink and red sugar, classic candies that have romance written all over them, and a red velvet take on breakfast in bed.
Any way you look at it, love is in the air.
You know what gets my heart all aflutter? Cookies.
But not just any cookies.
I'm talking about these.
The sweet, colorful, heart-shaped cookies by Traditional Baking Company of Bloomington, California.
They bake over 70,000 cases of these scrumptious cookies each year.
And they're a hit with everyone from young lovers to busy mothers.
Why bake for a school party when there are 24 festive cookies to a package? And it just so happens, the average school class is The company is so passionate about their heart-shaped cookies, they keep some of their ingredients a guarded secret.
Flour, sugar, eggs, salt, and a few other things that I would not like to mention.
The unmentionable ingredients are a secret combination of spices that are mixed together in batches in a prescale room.
These secret spices are then married with the main ingredients, and whipped together in an industrial mixture.
Our batches are anywhere from Once the dough is mixed, it's ready to hop over to the next step.
The dough goes on a crane.
And our line operators lift it over to the hopper.
The next phase is the real heart of the operation because this is where the cookies get their unique identity.
The dough goes through a rotary cutter which cuts the dough into heart-shaped cookies.
Then, the cookies slide onto a moving belt and through a water bath.
The reason why we do a water bath versus egg bath We do them both.
But on this particular cookie, we like the color the way it is.
Egg will actually give it a little bit more darker tone to it.
The thin coating of water ensures the cookies are good and moist for what comes next a shower of pink and red sugar crystals.
Mm.
I can taste them already.
The cookies pass underneath a sugar topper that actually gets manually fed from the top and drops straight down through little holes onto the cookie.
These cookies are looking delish.
But their journey to our heart and tummies has just begun.
Next, they have to go through this incredibly long oven.
The actual ovens are 180 feet long.
It may be a long oven, but these cookies move fast.
They get through it in approximately 71/2 minutes.
And they are cooked at a surprisingly low temperature of 165 degrees.
It is a low temperature.
But this a fast-baking cookie.
And it doesn't take that long to bake it.
We need to keep that white color consistency.
When the cookies come out of the oven, I must say, these little heartthrobs are still pretty hot.
So the temperature of the cookies, when they come off the oven, are about 105 degrees.
That's still a little too hot for packaging, so next, they head off to the cooling fans.
After 8 minutes on the cooling conveyor, they go to an ingenious machine called the Penny Stacker.
The Penny Stacker is a machine that drops the cookies down, elevator fashion, to stack right on top of each other.
This makes it easier for the two dozen workers to grab the right amount of cookies for the 24-count packages.
So one side will grab one color, and the other will grab the other color, thus packaging the two different colors of cookies in the same tray.
And before you know it, the heart-shaped cookies are ready for sugar lovers everywhere.
I like the flavor with the sugar, and the bite is tremendous.
Coming up, the secret behind taking a classic breakfast staple to a whole new level.
And later, how do they get those romantic sayings on those tiny candy hearts? Hey You may wonder what this next treat has to do with love.
Well, next time you serve someone you love breakfast in bed, you'll wanna be sure this red velvet waffle is on the tray.
The WaffleWaffle Company is trying to redefine the way we think of waffles with a variety of hearty, high-quality waffles that recall their European origins, but are distinctly American in flavor.
What we created is kind of a hybrid between a pastry and a waffle, and that's why we refer to it as a WaffleWaffle, because it's something that's unique.
Partners Sam Rockwell and Justin Samuels started WaffleWaffle in 2009 by renting space in a doughnut shop in the middle of the night.
We took regular waffle irons.
We took simple ingredients, natural ingredients, and made a waffle we really enjoyed.
Demand was strong enough that just a few short years later, they've got their own factory where they've increased their output considerably.
Now we're producing over 50,000 waffles every day.
That's just about 5,000 an hour.
As they've ramped up waffle production, they've also expanded their line to include half a dozen different flavors, enough to appeal to virtually any taste.
It started with our original.
And we have cinnamon.
We do a chocolate chip, a double chocolate.
And we do a maple, a bacon maple, and a red velvet.
That's right red velvet.
Not surprisingly, it's quickly become one of their most popular varieties.
Like all their waffles, the red velvet waffle starts with natural ingredients like flour, sugar, eggs, and butter.
We add a number of flavorings and natural colors to give it that red tint that makes it absolutely delicious.
The final element that goes into this romantic breakfast treat is a special sweetener imported from Europe pearl sugar.
What pearl sugar is, it's a harder, smaller piece of sugar that doesn't melt in the process of us cooking the WaffleWaffle.
So when the finished waffle comes out, you see these really nice white specks inside.
So the consumer gets a waffle that has a unique aesthetic to it, has a nice crunch and a sweetness in every bite, and a slight caramelization.
After the waffle mix is blended together, a bowl lift raises it into the air.
And it gets poured into the extruder, where a guillotine cutter cuts the dough down into a little puck.
Since it is a dough rather than a batter, it has a lot more body to it.
We really can cut it and portion it to the exact size that we need.
Each ball of dough is removed by hand and placed in these cast iron waffle plates, each of which has six compartments.
Those plates then slide down the line, where their tops are automatically closed.
And then they slide into a carousel oven.
They move from right to left, just like a carousel would.
As the plates move through the oven, the dough bakes inside at until they reach the other side, a process that takes just about 2 minutes.
It's a very quick cook time on these waffles.
It's completely streamlined and continuous.
It could go on forever.
Just have to keep feeding dough into it.
As the waffles come out the far side of the carousel oven, they're taken out of the plates by hand with a special pick.
So once we remove the waffles, they're placed on racks to cool so that they're at the correct temperature for the wrapping process.
The waffles cool for about a half an hour before heading down the line for the final inspection and hand packaging.
Each waffle is then individually placed on our flow wrapping line.
They're then pushed into the guillotine cutter, where it is wrapped and cut into perfect size.
When the waffles are finished and packed, we send them to our freezer off site, where they're frozen, they're stored, and they're ready to ship, completely fresh, anywhere in the country.
Wherever that finished product goes, the WaffleWaffle creators wanna make sure it's top quality.
You never know when someone's gonna have a waffle for the first time.
We wanna make sure that first bite, that second bite, and every bite thereafter is amazing.
Despite their attention to detail, there's one thing the company's founders can't control, and that's how people eat a WaffleWaffle.
But that's all right with them.
There's no wrong way to eat a WaffleWaffle.
You could have it as a stand-alone breakfast.
You could have it with eggs.
You could have it with ice cream, whipped cream, berries.
All of those options sound good to me.
Coming up, tiny hearts that make a big statement.
Hey These candies are one of the easiest ways to say "I love you," as well as "tweet me," "text me," and, my favorite, the classic "love bug.
" For more than a century, little candy hearts like these have delivered short but sweet messages, along with a little sugar rush.
It's used when people are afraid to say something, or just as a little outreach or a little gesture to somebody.
Sweethearts trace their origins way back to 1866 when the founders of the NECCO Candy Company made fortune cookie-like candies with messages inside.
A few years later, they started stamping the messages right on the candy itself.
With the treats very popular at weddings, the company made one more innovation using a heart-shaped mold.
It's a decision that definitely paid off.
We sell more of the little NECCO Sweetheart boxes than any other item in the marketplace at Valentine's Day.
And just how many little Sweethearts are we talking about? We make over 21/2 billion Sweethearts every year.
That makes these tiny treats big business.
But it's the personal touch that keeps them so popular.
One of the great things that's so endearing about the Sweethearts brand is that they're very special and hold a special part in people's hearts.
There's many people that reach out to us and ask us for special "marry me" Sweethearts, and they're used as ways to propose to people.
So, what does it take to make a candy that's as sweet as the memories it makes? Naturally, it starts with sugar, lots and lots of sugar.
Grind it up so it's a nice, fine powder.
We add some hydrated gelatin and vegetable gum, some corn syrup in a big mixer.
Then they add one of 18 different flavors, from classics like banana and wintergreen to new tastes like wild berry, grape, and watermelon.
One of those flavors is then added to the rest of the ingredients and mixed together until they've reached a frosting-like consistency.
Then the batter is transported to a forcing head that creates a sheet of dough.
And the sheet of dough is then thinned down by a series of mechanical rolling pins that size down to a Sweetheart thickness.
When the sheet of candy is exactly a 1/4 thick, they add the sayings on top with a print plate.
Each plate has 80 sayings that are printed on the dough.
So it's much like a stamp that you would use to put your return address on an envelope, except this one's made out of metal.
The stamper uses an ink pad with edible inks made of water and food dye.
That process is repeated about so let me do the math.
That works out to be and 672,000 per hour.
That's a lot of hearts.
So now they've got a long, thin sheet of printed dough.
Next stop the cutter.
After we print on the hearts, we have this reciprocating cutter assembly, which consists of a cutter that's a heart shape.
And inside, there's a plunger.
The little heart-shaped cutters are arranged to cut around each of the printed sayings.
And when the dough passes over a gap in the conveyor, they drop right out.
Cool, huh? Just underneath that gap is a conveyor that moves all those freshly printed Sweethearts toward the dryer.
The dryer is 60 feet long and has 13 belts.
We blow air into it at about 150 to 160 degrees.
Any hotter than that and the candy wouldn't just dry, it would melt, especially given how long it spends in there.
It takes about an hour for the candy to traverse all 13 belts or roughly 780 feet of dryer belting that it has to navigate before it comes out the back end.
Even then, the candy isn't totally dry.
The Sweethearts are collected in trays, stacked on pallets, and transferred to a warm room for overnight drying.
The next day, trays of Sweethearts, each one a single color, are brought to a machine for mixing.
It's just a big conveyor belt where we stack the candy up really deep, and it mixes all the colors.
Once thoroughly mixed, they're sent to a cross-conveyor where they get weighed, bagged, and sealed.
Continuously, we're running, on a single machine, these packets of Sweethearts.
That's a lot of candy.
Oh When we return, a sweet way to say "I love you," all the way from France.
Hey Did you know Americans spend over a billion dollars on candy treats every year, just to say "I love you"? Well, here's a tasty confection that's guaranteed to get that message across.
The coconut pink fondant bonbon from See's Candies, Los Angeles.
They've been making this French delight since 1921, when founder Mary See started making candies in her home.
She had a little bungalow, uh, in Pasadena.
And since then, we've come a long way.
We now have over 200 shops.
And with the help of a little automation, the company can now crank out over 31,000 bonbons a year.
But they're still made almost entirely by hand, the way they've been made for almost 75 years.
They start by making that creamy middle with practically the same recipe Mary created.
In these beautiful copper kettles, a mixture of corn syrup and cream are combined.
Then, sugar and salt are measured and added.
That's topped off with water.
And then the kettles are put on the burner and mixed until the sugary solution is brought to a boil.
The temperature is very important for us to get our final bonbon center to the texture that we need it.
Once it reaches a precise temperature, which is a trade secret, the filling moves to the cooling slab.
Here, they add butter because, you know, everything's better with butter.
Then a bit of vanilla and cream gets added to the mix.
The bonbon cream helps make our product pliable.
And we can shape it into our actual bonbon center.
We want it to cool to touch, and we also want it to spread evenly.
The cooled candy is now ready for some hand mixing by hand and by a machine called a cream mixer.
Once the candy cools, the coconut flakes are added in by hand.
Then the mechanical agility of the cream mixer and the experienced hands of the candy maker combine to mix what will become the bonbon center to perfection.
This process takes two to three candy makers in order for us to evenly spread the coconut flake throughout the whole batch.
Once it's reached the perfect consistency, the cream filling is loaded onto trays in batches and transported to what they call the bonbon room.
Why do they call it the bonbon room, you ask? 'Cause here's where the machine that turns the dough into bonbons lives.
The coconut mixer is loaded into the top of the machine and perfectly shaped bonbon fillings come out the bottom.
The perfect shape for bonbons, by the way, is 11/2 inches long by 1-inch wide.
Trust me on this.
The bonbon centers are then hand-loaded onto trays where they await the fondant icing.
So back to the copper kettles where sugar and water are brought to a boil.
Then the liquid sugar is removed from the burner.
And liquid gelatin is stirred in by hand.
Once it reaches the correct consistency, the mixture is poured into the hopper that feeds directly into a machine called the Klockner.
Inside the Klockner, the scalding, gelatinous liquid is being scraped off the walls by a corkscrew-shaped vessel that has ice-cold water running through its mechanical veins.
In short, it's a heat exchanger, kind of like a whirling cooling slab.
As the hot sugar hits the cold water, it's shocked.
So it's creating crystals, where at the end, we're getting a white, foamy, cake-icing fondant.
And Klockner can fondant like nobody's business, transforming all those ingredients into beautiful icing in only a few minutes.
Then all-natural pink food coloring is added to the delicate frosting.
Finally, we're ready to marry the coconut centers with the pink fondant.
And there's no machine for this.
It's all done by hand.
The coconut centers are dipped into fondant, transferred to a tray.
And then a See's Candies trademark "S" is drizzled onto the top of each piece of candy.
I love the personal touch on a bonbon.
Um, each dipper has their own style and own flair.
And when you get to know the dippers and their flair, you can tell who dipped which bonbon.
Now complete, each coconut fondant bonbon needs a few minutes to dry before it's carefully placed into a cardboard box and transferred from the dipping room to the warehouse, where they're inventoried, prepped for distribution, and ready for romantic consumption.
Bonbon appétit.
You'll want to be sure that this r-rail is on the tray.
Okay.
What? Do you shush me? Did you give me a hand shush? You'll want to be sure this red velvet waffle is on the tray.
0.
" We're talking heart-shaped cookies with a sweet coating of pink and red sugar, classic candies that have romance written all over them, and a red velvet take on breakfast in bed.
Any way you look at it, love is in the air.
You know what gets my heart all aflutter? Cookies.
But not just any cookies.
I'm talking about these.
The sweet, colorful, heart-shaped cookies by Traditional Baking Company of Bloomington, California.
They bake over 70,000 cases of these scrumptious cookies each year.
And they're a hit with everyone from young lovers to busy mothers.
Why bake for a school party when there are 24 festive cookies to a package? And it just so happens, the average school class is The company is so passionate about their heart-shaped cookies, they keep some of their ingredients a guarded secret.
Flour, sugar, eggs, salt, and a few other things that I would not like to mention.
The unmentionable ingredients are a secret combination of spices that are mixed together in batches in a prescale room.
These secret spices are then married with the main ingredients, and whipped together in an industrial mixture.
Our batches are anywhere from Once the dough is mixed, it's ready to hop over to the next step.
The dough goes on a crane.
And our line operators lift it over to the hopper.
The next phase is the real heart of the operation because this is where the cookies get their unique identity.
The dough goes through a rotary cutter which cuts the dough into heart-shaped cookies.
Then, the cookies slide onto a moving belt and through a water bath.
The reason why we do a water bath versus egg bath We do them both.
But on this particular cookie, we like the color the way it is.
Egg will actually give it a little bit more darker tone to it.
The thin coating of water ensures the cookies are good and moist for what comes next a shower of pink and red sugar crystals.
Mm.
I can taste them already.
The cookies pass underneath a sugar topper that actually gets manually fed from the top and drops straight down through little holes onto the cookie.
These cookies are looking delish.
But their journey to our heart and tummies has just begun.
Next, they have to go through this incredibly long oven.
The actual ovens are 180 feet long.
It may be a long oven, but these cookies move fast.
They get through it in approximately 71/2 minutes.
And they are cooked at a surprisingly low temperature of 165 degrees.
It is a low temperature.
But this a fast-baking cookie.
And it doesn't take that long to bake it.
We need to keep that white color consistency.
When the cookies come out of the oven, I must say, these little heartthrobs are still pretty hot.
So the temperature of the cookies, when they come off the oven, are about 105 degrees.
That's still a little too hot for packaging, so next, they head off to the cooling fans.
After 8 minutes on the cooling conveyor, they go to an ingenious machine called the Penny Stacker.
The Penny Stacker is a machine that drops the cookies down, elevator fashion, to stack right on top of each other.
This makes it easier for the two dozen workers to grab the right amount of cookies for the 24-count packages.
So one side will grab one color, and the other will grab the other color, thus packaging the two different colors of cookies in the same tray.
And before you know it, the heart-shaped cookies are ready for sugar lovers everywhere.
I like the flavor with the sugar, and the bite is tremendous.
Coming up, the secret behind taking a classic breakfast staple to a whole new level.
And later, how do they get those romantic sayings on those tiny candy hearts? Hey You may wonder what this next treat has to do with love.
Well, next time you serve someone you love breakfast in bed, you'll wanna be sure this red velvet waffle is on the tray.
The WaffleWaffle Company is trying to redefine the way we think of waffles with a variety of hearty, high-quality waffles that recall their European origins, but are distinctly American in flavor.
What we created is kind of a hybrid between a pastry and a waffle, and that's why we refer to it as a WaffleWaffle, because it's something that's unique.
Partners Sam Rockwell and Justin Samuels started WaffleWaffle in 2009 by renting space in a doughnut shop in the middle of the night.
We took regular waffle irons.
We took simple ingredients, natural ingredients, and made a waffle we really enjoyed.
Demand was strong enough that just a few short years later, they've got their own factory where they've increased their output considerably.
Now we're producing over 50,000 waffles every day.
That's just about 5,000 an hour.
As they've ramped up waffle production, they've also expanded their line to include half a dozen different flavors, enough to appeal to virtually any taste.
It started with our original.
And we have cinnamon.
We do a chocolate chip, a double chocolate.
And we do a maple, a bacon maple, and a red velvet.
That's right red velvet.
Not surprisingly, it's quickly become one of their most popular varieties.
Like all their waffles, the red velvet waffle starts with natural ingredients like flour, sugar, eggs, and butter.
We add a number of flavorings and natural colors to give it that red tint that makes it absolutely delicious.
The final element that goes into this romantic breakfast treat is a special sweetener imported from Europe pearl sugar.
What pearl sugar is, it's a harder, smaller piece of sugar that doesn't melt in the process of us cooking the WaffleWaffle.
So when the finished waffle comes out, you see these really nice white specks inside.
So the consumer gets a waffle that has a unique aesthetic to it, has a nice crunch and a sweetness in every bite, and a slight caramelization.
After the waffle mix is blended together, a bowl lift raises it into the air.
And it gets poured into the extruder, where a guillotine cutter cuts the dough down into a little puck.
Since it is a dough rather than a batter, it has a lot more body to it.
We really can cut it and portion it to the exact size that we need.
Each ball of dough is removed by hand and placed in these cast iron waffle plates, each of which has six compartments.
Those plates then slide down the line, where their tops are automatically closed.
And then they slide into a carousel oven.
They move from right to left, just like a carousel would.
As the plates move through the oven, the dough bakes inside at until they reach the other side, a process that takes just about 2 minutes.
It's a very quick cook time on these waffles.
It's completely streamlined and continuous.
It could go on forever.
Just have to keep feeding dough into it.
As the waffles come out the far side of the carousel oven, they're taken out of the plates by hand with a special pick.
So once we remove the waffles, they're placed on racks to cool so that they're at the correct temperature for the wrapping process.
The waffles cool for about a half an hour before heading down the line for the final inspection and hand packaging.
Each waffle is then individually placed on our flow wrapping line.
They're then pushed into the guillotine cutter, where it is wrapped and cut into perfect size.
When the waffles are finished and packed, we send them to our freezer off site, where they're frozen, they're stored, and they're ready to ship, completely fresh, anywhere in the country.
Wherever that finished product goes, the WaffleWaffle creators wanna make sure it's top quality.
You never know when someone's gonna have a waffle for the first time.
We wanna make sure that first bite, that second bite, and every bite thereafter is amazing.
Despite their attention to detail, there's one thing the company's founders can't control, and that's how people eat a WaffleWaffle.
But that's all right with them.
There's no wrong way to eat a WaffleWaffle.
You could have it as a stand-alone breakfast.
You could have it with eggs.
You could have it with ice cream, whipped cream, berries.
All of those options sound good to me.
Coming up, tiny hearts that make a big statement.
Hey These candies are one of the easiest ways to say "I love you," as well as "tweet me," "text me," and, my favorite, the classic "love bug.
" For more than a century, little candy hearts like these have delivered short but sweet messages, along with a little sugar rush.
It's used when people are afraid to say something, or just as a little outreach or a little gesture to somebody.
Sweethearts trace their origins way back to 1866 when the founders of the NECCO Candy Company made fortune cookie-like candies with messages inside.
A few years later, they started stamping the messages right on the candy itself.
With the treats very popular at weddings, the company made one more innovation using a heart-shaped mold.
It's a decision that definitely paid off.
We sell more of the little NECCO Sweetheart boxes than any other item in the marketplace at Valentine's Day.
And just how many little Sweethearts are we talking about? We make over 21/2 billion Sweethearts every year.
That makes these tiny treats big business.
But it's the personal touch that keeps them so popular.
One of the great things that's so endearing about the Sweethearts brand is that they're very special and hold a special part in people's hearts.
There's many people that reach out to us and ask us for special "marry me" Sweethearts, and they're used as ways to propose to people.
So, what does it take to make a candy that's as sweet as the memories it makes? Naturally, it starts with sugar, lots and lots of sugar.
Grind it up so it's a nice, fine powder.
We add some hydrated gelatin and vegetable gum, some corn syrup in a big mixer.
Then they add one of 18 different flavors, from classics like banana and wintergreen to new tastes like wild berry, grape, and watermelon.
One of those flavors is then added to the rest of the ingredients and mixed together until they've reached a frosting-like consistency.
Then the batter is transported to a forcing head that creates a sheet of dough.
And the sheet of dough is then thinned down by a series of mechanical rolling pins that size down to a Sweetheart thickness.
When the sheet of candy is exactly a 1/4 thick, they add the sayings on top with a print plate.
Each plate has 80 sayings that are printed on the dough.
So it's much like a stamp that you would use to put your return address on an envelope, except this one's made out of metal.
The stamper uses an ink pad with edible inks made of water and food dye.
That process is repeated about so let me do the math.
That works out to be and 672,000 per hour.
That's a lot of hearts.
So now they've got a long, thin sheet of printed dough.
Next stop the cutter.
After we print on the hearts, we have this reciprocating cutter assembly, which consists of a cutter that's a heart shape.
And inside, there's a plunger.
The little heart-shaped cutters are arranged to cut around each of the printed sayings.
And when the dough passes over a gap in the conveyor, they drop right out.
Cool, huh? Just underneath that gap is a conveyor that moves all those freshly printed Sweethearts toward the dryer.
The dryer is 60 feet long and has 13 belts.
We blow air into it at about 150 to 160 degrees.
Any hotter than that and the candy wouldn't just dry, it would melt, especially given how long it spends in there.
It takes about an hour for the candy to traverse all 13 belts or roughly 780 feet of dryer belting that it has to navigate before it comes out the back end.
Even then, the candy isn't totally dry.
The Sweethearts are collected in trays, stacked on pallets, and transferred to a warm room for overnight drying.
The next day, trays of Sweethearts, each one a single color, are brought to a machine for mixing.
It's just a big conveyor belt where we stack the candy up really deep, and it mixes all the colors.
Once thoroughly mixed, they're sent to a cross-conveyor where they get weighed, bagged, and sealed.
Continuously, we're running, on a single machine, these packets of Sweethearts.
That's a lot of candy.
Oh When we return, a sweet way to say "I love you," all the way from France.
Hey Did you know Americans spend over a billion dollars on candy treats every year, just to say "I love you"? Well, here's a tasty confection that's guaranteed to get that message across.
The coconut pink fondant bonbon from See's Candies, Los Angeles.
They've been making this French delight since 1921, when founder Mary See started making candies in her home.
She had a little bungalow, uh, in Pasadena.
And since then, we've come a long way.
We now have over 200 shops.
And with the help of a little automation, the company can now crank out over 31,000 bonbons a year.
But they're still made almost entirely by hand, the way they've been made for almost 75 years.
They start by making that creamy middle with practically the same recipe Mary created.
In these beautiful copper kettles, a mixture of corn syrup and cream are combined.
Then, sugar and salt are measured and added.
That's topped off with water.
And then the kettles are put on the burner and mixed until the sugary solution is brought to a boil.
The temperature is very important for us to get our final bonbon center to the texture that we need it.
Once it reaches a precise temperature, which is a trade secret, the filling moves to the cooling slab.
Here, they add butter because, you know, everything's better with butter.
Then a bit of vanilla and cream gets added to the mix.
The bonbon cream helps make our product pliable.
And we can shape it into our actual bonbon center.
We want it to cool to touch, and we also want it to spread evenly.
The cooled candy is now ready for some hand mixing by hand and by a machine called a cream mixer.
Once the candy cools, the coconut flakes are added in by hand.
Then the mechanical agility of the cream mixer and the experienced hands of the candy maker combine to mix what will become the bonbon center to perfection.
This process takes two to three candy makers in order for us to evenly spread the coconut flake throughout the whole batch.
Once it's reached the perfect consistency, the cream filling is loaded onto trays in batches and transported to what they call the bonbon room.
Why do they call it the bonbon room, you ask? 'Cause here's where the machine that turns the dough into bonbons lives.
The coconut mixer is loaded into the top of the machine and perfectly shaped bonbon fillings come out the bottom.
The perfect shape for bonbons, by the way, is 11/2 inches long by 1-inch wide.
Trust me on this.
The bonbon centers are then hand-loaded onto trays where they await the fondant icing.
So back to the copper kettles where sugar and water are brought to a boil.
Then the liquid sugar is removed from the burner.
And liquid gelatin is stirred in by hand.
Once it reaches the correct consistency, the mixture is poured into the hopper that feeds directly into a machine called the Klockner.
Inside the Klockner, the scalding, gelatinous liquid is being scraped off the walls by a corkscrew-shaped vessel that has ice-cold water running through its mechanical veins.
In short, it's a heat exchanger, kind of like a whirling cooling slab.
As the hot sugar hits the cold water, it's shocked.
So it's creating crystals, where at the end, we're getting a white, foamy, cake-icing fondant.
And Klockner can fondant like nobody's business, transforming all those ingredients into beautiful icing in only a few minutes.
Then all-natural pink food coloring is added to the delicate frosting.
Finally, we're ready to marry the coconut centers with the pink fondant.
And there's no machine for this.
It's all done by hand.
The coconut centers are dipped into fondant, transferred to a tray.
And then a See's Candies trademark "S" is drizzled onto the top of each piece of candy.
I love the personal touch on a bonbon.
Um, each dipper has their own style and own flair.
And when you get to know the dippers and their flair, you can tell who dipped which bonbon.
Now complete, each coconut fondant bonbon needs a few minutes to dry before it's carefully placed into a cardboard box and transferred from the dipping room to the warehouse, where they're inventoried, prepped for distribution, and ready for romantic consumption.
Bonbon appétit.
You'll want to be sure that this r-rail is on the tray.
Okay.
What? Do you shush me? Did you give me a hand shush? You'll want to be sure this red velvet waffle is on the tray.