This week, more nuts and bolts of the process in getting a home-based baking business off the ground for the local farmers market. This week: keeping the costs down.

The thread that runs through all of the baked goods I’m offering at Waterford Farmers Market is the same: taking familiar products and giving them a twist. Baking treats that not only taste delicious but look, smell and even sound delicious.

When I first put out my Sticky Toffee Oreo Puffs out for sale, people responded quizzically. But after a sample taste, the Puffs disappeared in a puff of smoke. I had a guy show up bright and early last Saturday asking for “the Oreo things” and said his family was “addicted.”

What I don’t tell the customers is that I’m addicted to their excitement and praise. Pure ego fuel. Which means I’m not going fall back on good old standbys; you can buy those anywhere. When I make chocolate chip cookies, they’re going to be brown butter chocolate chip cookies with a scattering of flaked sea salt. Which means extra time spent browning the butter, extra time browning non-fat milk powder in the oven, extra money for a really high quality mix of chips and spending extra time trying to find sea salt flakes at a local grocery store.

Time is money, but money is still money

A couple weeks ago, I found a recipe for Toffifay Chocolate Chip Cookie Cups from the site Bake To The Roots from German cookbook author Marc Kromer. This recipe rang all the bells for me: It sounded delicious, it looked cool, snacky and easy to make, I’ve never seen it offered at any other bakeries or markets and it featured a candy that was familiar but not overly advertised.

It’s that last part that intrigued me the most. There are literally thousands of different recipes for baked goods that include Reese’s cups, M&Ms and Hershey’s Kisses. I myself use Twix in banana bread bars and Heath Bar bits in my Biscoff & Heath krispie treats. Toffifay has been around for years. It was introduced in Europe in 1973 and to the U.S. market in 1978. But there’s a reason you don’t find them in candy jars on desks and in the yearly Halloween candy displays: they’re a little fussy to handle. A Toffifay has an outer cup made of caramel and they don’t come individually wrapped. If Grandma throws a handful of them into her purse, she’s gonna come up with a fistful of chocolately caramel goo.

Finding Toffifay candies at a reasonable price to test them out proved to be a little bit of a task. Most of the supermarkets don’t carry them, but I did spot them at CVS. A box of 15 candies retails for $4.42, so I need two boxes because the batch of dough makes 24 cookies. That’s $0.29 per candy. But I had CVS Extrabucks and coupons loaded onto my store card, so I got them for $0.57 per box (down to $0.04 per candy!). But the problem is this: CVS only stocks a couple boxes per store and I can’t waste time (time = $) running to every CVS hoping they’ll have them in stock. Also, I just happened to have the Extrabucks on my card and I won’t be able to get that pricing consistently.

But Walmart also carries Toffifay in a 24 pack for $5.16 ($0.22 per candy) and they stock more consistently. So I pulled their case of eight packs off the shelf and stocked up. That’ll save me time and gas (time AND gas = $).

I did a test batch of the recipe with my hoard of Toffifay candies. I’ve adapted the recipe slightly.

Toffifay Cookie Cups

1/2 cup (120g) butter, at room temperature ($0.90)

3/4 cup (150g) raw cane sugar (Sugar In the Raw $0.56)

1 large egg ($0.20)

1 tsp. vanilla extract ($0.10)

2 1/4 cups (290g) all-purpose flour ($0.45)

1/2 tsp. baking soda ($0.03)

1/4 tsp. salt ($0.03)

2.1 oz. (60g) semi-sweet mini chocolate chips ($0.89)

24 Toffifay candies ($5.16)

Total cost of ingredients: $8.32 = $0.35 per cookie

Preheat oven to 350°F. Add the butter and sugar to the bowl of a standing mixer on medium speed and mix for 4 minutes until very light and fluffy. With the mixer running, add the egg and vanilla extract and mix in well for another 4 minutes.

Mix your flour, baking soda and salt together, reduce the mixer speed to stir and add them into the mixer bowl. Mix until just combined and then add the chocolate and stir till the chips are evenly distributed.

Line mini muffin trays with 24 mini muffin cups and add a large cookie scoop (1 tablespoon) of the cookie dough to each well. Bake the cookie cups for about 12-13 minutes, until the top rim is lightly browned.

Remove the pan from the oven and let them cool for 2 minutes and then press the Toffifay into the soft dough. Let the cookie cups cool completely in the muffin trays and remove when cool. Package neatly, sell millions of them, retire on the profits.

That last sentence is a looooong way off

My love of baking and cooking has been a little blunted lately, not only by the factory-like production going on in my kitchen daily, but by the accounting. As you can see from my cost breakdown for the ingredients, making a six-pack of these cookies costs me $2.10. Add in the packaging and labeling and we’re up to $2.22 per package. What am I going to charge for these morsels? Seven U.S. dollars. A tidy, money-grubbing, profit of $4.78 per six-pack/$19.12 for the entire batch.

Before you report me to the FTC for price gouging, hear me out. It takes me about an hour total of active prep, cooking and packaging time to make this batch of cookies. But the electricity to bake them and then run the dishwasher isn’t free. And the government will be stepping up to take a little slice of the profit pie as well. And if I throw in all of the background costs (insurance, licensing, farmers market fees, gas, etc.), I’m probably really making about $15.00 for that hour to make these cookies.

A gentle reminder: current CT minimum wage is $15.69.

Rich Swanson is a local cook who has had numerous wins in nationally sponsored recipe contests. He is also the layout specialist here at The Day.

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Rich Swanson can be reached at TheSurlyTable@gmail.com.