Raising Money to Ride

As anyone who has even briefly met me knows, I ride the 540 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation as part of AIDS Lifecycle.
And as everyone knows, this is a tough financial year, so I thought I better get creative with fundraising. As a baker and all-around dessert maker, I thought I'd put these skills to work to help raise funds. Two years ago I gave $100 donors cookies. This year I thought I would sell peppermint bark. Williams Sonoma charges $20 a pound, so I thought if I could make it and sell it for $6 a half pound, I could clear at least a little something to raise funds for the ride.

I made a decent sized batch earlier this week and bagged it up in little half pound bags which I plan to tie shut with a festive ribbon. The project was on.
I decided to go bigger, so today I went to Restaurant Depot, a to-the-trade-only wholesale warehouse to get white chocolate. I bought a 10 pound box of Ghiradelli chips, figuring they would make lovely peppermint bark. It wasn't cheap, even for wholesale, but I figured I should get the good stuff.
Or what I thought was the good stuff. God knows what they put in it, but it would not melt. I hesitate to read the ingredients because the stuff, even being in a double boiler for what seemed like forever, had the consistency of silly putty.
Chalk up another experience to lesson learned. I'll stick to the Safeway where at least I know what I'm getting. And believe it or not, the pure chips there are a little cheaper.
But at least I do have about three pounds of the good stuff, and next week I'll go into production again.