As the weather turns gray and damp it’s a great time of the year in our showcases. Our Winter Holiday flavors are out and selling well. This year we are featuring:

Gingerbread
Egg Nog
Marsala Raisin
Snowflake
Irish Cream
Peppermint Bark

The Irish Cream gelato is inspired by Rick’s family tradition of making Irish Cream in the days leading up to Christmas and uses their family recipe. Peppermint Bark is inspired by my wife’s annual Christmas treat. Each year she makes a big batch of Peppermint Bark for co-workers, friends and relatives.

Don’t show up empty-handed at Thanksgiving dinner. Or the Holiday party. Or the work potluck. Instead, come by and pickup a gelato pumpkin pie.

Bring one of our gelato pumpkin pies made with an all-natural crust and our hand-crafted pumpkin gelato and you will be praised for your thoughtfulness, admired for your cleverness and toasted for you sense of grace. Your name will be remembered next year and years to come and surely, more invitations will arrive at your door as a result.

But do keep in mind, our gelato pumpkin pies are only available through Christmas.

As soon as September rolls around I start getting excited. Not about September itself, but that September gives way to October. And October means Fall flavors of gelato. We generally come up with more flavors than we can actually make. This year we had to strike a few flavors that we made last year to allow room for even more new flavors.

This year we have Apple Crisp, Apple Cider, and Pecan added to our daily todo list along with previous year’s favorites like Pumpkin, Butternut Squash, Maple and Guavasteen. We will carry these flavors through the end of November. And you know what the end of November means. right? December’s Christmas flavors are right around the corner.

We got in touch with a local rare fruit growers association a few years ago and talked about how we make our fresh fruit sorbetto. We got an enthusiastic response from Mr and Mrs Grossman of Berkeley about their Feijoa tree.

In past years they had sold the fruit to Berkeley Bowl but the Grossmans didn’t notice the fruit selling well and they worried that people didn’t know what to do with it after they bought it. Rather than sell the fruit to Berkeley Bowl, they sold it to us. For the past four years we have bought all of the fruit and turned it into a delicious sorbetto sourced just a few miles from our kitchen.

So what is a Feijoa? You may know it as a pineapple guava or a guavasteen. Or you may not. It is a rare fruit after all. The taste is very sour but when we make it into a sorbetto it turns into a very unique and refreshing flavor, one that makes you wonder why it is such a rare fruit.

The Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival was quite an event. Over the course of a few hours we hand-scooped and gave away almost 4,000 cones of gelato. Attendees were given a choice of Ferrero Rocher, our chocolate-hazelnut flavor, or Stracciatella, milk gelato with little rags of chocolate.

The periodic rain was much less of a deterrent than the loud music performance that took place directly above our cart. I felt like the neighborhood curmudgeon yelling, “Turn that racket down!”

One of the reasons we had such a long line was that our portions were so much bigger than some of the bites of chocolate being given away at other booths. The event raised an awful lot of money for Project Open Hand so it was well worth it.

Thanks to everyone who showed up on Thursday evening for the late-summer Club Naia Gelato Flight at our Shattuck store. It was packed!

We got plenty of good feedback on our new crop of flavors. The rundown of our “report card” is:

Siena: 22% of the popular vote
Tcho: 21%
Cobblestone and Riso: Tied for 18%
Polenta: 10%
Horlicks: 8%
Sarsaparilla: 3%

With forty-four flavors in every gelateria we usually manage to find something for everyone. If you missed the flight be sure to make sure you are a member of Club Naia (it’s free) by signing up at one of our stores and keep watch for more flights later in autumn and in the winter.

Actually, who doesn’t like chocolate? I’ve met a few people who don’t like chocolate, and I don’t care for them. To me, it’s like saying, “I don’t like water,” or “I hate it when the sun is out,” or “No Thanks, I prefer to sleep standing up.”

September 12th & 13th you will be able to sample a few flavors of our chocolate gelato at the 14th Annual Ghirardelli Square Chocolate Festival. We have been invited several times and just haven’t been able to arrange it (you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to do one of these events well.) We are planning to bring a whole truck full of gelato for the two days as we have heard that the crowds are huge.

Please don’t let the huge crowds scare you away as all of the proceeds from the event benefit Project Open Hand which has been feeding seniors and people with serious illnesses in both San Francisco and Alameda County for almost 25 years.