The Pepperoni Roll Rush

Pepperoni rolls, West Virginia food of the gods.

I’ve written much about pepperoni rolls on this website. I’ve held many workshops in which I taught people how to make pepperoni rolls. I sell my own homemade pepperoni rolls at my Etsy shop. Pepperoni rolls are very popular and are one of my best selling items, and yet it still felt a bit extreme on Sunday when I suddenly started getting a slew of pepperoni roll orders. All at once. Five. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. All in the space of about three hours.

Hark, what kind of new spam is this? Spam or a scam, or someone is just messing with me! This was impossible! In around three hours, I had 44 orders for pepperoni rolls. That’s 44 dozen pepperoni rolls. In case you don’t have your calculator handy, that’s 528 pepperoni rolls.

I looked at the orders carefully. Different usernames, different shipping addresses. The orders were all paid. Spammers and scammers don’t want to give you money, they want to take it. But still. WHAT?! That’s so many orders, in such a short time span, and ALL for pepperoni rolls.

Being Thanksgiving week, the only day I can ship this week is Monday. I ship by priority mail and I have to have at least a two-day window to ship and have my baked goods arrive at their destination. I don’t ship over Sundays or holidays when the post office is closed for the sake of freshness. Monday was already booked with previously scheduled orders. It’s the holidays and my shop is very busy during the holidays.

When the onslaught of orders slowed down, I rescheduled all the orders for the following week since obviously I couldn’t do them all on Monday of this week and I can’t ship again until next Monday when I will have a full shipping week to ship Monday through Thursday. And apparently I will be making a lot of pepperoni rolls.

After sending out all the rescheduling notifications to customers, I heard back from several of them and then it all became clear when a couple of them mentioned they’d just watched a story on CBS Sunday Morning about the history of pepperoni rolls in West Virginia. I googled and found the story, which you can see here.

Wow. The power of TV. A national network runs a story on pepperoni rolls and within a few hours I have orders for 44 dozen pepperoni rolls. And it’s not like I’m even mentioned in the story! In fact, oddly, I discovered in the story that I’m not the West Virginia pepperoni roll expert–the story says that’s someone named Candace Nelson. Hmmpphhh!

I told Morgan about all this pepperoni roll madness and she said, “You’re rolling in the dough!” Ha.

Anyway, the holidays at my Etsy shop really started a couple of months ago. Orders have been ramping up since the fall and will go crazy here in the next month. Despite the 528 pepperoni rolls I have to make next week, I am still taking orders! (Could you order something besides pepperoni rolls? If not, that’s okay, I can make more! I’m just sayin’! I make a lot of other yummy stuff!!!!)

You can find the main page of my shop, and all the shop sections, here

You can find my pepperoni rolls here.

More food for parties and holidays here.

And lots of edible gift ideas (including monthly club gift subscriptions for scones, muffins, biscuits, assorted treats, fudge, and cookies) here.

Now who wants to cut up some pepperoni for me? Volunteers?

::crickets::

P.S. Actually, Rodney cuts up all the pepperoni sticks for me. And he hardly ever gets a pepperoni roll–the pepperoni rolls are always for somebody else!