Take a walk around Granite State Candy Shoppe this time of year and you’ll certainly find the perfect addition for the chocolate lovers stocking in your life.
Or if they really have a sweet tooth, you could put together one heck of a main attraction gift.
Because Granite State Candy is a bit of a holiday wonderland – at least when it comes to candy. Just about everywhere you look, there’s holiday sweets just calling out for you to buy.
We’re talking chocolate Santas, trees, snowmen and wreaths – most coming in milk, dark and white chocolate. There’s also ribbon candy, some rather large candy canes, toffee, fudge and barley pops – all made in house. Add in fresh roasted nuts, gift boxes and small bags of individual wrapped chocolates, and you might want to carve out some extra time to check it all out. And just think, we’ve only touched upon the stuff made specifically for the holidays, and not all the other great candy Granite State makes year round.
“We keep very good sales records so we know what to make,” said owner Jeff Bart.
The candy cane production takes a day or two and is quite the process.
“It’s not like anything else we make here,” said Caleb Ruopp, Granite State Candy’s head chocolatier.
While you’re currently gearing up for the season, crossing people off your shopping list and grabbing stocking stuffers, the people over at Granite State have been in holiday mode for quite some time.
“I was in the holiday spirit a couple months ago,” Ruopp joked. “Now I’m on to Valentine’s Day.”
When you sell “thousands and thousands of molded Christmas items” according to Bart, it’s not the kind of thing you can just whip up at the last minute.
“We want to have things out and on the floor, ready to go, about a week or 10 days before Thanksgiving,” Bart said.
So the work begins in late October/early November. That’s when they start figuring out how many of each mold they need to make in order to build up the supply for the big push. Right now, they work on refilling items that have sold well, and just making sure there’s enough of everything to get through the next week-plus.
Last week in the chocolate creation station, as we now call it, you could tell that a switch to Valentines’s Day was imminent with freshly made milk chocolate hearts on the table.
But there were still signs of the holidays with moose pops being carefully removed from the molds and Santa pops being filled from the vat of warm milk chocolate. There was a batch of peppermint fudge being concocted, candy canes being dipped and drizzled, and a fresh batch of roasted pecans cooling down. Apparently nuts are a huge seller this time of year (they roasted 400 pounds of cashews the other week) – something we didn’t know.
“People love to give nuts for the holidays,” Ruopp said. “And cashews are the biggest.”
We also saw this thing called molasses puff, which we were told is an acquired taste, but also quite popular.
While the chocolatiers are busy creating all the tasty treats, there’s an entire group at Granite State who just package items so it’s all ready for you to buy and take home.
There’s an exact science to making chocolate, from following the recipe to the exact amounts, to letting it rise and fall to the right temperatures. Then it has to properly settle to give it that delicious appearance. All in all, everything usually takes a day or two before it hits the shelves.
“Timing and temperature are huge,” Ruopp said.
So when you rip open that solid chocolate Santa on Christmas morning, remember to savor its taste. A lot of work went into making it just right.
