Hit the sweet spot

Candy shops a delight for the senses

Stacee Sledge

Feb 13, 2003 — Want to wow your special someone this Valentine's Day? Stop in at either Chocolate Necessities or Sweetart for exquisite sweets that will melt their heart.

Chocolate Necessities

Found a bit off the beaten path, this chocolate shop sits in a somewhat industrial area at Guide Meridian and Horton Road. A whimsical screen door welcomes you into the charming space, complete with a case lined with handmade truffles and shelves stocked with other chocolate goodies.

Don't mistake Chocolate Necessities for a candy store; their focus is exclusively chocolate. Opened by Kevin Buck and Mark Pantley in 1986, Chocolate Necessities offers truffles, chocolate bars, organic and sugar-free items, and bulk ingredients for cooking.

Pantley left the company after its first year, and Buck now runs the shop with the help of Pamela Koehn, who handles all packaging and administration. They employ two workers, Heidi and Mark Munson, who learned the art of chocolate under Buck's tutelage.

Heidi and Mark Munson together hand rolled and dipped approximately 28,000 gourmet truffles this past Christmas season. They expect to create around 12,000 for Valentine's Day.

Buck gave me the Cliff's Notes version of Chocolate 101. There are three factors that mark the highest-quality chocolate: lower sugar content, higher cocoa butter content  — not a corner-cutting oil replacement — and a blend of cocoa beans.

Buck chose to sell Callebaut chocolate after carefully comparing different brands from around the world. "It took me years to find this," he admits. "I found Bernard Callebaut in Canada, on a vacation, and it just shocked me how good it was. I thought, 'This is how it should be."

Sweets

Chocolate Necessities 4600 Guide Meridian Phone: 676-0589 or  (800) 804-0589  Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday  Serving: Hand-dipped Belgian truffles and other exquisite, high-end chocolate delights. Sweetart  1335 Railroad Ave.  Phone: 714-1331  Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday  Serving: A wide array of chocolate candies, toffee, truffles, and fudge.

If you do a side-by-side taste test of American chocolate and almost any European chocolate, you'll notice a distinct difference.

"The thing with U.S. chocolate is they've always had a children's market," says Buck, who says he is one of only two places in North America that use the highest grade of milk chocolate. "They've never been challenged to make quality products and are still making kids' stuff." As a result, American chocolate has a much higher sugar content, which masks the full flavor.

Buck keeps wrapped, mammoth 5-kilogram bars of his prized Callebaut chocolate piled underneath the work counter in the Chocolate Necessities kitchen, much like a traditional office would stack reams of printer paper.

The chocolatier and his team add no sugar or preservatives to the chocolate, which gives their truffles a shelf life of three weeks. Plus, he can practically persuade you it's downright healthy to eat chocolate: "The quality is so high, we like to focus on the health benefit of it," says Koehn. "It's loaded with antioxidants."

Whatever the health benefits, Chocolate Necessities' wares are wonderful. The glass-enclosed case is filled with decadent truffles in a variety of flavors, each garnished with thin lines of white, dark and milk chocolate or other toppings.

Each truffle has a soft center of ganache — a mixture of chocolate and cream — enclosed in a hard shell.

Learn more about Chocolate Necessities and their products, as well as the history of chocolate, cooking tips and recipes at www.chocolatenecessities.com. You'll soon become a faithful follower.

Sweetart

The kid in all of us will enjoy the creations at this downtown candy emporium and gallery on Railroad Avenue.

Owned by Jerry "The Candyman" Hruska and his wife Vivian Mazzola, Sweetart has been selling truffles, fudge, toffee, a plethora of other candies, and artwork in their charming shop since 1998.

The narrow, full-to-the-brim store is called Sweetart because Hruska makes the sweets, while Mazzola creates the art.

Sweetart's eclectic interior holds wonders every which way, its walls lined with Mazzola's colorful oil paintings and fused glass pieces. Born and raised in Southern California, where her father was a Disney studio artist, Mazzola studied on a scholarship at the Los Angeles Art Institute.

Hruska began making candy as a high school student in Montana in 1962. "I had a little book that I bought for 10 cents and I made every candy recipe in that book," he says. "Half of them came out good and half of them didn't."

After joining the Navy, he moved to Southern California where, in 1972, he met "Grandma" and began working at her shop, Grandma's Candies.

A recent Saturday found my husband and I sampling an array of the goodies from the two large display cases in the narrow shop.

There's a lot to choose from. On the day of our visit, the cases were filled with an array of truffles, as well as four different types of nut clusters, caramel pillows, giant turtles, peanut butter cups, chocolate-dipped Oreos and graham crackers, and many other candies. A long log of fudge rested atop one of the cases on a narrow slab of cool marble, waiting to be cut into whatever size one needed, while solid chocolate molds of the Eiffel tower, poodles, and hens sat in a glass cabinet behind the case.

Children who stop in are given a penny and asked to find the secret door located at the end of the display case. I watched one young girl happily discover the small door and open it to find a brightly painted cabinet holding a penny gumball machine.

My husband was all over the truffles — he's raved about them for years — but I was interested in Hruska's chocolate haystacks, which remind me of childhood shopping trips with my mother. We'd often cap off a day of shopping with a small bag of the coconut and chocolate delights from a candy counter in downtown Des Moines.

Hruska's version features ample, jagged clumps of sweet milk chocolate mingled with fresh coconut, which adds a satisfying chew to the treat.

I also sampled some of his English toffee — a traditional brittle made of butter and sugar, sheathed in milk chocolate and coated with almonds. It was divine.

It's been such a longstanding hit with regulars that Hruska was persuaded to create a second variation. Taking the name from his heritage, Hruska came up with Czech toffee, crunchy brittle surrounded in dark chocolate and encased in hazelnut pieces.

Hruska had us sample one of his railroad ties, named after the street on which Sweetart resides. Long strips of white, milk, dark, or mint chocolate are cut out with an antique tool he purchased for only $5. They've clearly earned a following, as a few minutes later, a young man came in and ordered 10 milk chocolate railroad ties to go.

Sweetart offers more than chocolate goodies. I took home an immaculate replication of a pear that Vivian fashioned out of marzipan that was nearly too beautiful to eat. "Hruska" is Czech for "pear" — hence the inspiration for the diminutive yellow-green fruit, finished with a clove stem.

Prices vary at Sweetart, with fudge listed at $9.25 per pound, topping out with truffles at $16.25 per pound. My husband went home happy with a full pound of truffles and felt there was no more enjoyable way to spend $16.