Sweet, Delicious, Free Shipping

Do you love our Spice Rack lollipops (the Vanilla-Cardamom, Tangerine-Clove and Salted Caramel flavors)? So do we! To help spread the love, for a little while we’re offering free shipping on Spice Racks in our Etsy store.

Yup: buy a Spice Rack and there’ll be no charge for the shipping (that’s a savings of $3.50 for the first one, $1.50 for each additional Spice Rack you add to your cart). Wooo!

photo by Kevin Keeker

Who’s YOUR Sweet Valentine?

For the next few weeks, we’ll be making and selling a heart-shaped lollipop duo called Sweet Valentine; it’s got spicy hot Cinnamon-Cherry and sweetly floral Honey-Jasmine flavors.

photo by Kevin Keeker

This delightful 6-pack is only available for a limited time, so be sure to nab yours from our Etsy store! Each flavor is also available by the dozen while supplies last. If you want to make sure you get them for Valentine's Day, please order before February 8th!

Eye Candy: Colorful Pierogies

Just about every January, I get hit by a surge of cooking energy and go into a delightful frenzy in my kitchen. I often make large batches of things to store in the freezer. It helped that this year, Kate & I took the first week of January as vacation from This Charming Candy so I really got busy!

Among the things I made for my freezer were 11 dozen pierogies, which are Polish dumplings:

My favorite filling is sauerkraut and onion; they go beautifully with pork dishes and also make a delightful stand-alone lunch. For fun, I decided to experiment with adding food coloring to the dough – I made purple ones, green ones, and orange ones.

And now, I get to enjoy having delicious, adorable, colorful homemade pierogies for the next few months! Yay!

The Proper Way to Drink Tea

photo of Mr Tea from LennyMud's Etsy shop

Anyone who follows our twitter feed knows that we love ourselves some tea. We've personally pimped Remedy Tea and Natur'el Tea in this space before, and I love both World Spice and Peet's teas. Susan's partial to Urban Tea, a company based in nearby Kirkland, WA. So when we saw Christopher Hitchens writing about none other than George Orwell's rules for tea, well, there may have been squeeing.

Not that I follow all the rules, of course. I do use a teapot that catches the loose tea leaves and I don't appreciate either milk or sugar in my tea. I like it black (or green as the case may be since that's what I seem to mostly drink these days). But I cannot recommend enough using a tall cylindrical cup instead of a wide one, or brewing loose tea leaves in a pot.

Do you have any rules for when you drink tea?

Setting the Scene...

Photo by Kevin Keeker

I wish that I was as good a writer as the Fug Girls. I want to come up with some instant vignette about spices traveling the world (or maybe just the Spice Girls) to convey a sense of fun about our Spice Rack lollipops shipping free whenever you buy them with something else. But all I've got is something mumbly about a caravan full of spices weaving its way back to Europe along the silk road and aren't you glad that the postal service is so much faster?

So I ask you, dear readers: what scene would you sketch for our Spice Rack lollipops traveling to you?

Hello!

photo by Jesse Oleson, aka Cakespy

We're back! Susan and I have had a glorious three weeks off in which we traveled to see family, played games, ice skated until our legs dropped off (ok, that was just me), cooked non-candy, and generally relaxed and got our energy back.

Our Etsy shop is open and our vacation responder has been turned off. Drop in and say hi!