Adventurer’s Pack Now Available

We got our pictures taken this weekend, so now the Adventurer’s Pack is fully available on Etsy, yay!

photo by Kevin Keeker

From left to right, that’s

• Pistachio-Marshmallow – longtime darling of our customers
• Salted Anise – a new entrant into the sweet/salty world
• Black Pepper Melon – which combines subtle peppery heat with honeydew
• Tart Pluot (plum-apricot) – a flavor tart enough to make your mouth water without scrunching up your face with sourness

We call them the “Adventurer’s Pack” because these flavors are unusual blends you don’t find very often in hard candy. But they’re not *so* weird that you’d only want to eat them once – our taste testers truly loved them. We’re very proud and excited to launch them today, and we look forward to shipping them to you :-)

p.s. We’re having a 10% off sale in our Etsy store between now and August 22nd, after which we’ll be on a short vacation. Enter the checkout code SUMMERFUN2011.

Eye Candy: Pinterest

A portion of my pinterest home page

I've been playing around with Pinterest a bit lately. What is Pinterest? It's a site full of nothing but Eye Candy, found by all kinds of people all over the internet. This Young House Love post explains it waaaaayyyy better than I ever could (and, in fact, was my introduction to it). Basically, it's where I save links to images that I like, either for future Eye Candy posts, or to find things similar to our current flavors, or maybe to put flavor combos for future development (not that I've started doing that yet), or whatever. I'm still figuring it out.

Do you use Pinterest? We'd love to follow you! Let us know in the comments. :)

Adventurer’s Pack, Redux

We’ve been busily expanding our sets of flavors this year, and updating all of our collections to have 4 flavors to bring you even more variety than ever. Most recently, we welcomed Cherries Jubilee into the Celebration Time collection. Hooray!

The last collection to get rejuvenated with new flavors will be the Adventurer’s Pack. Previously it’s had Pistachio-Marshmallow, Teaberry (a relative of Wintergreen) and Nutmeg Crème. Well, Nutmeg Crème ran away to join the Spice Rack, so the search was on for new flavors.

Kate & I decided to take this as an opportunity to retire Teaberry and to tighten up the Adventurer’s Pack theme. The new and improved Adventurer’s Pack will take you on a journey through four fabulous taste sensations:

• Sweet: Pistachio-Marshmallow
• Sour: Tart Pluot (Plum-Apricot)
• Salty: Salted Anise
• Heat: Black Pepper Melon

We are incredibly proud of these new flavors and we can’t wait to let you have them! That’ll happen very soon (like Monday or Tuesday), so watch this space! You might want to keep an eye on This Charming Candy’s Facebook page too.

Which flavor intrigues you the most? Which do you think will be your favorite?

Making Lollipops!

photo from King Arthur Flour blog

Karin, a friend of ours, found a lollipop tutorial on the King Arthur Flour blog. It looks like fun! I'd never have thought to use flour as a replacement for lollipop molds, and I love the idea of making stained glass out of hard candy syrup.

Have you ever made your own lollipops? What would you do with stained glass candy? Do you regularly read the King Arthur Flour blog? Are you going to start?

Not Too Sweet

One of my favorite compliments that we receive from customers is that our lollipops are “not too sweet”. It’s one of the factors that I think makes our candy such a hit with grownups once they get a taste of what we do. One customer recently left us this feedback on Etsy:

“I didn't know what to expect from Pistachio Marshmallow so I peeled one open right out of the box and just about died it's so good. Not too sweet like how commercial marshmallows can be, more that warm fresh marshmallow flavour and unique taste of pistachio. It's completely fantastic.”

How do we accomplish this, given that all hard candy lollipops are ~99% sugar, no matter who’s making them? In some of our fruit-based flavors, we do it by adding acids that occur naturally in all fruits such as Citric Acid or Malic Acid. These have the effect of cutting the sweetness and sharpening the fruit flavors. We experiment with different acidity proportions until we find a recipe that our taste testers rave about.

In other cases, I think it’s simply the fact that we blend multiple high-quality flavors together, and their interactions cut the sweetness. Hazelnut-Coffee, for example, combines a bitter flavor (Coffee) with a nutty one. Our spice flavors such as Tangerine-Clove and Nutmeg Crème reduce the perceived sweetness by introducing a complimentary spice.

If you’ve had any of our flavors before, what do you think? Are any of them too sweet for your grown-up taste buds?

Creative Local Chocolatiers

Despite what you may think, we don't limit ourselves to our own delicious lollipops when we're looking for a hit of candy. I'm a fan of dark chocolate, for example. Within the last week or so, two Seattle-based chocolatiers announced some new flavors that sound amazing:

Komforte Chockolates announced on Facebook that they'll continue their innovative sweet and savory inclusions with two new flavors this fall: Apple Pie + Graham and Savory Ramen (onion, garlic, soy sauce and ramen noodle bits). We love their packaging too.

Theo Chocolate, the USA's only organic fair-trade chocolate manufacturer, previewed their winter ganache flavors in a Facebook post: Date Bourbon, Eggnog, and Coffee Cinnamon.

I think the Savory Ramen and Coffee Cinnamon sound the most intriguing. How about you? Do you have a favorite boutique chocolate company? Which do you prefer: milk, dark or white chocolate?