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Sweets sensation
Forget that diet — Boston’s crop of candy stores is too good to miss
BY JULIE SURATT

Just because you OD’d on Cadbury Creme Eggs, pastel M&M’s, or chocolate-covered matzo during the recent holidays doesn’t mean you have to swear off sweets altogether. Instead of going cold turkey, try weaning yourself with coffee and a cigarette — of the candy variety. Sweet Temptation offers the perfect prescription: Perugina coffee-flavored hard candy ($9.95/pound) and a pack of candy cigarettes (50 cents).

Within about a mile radius, there are at least six candy stores (not to be confused with chocolate shops, of which there are a dozen) in the Back Bay and South End. If that sounds like overkill, it might interest you to know that Boston was once home to 140 candy and chocolate factories in the early-to-mid 1900s. Over time, companies like Fox-Cross and James O. Welch either moved away, consolidated, or closed for good. Necco is the lone ranger, and even it relocated from Cambridge to Revere last year.

But that doesn’t mean candy consumption is down in the Hub. Judging from a recent foray to the sweeter side, Bostonians are just as nuts about candy as ever. We had to fight our way through a crowd blocking the door at Sugar Heaven on Newbury Street — but it was worth a few bruises just to gaze at more than 1500 different types of candy. Grab a plastic yellow bucket and start with favorites from your childhood: Smarties (99 cents), SweeTarts (10 cents), Bit-O-Honey (20 cents), and Now and Laters (20 cents). Create your own Pixy Stix ($1.99/six inches) from 12 flavors of pucker powder. Then move on to novelties like Nibble Notes ($5.49), "the candy paper you can write on," and tequila-flavored lollipops, complete with worm ($2.99).

A couple of streets over, Truffles in the Prudential Center boasts one of the largest selections of sugar-free candies (what’s the point?) in flavors like coffee, caramel, butterscotch, chocolate caramel, and fruit chew ($12/pound). Don’t miss the polar gummy bears ($12/pound) covered with white chocolate. Also in the Prudential, the Sweet Factory has a pretty good shtick going with corny descriptions of its offerings. The Swedish fish come with a warning: "Don’t let them near the gummy worms!" Candies are conveniently divided into sours; licorice, jubes, and jellies; gummies; and Jelly Belly (all $2.19/quarter-pound).

Dairy Fresh Candies, in the North End, might be best known for its chocolates, but to ignore the buckets of hard candies ($6.99/bag) and mixed-nut crunches ($6.99/pound) would be a travesty. The place has an olden-days feel with its black-licorice coins ($2.99/bag), Arlington cloves ($3.99/bag), ginger chews ($6.99/bag), root-beer barrels ($2.99/bag), and honey drops ($2.99/bag).

Before you start fretting about the negative health effects of sweets, here’s a bit of good news: those who eat candy live almost a year longer than those who don’t, according to a study conducted in 1999 by Harvard School of Public Health researchers. Here’s to one more year of candy consumption!

Where to find it:

• Dairy Fresh Candies, 57 Salem Street, Boston, (800) 336-5536.

• Sugar Heaven, 218 Newbury Street, Boston, (617) 266-6969.

• Sweet Factory, Shops at the Prudential Center, 800 Boylston Street, Boston, (617) 262-7710.

• Sweet Temptation, Copley Place, 100 Huntington Avenue, Boston, (617) 424-0605.

• Truffles, Shops at the Prudential Center, 800 Boylston Street, Boston, (617) 536-2663.


Issue Date: April 30 - May 6, 2004
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