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Photo by Joshua Lindau
The sinfully delicious cin-almond truffles from Newport's Sweet Tooth Candies
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Photos by Joshua Lindau
Sweet Tooth Candies in Newport
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Photos by Joshua Lindau
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Bob Schneider, Sweet Tooth Candies
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Photos by Joshua Lindau
Sweet Tooth Candies in Newport
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Photos by Joshua Lindau
A selection of Sweet Tooth treats including their popular opera creams, left, and turtles, right.
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Copper kettle mixer at Old Kentucky Chocolates in Lexington
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Old Kentucky Chocolates' bourbon truffles travel through the chocolate enrober
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Photos by Joshua Lindau
Old Kentucky Chocolates' bourbon truffle candies, fresh off the line
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Boxes of Old Kentucky Chocolates candies are weighed by hand
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Pam and Don Hurt, owners of Old Kentucky Chocolates
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Lexington's Old Kentucky Chocolates
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Old Kentucky Chocolate's Southland Drive location in Lexington
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Patrick Durham prepares fudge for his Hodgenville business, The Sweet Shoppe
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Fudge nirvana at The Sweet Shoppe
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The fudgy delights are many at Hodgenville's The Sweet Shoppe
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Patrick Durham, The Sweet Shoppe
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The Sweet Shoppe is on the historic Hodgenville town square
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The Sweet Shoppe is a family affair for Forrest, Patrick, Paula and Maria Durham
Past the shiny display cases, meticulously stacked red-and-gold boxes and a life-size chocolate horse, a hallway leads to a set of doors. The doors swing open, and a sweet, warm and downright comforting olfactory blanket envelops you. If love has a scent, this is it.
Don Hurt, owner of Lexington’s Old Kentucky Chocolates, says he no longer can smell the candy being made in his 20,000-square-foot facility. It’s a tragic occupational hazard but doesn’t seem to lessen Don’s enthusiasm for the vocation he’s pursued for five decades.
The Owsley County native was serving in the Army when he took the first steps on what would become a prosperous confectionary career path. He enlisted in 1958 and first served as an MP, then in a medical unit and finally, fortuitously, as a cook when the Kentucky 100th Division was activated during the Berlin Crisis in 1961. Stationed at Fort Chaffee, Ark., Don says for an entire year he baked, serving 4,650 people per meal.
The business that today crafts 250,000 pounds of candy a year was born above a downtown Frankfort bakery that Don bought in 1964. “The bakery had everything to make candy, except for chocolates,” he says. So, the industrious entrepreneur found the necessary equipment from an Evansville, Ind., candy shop that was going out of business—and his life as a chocolate man began.
If Kentucky has a scent, it’s bourbon. As Don shares the origin of his best-selling bourbon chocolates, the oaky-vanilla vapors of our state’s signature drink mingle with the aroma of amour already thick in the air.
“Mr. Beam and his wife visited the shop [in Frankfort] and wanted to know why I was using Brown-Forman bourbon in my candies,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about Jim Beam.” Master Distiller T. Jeremiah Beam set out to cure Don’s unfamiliarity with the spirit Beam’s great-great-grandfather pioneered in 1795, giving the candy maker a personal tour of the Jim Beam distillery. “I’ve used Beam bourbon ever since,” says Don.
“We stay happy all day long,” says Pam, Don’s wife of 41 years, as she leads us from Don’s desk to begin our candy kitchen tour. “We call it a happiness business.”
Bright, holiday-themed wall murals visually echo Pam’s cheery proclamation as we walk past sugary treats in their inception—a misshapen log of truffle filling, pecans and pineapple in a copper bowl waiting to be turned into pecan cake—and vintage-looking equipment that affirms that, at least when it comes to candy-making, the best way of doing things hasn’t changed.
“Here’s the I Love Lucy machine,” says Pam as we walk into a room occupied by two hatted, aproned and gloved men rearranging tiny fudgy columns along a conveyor belt. Unlike their sitcom counterparts Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz, these employees are methodically ensuring the bourbon truffle centers (for that’s what they are) are properly arranged for their trip through what Pam tells us is the chocolate “enrober.” “It’s a curtain of chocolate—like a chocolate car wash,” explains Pam.
“You want to taste one naked?” Pam asks, indicating that I and my fellow tour goers may do our best impersonations of the aforementioned Lucy and Ethel by taking one of the candies off the line before it is enrobed in its semisweet dark chocolate coating. The newly born treat is soft and creamy and finishes with a perfect wallop of bourbon essence. (Thank you, Jeremiah!)
We parallel the truffles as they glide through the chocolate curtain and then make an 11-minute or so trip through a refrigerated, 80-foot-long cooling tunnel. The decadent darlings’ journey concludes when two ladies pluck them from the conveyer belt and place each in a ruffled, white bonbon cup.
After selling the Frankfort bakery in 1969, Don moved his candy business to Lexington and today has three locations—Southland Drive, the Lexington Center Shops adjacent to Rupp Arena, and in the Lansdowne Shopping Center. At the Southland Drive location, in addition to purchasing candies and assorted gift items, you can enjoy a free tour of the candy kitchen and maybe even score a candy fresh off the line. Iconic in its own right, Old Kentucky Chocolates also can be found at quintessentially Kentucky locales, including Mammoth Cave National Park, Berea’s Boone Tavern and Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill. It has an online shop and a fundraising program, offering six types of chocolate bars that schools and other organizations can sell at a 50 percent profit.
Old Kentucky Chocolates churns out hundreds of thousands of pounds of chocolates a year in a number of varieties that even Pam has a hard time keeping up with—“We have hundreds of [types of] candies. I guess we need to count them,” she says. So it’s surprising that so much is accomplished by so few employees—35 to be exact—and that much of the candy creating is done by hand. There’s Mary Royalty, whose 33-year tenure has been spent largely in the molding room, creating chocolate likenesses of everything from bunnies and golf balls to ladies’ legs and six-shooters. And Will Hurt, Don’s brother’s 20-year-old grandson, works at Old Kentucky Chocolates during his off-season as a minor league player for the Minnesota Twins. “I’m not gonna lie. Yeah, I eat chocolate every day,” he says. “It’s hard not to.”
From the ladies who make the gift baskets to the women who work the front counter and offer free candy samples to customers, each employee embodies Pam’s claim that theirs is a happy business. Twenty-four-year employee Cheryl Cooper may best sum up why: “Don and Pam have always treated us like family,” she says and promptly thereafter receives a hug from Pam. “It’s a good place to work. I’ve always liked it.”
In preparation for Valentine’s Day, the happy team at Old Kentucky Chocolates will log some serious hours in their environment that smells like love. Don says the sweethearts’ holiday is the busiest time of year for his company, and to meet demand, it’ll produce about 1,800 pounds of chocolate per day. Pam adds that employees will make chocolate-covered strawberries “day and night for two to three days. Everyone wants chocolate-covered strawberries, and we want them to have them!”
Before we leave the candy shop, loaded up with treats from the Hurts, Don asks if we have any ideas for candies. I scan his wares: chocolate Thoroughbreds (their version of caramel-pecan turtles), Derby mints, bourbon truffles, old-fashioned pulled creams (made from a recipe Don bought from Colonel Sanders—“His mother loved cream candies,” he says), pretzels coated in white chocolate. What type of candy would I make? It would be hard to compete with—in the words of the popular song from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory—the “pure imagination” of this candy man.
Hodgenville is best known as the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, but another of its native sons is putting the city on the map for an altogether sweeter reason: fudge. Peanut butter, maple nut, rocky road, cookies and cream, creamsicle and amaretto are a few of the hundreds of fudge flavors Patrick Durham creates and sells with help from his family: wife Paula, daughter Maria and son Forrest. The 1950s-era, black-shuttered building that houses the Durhams’ The Sweet Shoppe & Dessert Cafe is a stone’s throw (for those of you with a good arm) from the two bronze likenesses of our 16th president that mark the center of the town square.
Standing behind a kaleidoscopic display of fudges and beneath a chalkboard sign proclaiming: “This is where the magic happens,” Pat transforms cream, butter and sugar into a velvety lava. He deftly folds in pecans and then spreads the warm mixture into six paper-lined pans. Right before our eyes, in a matter of minutes, he has brought into being about 40 pounds of penuchi fudge, a rich, caramelly praline-flavored delight.
“I can make 160 pounds of fudge an hour,” says Pat of the activity that has occupied much of his time during the past 11 years. Paula says her husband often works for months without a day off. “I have a fudge mistress,” Pat adds with a grin.
The couple first ventured into the candy business by selling fudge at a Brandenburg shop owned by Paula’s sister, and then wholesale to additional businesses, all while Pat was working third shift at a factory in Elizabethtown. They eventually decided to make a go of it full time and now produce approximately 33,000 pounds of fudge a year. Tourists from all over the world and even soldiers serving overseas have enjoyed The Sweet Shoppe’s treats and, according to the push pin-laden U.S. map on the shop’s wall that denotes every place to which fudge has been shipped, there are lucky eaters in all 50 states.
Although the store on the Hodgenville town square does a brisk business, especially during the summer months when the ice cream they also serve is particularly popular, the Durhams say about 80 percent of their income is from selling at festivals and events. Pat, Paula, Maria and Forrest, wearing red T-shirts bearing The Sweet Shoppe logo and amusing declarations such as “Keep calm and eat fudge” and “I got 99 problems but fudge ain’t one,” crisscross the state to share the fudge love at more than 40 festivals a year. During the 2013 Kentucky State Fair alone, they sold 6,000 pounds of fudge, producing the sweet stuff onsite using three kettles that can make 40 pounds of fudge at a time.
Pat isn’t the only one in the family who’s been bitten by the fudge-making bug. Although only 16, Forrest already is thinking about ways to expand The Sweet Shoppe empire. He plans to get a business degree and then wants to launch more locations; he has his sights on opening the second Sweet Shoppe in Bardstown. “I’m the second-best fudge maker in the world,” he quips.
It may be caffeine and sugar that fuel Bob Schneider, giving his speech and movements a liveliness that evoke, well, a kid in a candy shop. Within minutes of arriving at Sweet Tooth Candies, Bob makes sure we have something sweet to eat (a scoop of homemade pumpkin ice cream topped with whipped cream) and enthusiastically begins telling us about his other treats. “The best chocolate in the world is here. We buy the very, very, very top of the line. We don’t compromise,” he says of his main ingredient, which he purchases by the 50-pound case and then handcrafts into an array of scrumptious candies. “I eat a lot of chocolate.”
His Newport candy store, located within view of the Cincinnati skyline in an imposing brick building on the corner of 11th and Ann Streets, opened in 1970, but Bob’s induction into candy-making began decades earlier. “I think I was born next to a chocolate melter,” he jokes. “It’s in the family.” The eldest of seven children, Bob grew up in an apartment above the Bellevue candy shop his father, Robert, opened in 1939. “Dad would bang on the pipes if he needed us kids to come down and help in the store.”
When Bob was 13, he started making candy with his dad and later went on to expand his confectionary knowledge by working at Bissinger’s, a Cincinnati candy shop established in 1845. The desserts his father perfected—opera cream candies and ice balls (ice cream coated in syrup-flavored shaved ice)—are among the Sweet Tooth’s bestsellers and remain popular at the original Bellevue store, Schneider’s Sweet Shop, which today is run by Bob’s brother, Jack. Bob is quick to point out that he and his brother are not in competition but rather are both carrying on his father’s legacy—a legacy that Bob’s two granddaughters have embraced. His eldest granddaughter, Jamie, already works at the Sweet Tooth, and Katie will begin learning the family business this summer.
The candy family extends well beyond blood relations. Julie Thompson has worked at Sweet Tooth for more than two decades and Bob takes obvious pleasure in pointing out that Julie’s husband, Randy, now 50, was “just a kid running around the neighborhood when I opened the business.” Julie, Bob, and his wife, Norma, are three of only five people who work at the candy factory, which is located less than a mile from the retail shop. When asked how much candy the five Sweet Toothers produce in a year, Bob says with a grin, “I have to guess. I hate to exaggerate, but I always do: 50,000 pounds.”
“It’s a lot of work but the feedback makes it all worthwhile,” says Norma. “[Customers] don’t have to come in, they want to, and we want them to have a good experience.”
Joan and John Blankenship stop by Sweet Tooth Candies almost every Saturday. This Saturday is no exception. The couple walks past a sidewalk sign advertising an opera creams special and beneath the shop’s cheery, red-and-white awning to join us in perusing the beautiful chocolate temptations. “I have to get my ‘stash,’ as I call it,” says Joan. While Julie gets Joan a small selection of sweets—cherry cordials and apricot creams—Bob informs us his candies have been enjoyed by people worldwide and, by way of proof, points to a photograph of a Chinese woman holding a burgundy-and-gold Sweet Tooth Candies box, the Great Wall of China serpenting behind her. “The Queen of England has had a tin of Sweet Tooth candy,” he says, explaining that one of his corporate clients sent it to the monarch.
“I still wish I had 100 stores,” says Bob. “I’m still planning for the future. I don’t drink beer. I don’t smoke. I gotta work.” No—it’s not caffeine and sugar that gives the 71-year-old his seemingly inexhaustible energy. This candy man is powered by passion and love for his craft.