Cooking up custom candy at Toronto’s newest sugar shack
At the first Canadian outpost of Spanish chain Papabubble, cooks and owners alike pursue a perfect small-batch product
The team at Toronto’s Papabubble has a holiday problem: they all greatly dislike eggnog and are trying to flavour a hard candy that tastes like the popular festive drink.
Anyone who drops by — the media, carpenters — must have a taste of the test batch and offer feedback.
That’s what happens when you’re not just any old candy store, but one that makes custom shapes and flavours right on the premises.
And that’s what attracted Jennifer Liu and Catherine Chan to their franchise, part of a chain that was founded in Spain in 2004 and now has outposts all over the world. Their Toronto location is the first store in Canada.
The two went to high school together and went on to “office jobs.” Liu was, among other things, a buyer for Davids Tea. Chan worked mainly in fashion, doing wholesale distribution.
“We talked about opening our own business together,” says Chan. “We both needed a change.”
Liu was doing Google searches of interesting franchises when she came across Papabubble.
On impulse, she emailed the chain’s owner, and got a reply back almost right away.
A month later, in December 2014, she was off to New York to check out a location.
Chan, away on business at the time, visited the Papabubble soon after. Both thought the concept was ideal: they loved the sleek decor, the playful approach, and the artisanal, smallbatch product. They knew Toronto had nothing like it.
“Every candy is an art piece,” says Liu. They signed on.
They found a location on a welltrafficked stretch of Yonge St. north of Lawrence Ave. The storefront was mostly ready by last summer.
That’s when head office sent in a trainer to teach Liu, Chan and their two employees — George Brown culinary grads Calandra Bond and Charlene Giasson, whom the owners found via a Craigslist ad — how to make candy. The training took three months.
They learned to make a basic candy recipe using five everyday ingredients, cook the candy to a blistering 150 C, then shape it into flavourful, stylish hard candies.
The training included learning how to fashion words and images into candies, form fun items such as lollipops and flavour each bite to taste like mint, peach, butterscotch and more.
Each batch yields about three kilograms of candy and takes about two hours to put together. It’s challenging but creative work. While Giasson and Bond had a leg up due to their culinary training (“We’re getting good but they’re better,” admits Liu), everyone is still learning the fine craft of making candy Papabubble style.
Coming up, the team is learning to make marshmallows and gummies. They’ll always be trying new flavours, styles and looks.
Look for mustached lollies for Movember and a perfectly spiced eggnog candy, coming soon.