Local confectioners discuss candy cane creation

Christmas may be days away, but at Nelson’s Candy in Wilton, it’s not uncommon for the unmistakable scent of peppermint to fill the air as early as October — a sign that candy cane season has begun.

“The minute they know we have them … people will ask,” owner Nancy Feraco said of Nelson’s candy canes. “We do wait to hang them up until about a week or two before Thanksgiving, but people will ask for them, and we’ll run in the other room and get them, and sell them that way.”

Feraco took over the shop in early 2019 for the late Doug Nelson, continuing his decades-long legacy in town of chocolate and candymaking. Chief among their products during the holiday season are the candy canes — made the old-fashioned way, of course, using large kettles of boiling water and a taffy puller.

“The candy cane recipe goes way back,” said Philip LaVergne, one of Nelson’s candymakers. “Doug rarely used a thermometer. Everything was all by feel. … But when it came to the candy canes, he would use one because it’s a little bit more specific.”

Indeed, the practice of making these beloved peppermint canes by hand is about as traditional as it gets in the candymaking world. It requires a distinct level of precision — not to mention consistent manpower for all the quick cutting, rolling and shaping due to the short window of time before the candy hardens — to craft them from start to finish, making the final product that much more special.

“It’s not a difficult process to learn. It is pretty straightforward but there’s a lot of scientific stuff behind it,” said Emily Lewis, production manager of Van Otis Chocolates, which, in the past, has held public candy cane making demonstrations as fundraisers for Easterseals New Hampshire. While the demonstrations have been put on hold due to the pandemic, Van Otis does carry an assortment of seasonal items during the holidays, including peppermint cream and candy cane Swiss fudge, or dark and white chocolate Swiss fudge blended with candy cane pieces.

Up in the Weirs Beach area of Laconia, Kellerhaus is another New Hampshire shop known for making its own candy canes by hand. Owner Daryl Dawson said they always make sure to get their first batch done just in time for their annual holiday event in late November.

“We’re not in a temperature-controlled facility … and so we need it to be a cool temperature and low humidity in order for the candy to harden correctly,” Dawson said, “and that’s usually around [the] end of October, beginning of November for our candy canes and also our ribbon candy.”

Granite State Candy Shoppe, with stores in Concord and Manchester, also offers handcrafted candy canes — they’re available individually as is, or dipped in white or dark chocolate. The shop also offers white and dark chocolate-layered peppermint bark and candy cane cocoa bombs, featuring a combination of dark chocolate and their homemade candy cane pieces.

From the traditional red and white peppermint cane to those in an assortment of crazy colors and flavors, we take a deep dive into how local candy experts make the magic happen and explore the folklore and claims of origin behind the candy cane as a uniquely Christmastime treat.

Ribbon candy
Like candy canes, ribbon candy is perhaps associated with the Christmas season more than any other time of the year. Kellerhaus in Laconia, in business since 1906, is known for being one of the few shops in the Granite State that regularly makes its own ribbon candy. They usually start making it around November in tandem with the candy canes, according to owner Daryl Dawson.
“A candy cane is really solid, but the ribbon candy we’ll pull into really thin strips,” Dawson said. “A lot of people think of ribbon candy as what they’ll see in the grocery store and it’s very thick. Ours is very thin, so thin that it’s almost one of those Listerine strips. It sort of will just melt in your mouth. … You won’t be chewing on it or having to suck on it for very long.”
For flavors, Dawson said they offer two different boxes — one is a traditional box holding cinnamon, wintergreen, peppermint, molasses and chocolate, while the other is an old-fashioned box with flavors like licorice, clove, spearmint, root beer and vanilla.
Nellson Perry, a candymaker who joined the staff of Nelson’s Candy in downtown Wilton back in March, has a mostly hard candy background — including candy canes and ribbon candy. Owner Nancy Feraco said they’ve made a few types of ribbon candy so far and hope to start experimenting with more soon. They have also been playing around with small hard candy pieces featuring drawn festive imagery in the center, like snowflakes and Santa Claus faces.

Getting hooked

Depending on their size, LaVergne said Nelson’s can usually produce around 150 individual candy canes or slightly more per batch, while at Kellerhaus, Dawson said that number tends to be between 75 and 100 due to its larger, nearly foot-long canes. The process starts by cooking a mixture mostly made up of sugar and water together until it reaches a temperature of just about 300 degrees.

“Once it hits the 300 degree mark, we pour that mixture out onto a stainless steel table that is heated with water to prevent the candy from breaking,” Dawson said. “When it’s poured onto the table, it’s completely clear. You can almost see through it into the table and we let it cool and add flavoring and color. … When it’s really hot it comes out in pools on the table, and you have to block it from kind of flowing off of the table, it’s so liquidy.”

When the sugar mixture cools enough and reaches a malleable, plastic-like state, that’s when it can be taken over to a taffy puller.

“They are like big coat hooks, basically,” Lewis said. “You have to wear gloves because it’s still very hot at that point, probably at around 250 degrees, and so some of us will wear multiple layers of gloves. … You rapidly flip it over the hook and pull it down and flip it over the hook and pull it down again, and that incorporation of air is actually going to make your candy cane turn white.”

Dawson said this process of turning the mixture from a clear color to a solid white only takes about five minutes.

“It’s really remarkable to see that happen,” he said. “[Pulling it] not only helps to cool it, but it also makes it a little bit more pliable and easier to work with. … We’ll also pull the red of the candy cane stripe until it’s nice and shiny looking.”

From there, the mixture — also known as a loaf — is moved to a table to be rolled, extruded and cut into individual pieces. Candymakers will use a sharp knife or a pair of shears to carefully section pieces off.

“You make a big log out of the white in the center, and then you put the stripes you added flavoring in on the side to create a design,” Lewis said. “You pull it into almost like a rope shape, and then cut your desired length and then shape them and pass them on. It sets really quickly on the table. I mean, once it gets removed from any kind of heat, it’ll set within maybe 30 seconds to a minute. So you can’t really play around with it too much or you’ll start cracking it.”

The final step, Dawson said, involves gently bending the top of each rolled up piece to create that signature hook-like shape of the candy cane.

As they reach the end of a batch, LaVergne noted, sometimes the stripes won’t always line up just right, or there won’t be enough left to create a full-sized candy cane. Those pieces are set aside to be used on other items like Nelson’s peppermint bark.

“[The candy cane pieces] are all mixed into the dark chocolate layer and the white chocolate layer, and then we sprinkle more of them on top,” he said.

Fun with flavors

Who says candy canes have to just be red and white and peppermint-flavored? In March of this year, Peterborough native Nellson Perry joined the staff of Nelson’s — Feraco likes to joke that they named the shop after him — bringing with him an extensive background in hard candy making from his time in the Los Angeles area.

“Nellson actually showed us another methodology of flavoring [candy canes] in the kettle,” LaVergne said, “because before, we used to flavor it on the hook. This way, it’s more specific, more precise and it’s the same exact flavor every time. … The other thing was that before, the stripes didn’t get flavor, because we cut off that piece of candy before they brought it to the hook. So now everything’s got flavor, and you’re going to get a better product out of it.”

The changed step of adding the flavoring into the kettle has also afforded them the opportunity to more readily experiment with different types of candy canes. Peppermint remains the tried and true favorite, but Nelson’s has also been known to make orange candy canes, blue raspberry candy canes, root beer candy canes and even anise candy canes for those who like the taste of black licorice. They made an orange candy cane with black stripes during the Halloween season, and recently Perry combined green apple, pineapple and orange flavors to create a fruit punch candy cane. Other unique flavor combinations have included a “chocolate-filled” candy cane, the inside of which Feraco equated to the chewiness of a Tootsie Roll.

“We took the candy loaf and flattened it out first, and then we put a big tube of chocolate taffy in there and then sealed it up,” LaVergne said.

At Kellerhaus, Dawson said they’ll always roll out peppermint and wintergreen candy canes, along with a third flavor that’s typically switched up every season.

“The peppermint is your typical red and white candy cane, and then the wintergreen is green and white,” he said. “Wintergreen is kind of like if you think about a wintergreen gum. It’s a little bit sharper and not as minty as the peppermint. … Everybody’s got different tastes of what they like; it just depends on the person. But the peppermint is definitely the top seller for us.”

As for that third flavor, this year it’s a blue and pink-colored cotton candy-flavored cane. But Dawson added that, oftentimes, the sky’s the limit with what they can come up with.

“We’ve done gingerbread, grape, orange, sour apple … [and] some of them actually do really well,” he said. “We usually like to let some of our newer employees decide on the flavor to do.”

An age-old tradition

There is much folklore surrounding the origin of candy canes and their significance at Christmastime. According to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, an encyclopedia edited by Darra Goldstein and published by Oxford University Press, a common story comes from the German city of Cologne, around the year 1670.

Hard candy sticks were a popular confection in Germany during the 17th century. Goldstein writes that a choirmaster of Cologne Cathedral, in his attempt to quiet children during holiday church services, consulted with a local candymaker. He ended up asking him to make a special version of a hard candy stick — one with a hook on the end, to resemble a shepherd’s crook.

Of course, there’s also the customary suggestion that, because a candy cane turned upside down resembles the letter “J,” it’s symbolic of Jesus Christ. Goldstein goes on to write that other theologians have suggested the white color of candy canes to be reflective of purity.

Prior to World War I, candy canes were manufactured by hand just about everywhere in the world. That began to change, Goldstein writes, around the early 1920s when the Bunte Brothers of Chicago applied for a patent for a machine that would manufacture them.

Considering the fact that candy canes have been mass-produced by machine now for roughly an entire century, it’s rather remarkable to see local shops like Nelson’s Candy — which, in its own right, has been in business since 1914, dating back to its days in Lowell, Mass. — take the time to continue to make them the old-fashioned way today.

Inside the Wilton shop is a framed black-and-white photograph of Doug Nelson’s grandmother and other family members and employees. Above them is a large chandelier-style structure with homemade candy canes hanging from it.

“As a child, Doug started making candy for her, and he made it all his life,” Feraco said. “In the 1980s, she sold [her shop] and she had all the grandchildren come in and take whatever they wanted for equipment. And so Doug took the taffy machines, he took the kettles and a few other things. … He moved here [to Wilton] in the early ’90s.”

Where to get your candy cane fix

Here are some local shops that offer their own handmade candy canes and other candy cane-related items, from peppermint bark to candy cane cocoa bombs.

Granite State Candy Shoppe
13 Warren St., Concord, 225-2591; 832 Elm St., Manchester, 218-3885; granitestatecandyshoppe.com
With stores in both downtown Concord and Manchester, Granite State Candy Shoppe offers handmade peppermint- or wintergreen-flavored candy canes — they are sold individually as is, or come dipped in milk or dark chocolate. Other products include dark and white chocolate peppermint bark (topped with the shop’s homemade peppermint pieces) and dark chocolate candy cane cocoa bombs.

Kellerhaus
259 Endicott St. N, Laconia, 366-4466, kellerhaus.com
Located in the Weirs Beach area of Laconia, Kellerhaus typically gets rolling on the candy canes and other peppermint-flavored items just before Thanksgiving. Individual canes are rather large — nearly a foot long after they are hooked, according to owner Daryl Dawson — and come in peppermint or wintergreen flavors, as well as a third flavor that rotates out every season. This year it’s cotton candy, featuring a blue and pink-colored cane.

Nelson’s Candy and Music
65 Main St., Wilton, 654-5030, nelsonscandymusic.com
It’s not uncommon for the sweet scent of peppermint to flow through the air inside this downtown Wilton shop as early as October. Nelson’s Candy is known for being somewhat of an experimental candy cane factory behind the counter — the traditional peppermint-flavored canes are available here, as well as everything from fruit punch to root beer candy canes. The same candy cane pieces are used in the shop’s own homemade peppermint bark.

Van Otis Chocolates
341 Elm St., Manchester, 627-1611, vanotis.com
While this Manchester shop has halted its candy cane making demonstration fundraisers due to the pandemic, there are still all kinds of seasonal treats here, from the peppermint creams to the candy cane Swiss fudge, featuring dark and white chocolate Swiss fudge mixed with candy cane pieces.

Featured photo: Candy cane Swiss fudge from Van Otis Chocolates in Manchester. Photo by Kreativ Studios.