Oct 23, 2007

Cobblestone Confections’ road to success paved with toffeeBy Lisa MillerMansfieldNewsJournal.com

Mansfield — The Halloween candy hasn’t even been handed out yet, but visions of peppermint snowmen and spearmint hard tack are dancing in Merry Birmelin’s head.

Actually, her head, like the house she shares with husband and “best helper” Lew, is also crammed with luscious lulus, popcorn crunch cakes and other goodies from her Cobblestone Confections candy business.

Step inside the house on Overlook Drive and look to the right. There’s a shipment of shiny, star-shaped gift boxes awaiting their candy contents. On the left is an antique cupboard stocked with some of the products Merry has developed from classic recipes and given her own little twist. Her hard tack goes fruit-flavored in the summer and back to anise, clove and other tastes she said customers go for because “grandmas used to make that.”

Lew serves as both candy-packer and wife-backer. He explains, for example, that while everybody makes chocolate and peanut butter buckeyes, Merry’s chocolate fudge cups with peanut butter creme are the best.

“They always want recipes,” he said of customers at the festivals and other events where they set up shop. “She does a nice job.”

Merry doesn’t use the marble slabs, copper kettles or even candy thermometers that most candy makers swear by.

“I cook by sight and feel,” she said. “The kitchen is really small but it’s efficient for me.” More supplies are out on the screened-in porch.

Except for a few months a year, the smell of butter bubbling on the stove or pans full of nuts and sugar setting up into toffee wafts out of the kitchen and greets a guest at the door. That’s become the sweet smell of success so far for the business launched in 2005.

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