Three jars, always within reach
Striped pegs for the citrus batches, round drops for honey and chili, cubes for anything starch-moulded. Keeping a jar half full is not laziness — it is how we taste the cure over a week.
How we pair themAsheville, North Carolina · Since 2016
Sugar, spun slowly — flavoured like a season.
We cook candy in five-kilo batches, pull it by hand on a marble slab, and flavour it with whatever the market gave us that morning. This journal is where the recipes, the failures and the glossy results live.
- 38 Flavours in rotation
- 412 Batches pulled
- 6 Pantry staples
- Marigold honey
- Burnt orange peel
- Green cardamom
- Sea salt caramel
- Fig & walnut
- Guajillo chili
- Spearmint
- Tahitian vanilla
Inside the atelier
A copper kettle, a marble slab, and a great deal of patience
Everything starts in the same nine-litre kettle at the back of the shop. What changes is the pause — the exact second we lift it off the heat.
Candy is a timing sport. The sugar does not care how good your idea was; it cares whether you pulled the kettle at thread stage or three degrees too late. So we cook small, watch closely, and write down the weather. Humidity is the ingredient nobody lists.
A batch begins with cane sugar, a spoon of glucose and a splash of water. From there the flavour can go two ways: steeped, where citrus peel or cracked cardamom rides in the syrup from the first minute, or folded, where the aromatic goes in off the heat so it keeps its top notes. Most of our lollipops use both — one perfume for the middle, one for the finish.
The swirl is poured in passes onto a warm marble ledge. Two colours, two temperatures, one confident wrist. If the pour hesitates the ribbon shatters, and the shards go into a jar for testing rather than the window. Roughly one batch in nine ends up as test candy. We are honest about that because it is the interesting part.
“A good lollipop should taste like the first thirty seconds and the last three minutes, and it should be worth both.” Nell Abarca · head confectioner
Confectionery notes
The shelf, the shards, and everything in between
A working board of what is on the marble this month — jars at eye level, botanicals in the pantry, and one exploded lollipop for the curious.
Three flavours, never four
A lollipop is a small thing with a short attention span. One key flavour, one supporting note, one texture. The third one is the finish — salt, acid, or a whisper of heat — and it never shows up first.
Read the kitchen notes
Botanicals, weighed small
Cardamom is cracked by hand, mint is infused cold, and the chilies are toasted until they smell of raisins rather than fire.
What is actually inside a swirl
A shell, a poured heart, a band of pulled sugar and a birch stem. Four parts, three temperatures, one very steady wrist.
The autumn table
Figs, late pears and the first plums — the three fruits that taste best against a dark caramel.
Twelve folds, then stop
Pulled sugar gets its shine from air, not from butter. Twelve folds gives a rope that snaps clean at room temperature and softens on the tongue in about four seconds. Fold a thirteenth time and it turns cloudy; fold fewer and it weeps by Thursday.
See the four holdsSmall batches, long evenings
The atelier pours on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the tasting counter is open while the marble is still warm. Write ahead and we will save you a shard of whatever went wrong.
Plan a visit
Interactive · pantry pairing
The flavour atlas
Six pantry keys, six ways to build a lollipop. Choose a key and the tasting card rewrites itself — no reload, no fuss.
Interactive · texture reference
Sugar glass & the four holds
The same sugar will behave four completely different ways depending on where you stop the cook. Step through the holds.
Crystalline
Sugar held below the boil and stirred until it seizes into fine grains. The result is a short, sandy bite that dissolves in seconds — the base of every fondant and every sugar crust in the room.
- Feel Sandy, quick-melting
- Cook to 113–118°C
- Best for Fondant centres, sugar crusts
- Kitchen note Stir only at the very end, or the batch grains early.
Seasonal board
What the market hands us
The harvest board is rewritten every six weeks. These are the four windows we plan the year around.
Figs, pears and the first cold mornings
Late figs carry enough sugar to ripple through caramel without extra glucose, which makes October the easiest month in the kitchen, and the shortest. By November the pears have gone starchy and we switch to quince and burnt honey.
- Autumn Fig & walnut ripple, pear caramel, cider lollipop.
- Winter Burnt honey, blood orange peel, cocoa nib rock.
- Spring Spearmint, cucumber water, early strawberry glass.
- Summer Guajillo chili, stone fruit, sea salt lemon drop.
Journal index
Three notes worth reading first
Short reads from the marble slab, updated between batches.
-
No. 014
Why we steep citrus twice
Peel in early for depth, zest late for lift. A short note on building a citrus lollipop that tastes like fruit instead of floor cleaner.
Open the atlas -
No. 021
The four-second snap
How to tell a sugar glass batch is ready by sound alone, and why the third crack is the one that matters.
Step through the holds -
No. 027
Working safely with hot sugar
Our standing kitchen rules: dry hands, no children at the marble, and what to do in the first ten seconds of a spill.
Read the advisory
Come watch a batch set.
The tasting counter opens while the marble is warm. Tell us which flavour you are curious about and we will pull a shard of it for you — no tickets, no checkout, just sugar and conversation.
148 Larkspur Lane
Asheville, NC 28801
Tuesday & Friday, 10–4