Rings, and even bugs, for your sweet tooth
February 5, 2006 - The Boston Globe - Travel Section
BARCELONA - Toothpaste sales must be up in this town. Either that, or the city’s dentists are doing brisk business. Or both. Fueled by a mix of funkiness, glamour, and, well, bugs, Barcelona is becoming a hard candy hot spot.
Nowhere is the mania as evident as it is at Papabubble when they are making candy. To find the shop, stroll to the bottom of La Rambla Barcelona’s best-known street hang a left and walk until you hit the line of gawkers spilling out the door.
Inside, you’ll find partners Christopher King and Tommy Tang bending sugar to their wills, 165 pounds a day.
The two Australians make the candy as their customers watch, and any child (and most adults) who wanders in immediately goes glassy- eyed with pleasure.
Tang, who says his “age doesn’t matter” but looks to be in his 30s, got the candymaking bug and learned the trade from an 80-year-old countryman.
How do the locals feel about Australians coming to Barcelona to make candy?
“They find it fascinating that people come from Australia and set up shop, but it’s something artisanal, and they have a lot of respect for handmade things,” says King.
They are candy freaks in their own right. King, 30, still has a soft spot for the candy of his youth: mint patties, Humbugs, the “Harry Potter”-sounding Pollywaffles, and Fry’s Turkish Delight. Tang’s favorites include Peppermint Crisps, and the less tasty- sounding Snakes Alive!
While the Papabubble boys shoot for a mix of Barcelonans and tourists as customers, Christian Escriba is using the city as his springboard to the world. In the famous bakery founded 99 years ago by his great-grandfather, Escriba is designing and making high-end Candy-Glam rings.
Looking like miniature objects made by glass artist Dale Chihuly, Escriba sells his rings around the world for about $30 a pop. Among the approximately 200 models he has created are shimmering gold pyramids, amber-colored hearts, and blue lips. He refers to the flowers with delicate stamens he’s working on as “the ones that break,” but demand forces him to continue making them.
“The rings came out of a wedding cake,” Escriba says with an enigmatic grin. “I clothed a girl in sugar and, of course, she needed jewels to go with it.” Smiling, he puts a DVD into a laptop to show me what he’s talking about.
Sure enough, in the video, the lights go down at a wedding dinner and a woman glides out with fluorescent green hair and an enormous dress that rolls across the ground. The spiraling “hair” and bright- colored swatches that cover the dress are all made of candy. She also wears two hands’ worth of rings.
“The woman was the cake,” he explains, “Of course, she had to have jewelry to go with it.”
The rings went over so well as presents for the wedding guests that Escriba started selling them from his two shops as Valentine’s Day presents two years ago.
Using Pastisseria Escriba on La Rambla, he displayed the rings like jewels each one in a case, and, upon purchase, put in a larger box. Escriba’s big break came when someone from Harrods in London went home with six rings about two years ago.
“I got a call from Harrods buyer [afterward], who wanted to start stocking them. Right away.” Now, stores like Galeries Lafayette in Paris display them alongside their jewelry and Escriba comes up with a couple of new lines of rings each year.
Petras’s stand, Fruits del Bosc (fruit of the forest), in la Boqueria, the famous food market on La Rambla, overflows with beautiful mushrooms and tubers from around the world. Set off in a corner display case is a shelf with nothing but edible dried bugs. Among the cans of large, dried water beetles, giant ants, and thumb- sized scorpions sit the stars of the display: bug candies.
They look like prehistoric monsters frozen in time, or at least in clear lollipops and slabs of orange hard candy; people stop, point, and make faces.
“We get everything,” says Petras, describing the reactions. “Some people don’t like it, but other people want to try them.”
Petras seems as surprised as the people walking by that his bugs (and the bug candy) are still there. “It started off as a joke, but the public kept demanding it,” he says.
Back in his bakery, Escriba sums up the candy scene, “You know `Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’?” he says. “That’s us.”
Contact Joe Ray at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
IF YOU GO . . .
Papabubble
Ample 28
011-34-93-268-86-25
www.papabubble.com
A 200-gram jar costs $6.50; lollipops $3-$7.25. “And if you want a giant lollipop the size of a tennis racquet,” says Tang, “that’s 50 euros [$60].” Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and 4-8:30, Saturday 10-8:30, Sunday 11-7:30.
Patisseria Escriba
Rambles, 83 (next to La Boqueria)
011-34-93-301-60-27
www.escriba.es
Daily 8 a.m.-9 p.m.
and at Gran Via, 456
011-34-93-454-75-35
Rings about $36. Weekdays 8 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5-9 p.m., weekends 8 a.m.-9 p.m.
Fruits del Bosc Petras
La Rambla, 85-89 (in La Boqueria)
011-93-302-52-73
Slabs of orange hard candy with bugs inside $6, and bug lollipops $3.60. Monday-Saturday 7 a.m.-2 p.m. Closed Mondays January-March.
