I must apologize to the exquisite little candies pictured above for my treatment of them. I set them on my kitchen floor and took a photograph of them, but confections like these should be placed on a pedestal—especially those dark chocolate ones with the flecks of gold on top, they should be revered.
In my defense, after I snapped the photo, I sat on the floor with the chocolates and ate them reverentially, row by row, unable to take a break to stand up and move to a chair. First there was white chocolate with red velvet cake in the middle and a red hot on top. Then there was coconut, wrapped in chocolate and dusted in coconut. And cake batter coated in white chocolate. Each was delicious. But it was the Champagne Bliss, a coy little gilded globe of chocolate-on-chocolate that proved Miley Barcus' claim that her Wonderffuls are "a cross between a truffle and the best piece of cake you've ever tasted."
When Barcus, a former rocker who threw over the music biz for a career in real estate, realized that her clients were more interested in her homemade candies than in her property listings, she surrendered to her chocolatey calling. After a brief stint at The French Pastry School in Chicago, she opened Merveilleux Confections this month in the Factory at Franklin.
Merveilleux, indeed. Wonderffuls are marvelous. The two that took my breath away and kept me sitting on the kitchen floor were both chocolate-on-chocolate, one encased in a dark crisp shell, the other dusted in bitter cocoa powder. The secret to both was a rich brownie center, with an ever-so-fine granular crunch embedded in the gooeyness and a salty counterpoint to the intense sweetness. Each $2 bite left me wanting more. And milk.
Wonderffuls are available at Merveilleux Confections in the Factory at Franklin, 230 Franklin Road (phone: 472-1243) and online at wonderffuls.com.
