Baby Boomers Chocolate Chunk Cookies
- This sweet business started life as a giveaway. The owners of Baby Boomers Cafe started handing cookies out just to cheer people up, a sort of “feel good gesture” for restaurant patrons who looked like they could use a cookie. They were good enough that customers asked to buy them in quantity, and recently gained fame with the news that Sen. (and now President) Barack Obama was a fan. If you can’t get to the cafe in Des Moines, Baby Boomers will be happy to ship you a dozen or more, baked fresh daily. www.babyboomerscookie.com
- Has been hand-making chocolates, roasting nuts and creating salted nut rolls in Des Moines since 1946. Apparently chocolate and pecans aren’t rich enough on their own, so Suzette combines them with caramel to make its famous jumbo snapper. And apparently nougat needs an extra bit of punch, which is why it winds up combined with peanuts in those salted nut rolls. Don’t even get started on the creamy sugar mints or the jordan almonds. Des Moines CVB hands out Suzette chocolates at trade shows and as planner gifts and attendance-builders. www.suzettecandies.com
- This local candy maker completes the picture of Des Moines as “A Great Place to Go Just for Dessert.” It creates gourmet s’mores kits that include a choice of two flavors of locally made marshmallows, a dozen vanilla pizzelles (waffle cookies), a quarter-pound of Belgian milk chocolate discs, six toasting sticks and two “miniature bonfires” in the person of gel-fuel containers (kind of like Sterno, but smaller). (Note: Just don’t try to take the gel fuel to the airport.) www.beaverdaleconfections.com