Friends and Followers:
We hope that the enchantment and instruction of the season is evergreen, and that you may delight in peaceable, charitable, and glad modes of being. It is with merry hearts that we alert you that we’ve been working as persistently as benched elves in preparing new desserts and confections to bring happiness to your tongue and being.
Foremost, we have new ice cream flavors at The Franklin Fountain, which we believe will enliven you to shriek with seasonal joy. Hear this– Peppermint Stick Ice Cream returns once more to our dipping cabinets,bringing a cool taste to the snow-color’d ice cream it haunts. You may also have this flavor in Peppermint Stick Ice Cream Sandwiches, a delicious treat concocted by our culinary sorceresses.
We will also be featuring a new sundae: A Christmas Carol Crunch. This elaborate dish features ‘Cheery’ Rum Raisin Ice Cream, Fresh and Sticky Pudding Cake, spiced and rum-spiked Currants, topped by candied English Walnuts, and pools of housemade hot caramel sauce. It is spooked thricely by Dickensian Christmas spirits, and we suspect that it would go over quite well at one of Fezziwig’s Christmas parties.
Breaking news! The votes have been tallied from last month’s Phosphate Election and the people have spoken with clarity of mandate. “Taft, A Winner!” has proven its namesake with a landslide victory. As for the fare of other phosphates on the ballot, Governor Woodrow Wilson’s “Wilson Punch” placed second, Eugene Victor Debs’s “Wonder Worker Tonic” placed third, and poor Theodore Roosevelt placed last with his “Teddy’s Favorite” phosphate concoction, which was, by the admission of many in terms of its ingredients, was a bit hard to stomach. We congratulate President Taft, and hope he will lead our divided nation well in these next four menu years with delicious and unifying chocolate soda, crushed strawberries, and variable seasonal ice cream. Hail to the Chief!
We have some important news on the Shane Confectionery front– the Shane Ordering Form has been made public and ready, with a period-authentic visual aesthetic. You may visit http://shanecandies.com/confections/ to view and engage it, or you may pick up a physical form on site at Shane Confectionery or The Franklin Fountain. From its folded pages you may find and select from an array of goodies and bon bons, available for READY SHIPMENT across the land! Chocolates, buttercreams, jellied fruits, clear toy candies– there is an extensive list that you may choose from. We hope that your eyes are cast over our out-rolled catalogue of wonders.
We have some Christmastime news for you at Shane’s: our famed Clear Toy Candies have been featured in a wonderfully written article in GRID Magazine. You may find the exquisite prose and marvelous photography in the link below. Please give this terrific piece of journalism your sharpest focus.
We will also be featuring a limited edition trio of truffles to be sold as a set this month: “The Gifts of the Magi.” These truffles are made with the very same ingredients that were gifted to the Christchild over two millennia ago. The frankincense and myrrh used in each respective truffle are imported from the Holy Land, and the third is a golden honey filled truffle gilded with authentic gold leaf. You will not find such an assortment anywhere in the West, and we encourage you to follow the eastern stars to their hallowed magnificence. To describe the flavor is a holy mystery and as special as a true sacrament.
We shall also be offering for the first time “Postcard Cookies”, thick sugar cookies topped with an edible icing of images of antique postcards. A truly unique Christmas Cookie, handmade by our Philadelphia Friend, Author, Historian and Decorative Arts specialist Jennifer McGlinn. Her partnership on these cookies is new to Shanes! To read more about these treats and her books, see this link: http://jennifermcglinn.wordpress.com/
Additionally, in keeping with our Pennsylvania German traditions at The Fountain, we also sell Springerle Cookies (made using hand-carved wooden molds at The Springerle House in Strasburg, PA) in four traditional flavors at both locations.
The requested confections were more and many (like presents under the tree) this year and our copper overfloweth at this time of Celebration:
TAKE NOTICE:
if you are caught stealing from the candy jar, old St. Nick will be sure to bring you some Coal Candy from Shane’s. Hundreds have already been made and shipped out for stuffing the naughty ones among you…
We will also be offering special Hanukkah Candies. Historically, while celebrated by observant Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews across the world, Hanukkah was traditionally considered to be a minor festival within the Jewish world. It wasn’t until 1876 that
Rabbi Issac Wise of Cincinnati popularized the festival and underscored the metaphoric spiritual truth that the light of the spirit is victorious over surrounding darkness, and that it should increase successively with appropriate earnestness of conduct and deed. Wise’s teachings on the subject and the championing of its core message are both a story of personal conviction and a tale of the evolution of religious life and Jewish identity within America. We salute him with a Shane Confectionery assortment of blue, white, and silver Jordan Almonds the colors of talliot, and bagged gold-and-silver wrapped chocolate geld. For our patrons of Hebrew lineage or identity, we hope to gladden your eight day festival with these goodies.
If you can’t make it into Shane’s this season, we hope that you can stop by any number of locations which carry our products, like Metropolitan Bakeries, Capogiro Artisans, Arden Theater, or the Terrain at Styer’s Nursery in Glen Mills, PA or Terrain in Westport, CT.
We wish you everything the goodness in your heart desires.
May There Be Peace On Earth and Peace Within You,
The Berley Brothers and Staff