Descendants of Minnesota’s oldest candy shop make nostalgic sweets beloved for generations

At Canelake’s Candies in Virginia, Minn., fourth-generation candymaker Sam Canelake picked up a chocolate bar the size of a lunch tray and whacked it with a hammer. He tossed a couple hunks into the enrobing machine to coat another batch of hot air — a hard-to-find, old-fashioned treat that’s the number-one seller at the state’s oldest continuously operating candy store.

Making the crunchy, featherlight sweet (also known as angel food or sponge candy) is a finicky, multi-step process that’s “90 percent technique,” Sam said. But the six months it took him to get the hang of it was a relative sugar granule of time in his family’s long history in the candy business.

A couple of years ago, Sam, 30, left his job as a math teacher in Arizona to learn his great-grandfather’s candy trade (settling into an apartment next door to the small-town storefront, as if scripted by a Hallmark movie). More than a century ago, that great-grandfather, a Greek immigrant named Gust Canelake (the Anglicized pronunciation is Cane-lake), came to the booming Iron Range and launched a confectionary with his three brothers. Since 1905, the shop has changed hands, changed locations, and changed names from the original Virginia Candy Kitchen. But they still use the old recipes and copper cooking kettles.

With the holidays approaching, the shop’s windows featured Santa Claus in a reindeer-drawn sleigh from the old Dayton’s eighth-floor displays. Staffers were hustling to meet quadrupled demand for treats from Canelake’s and the family’s sister business, Great Lakes Candy Kitchen in Knife River on the North Shore.

Both shops are known for their abundant display of homemade sweets, from chocolate-covered cremes and caramels, to brittles, barks and candy bars. Sam’s aunt Pamela Canelake Matson, who oversees the Virginia store with her husband, Dennis Matson, (the couple’s son Andy runs the Knife River store), says that regulars love to relive their childhood memories at the shop. And first-timers are “kind of flabbergasted” by the candy array.

“It’s an explosion of colors and sights,” she explained. “They’re like the kid in the candy store.”

One of Pamela’s favorite early memories is of making candy canes with her dad at grandpa Gust’s shop. As a teenager, she worked at the store’s soda fountain, which still serves limey green river phosphates of the Prohibition era.

Behind the counter stools hangs a photograph of an older couple re-creating their first date at Canelake’s some 50 years later. It’s one of many images and artifacts in the shop that reflect the family and community history, including black-and-white images of Gust removing the metal from the shop’s ice-cream machine to donate to the war effort, and dipping chocolate with his wife when they were likely in their 80s. (“He came to work here right to the last second,” Dennis noted.)

Gust passed the store down to Pamela’s father and his brother, who ran it for decades. When the two brothers were ready to retire, in the 1980s, they sold the business to a longtime employee.

Pamela and her siblings hadn’t been interested in running the store at that time. But while living in Duluth, Pamela had started selling caramels and fudge made with her dad’s recipes at a small craft co-op. In 2007, her twin sister, Patricia Canelake, noticed a smoked fish shack on Scenic 61 just off Lake Superior and thought it would be the perfect spot for a candy store. So the sisters scrubbed out the pungent smell and launched Great Lakes Candy Kitchen.

Though Dad was then in his 80s, he agreed to teach his daughters how to cook the family recipes. “He had them all written down in a little blue book, and he had them kind of coded so if someone found them, they couldn’t decipher them,” Pamela explained, recalling how the three of them had hovered over Dad’s kitchen stove. “My brother thought it actually extended his life, because he had something to really look forward to. Then at one point my dad said, ‘You know, there’s nothing more I can show you.’ "

In 2018, four years after their father had died, Pamela and her siblings heard that Canelake’s was for sale and decided to bring it back into the family. “We were like, ‘Do we really want to take this on?’ Yeah, we do, because it was started in 1905 and it was part of our legacy.”

Back in Canelake’s early years, small confectioners were as ubiquitous as modern coffee shops (especially during Prohibition). Today, only a few candymakers in Minnesota, including Abdallah and Regina’s in the Twin Cities area, have similar longevity and selection as Canelake’s

When the third generation of Canelakes took over, they added new items to their assortment (handmade truffles, marshmallows and chocolate-covered clusters of popped wild rice) and leaned into meeting youthful tastes (salty-sweet combinations, gummy candies over hard candy, Oreos dipped in basically anything). But they still make old-timey sweets such as peppermint ribbon candy and horehound lozenges using hand-cranked antique machines. And they don’t skimp on ingredients, Pamela said, even though the price of their chocolate, supplied by Minnesota-based Cargill, roughly doubled in the past year.

The family is also launching a new venture next door. They recently bought the old Arrowhead Bar in order to expand Canelake’s kitchen. ”We’re hoping it will help it last for another 100 years,” Pamela said. But the septuagenarian couple never planned to become bar owners. (Dennis: “We like to go drinking, but we don’t want to run a bar!” Pamela: “Dennis likes to drink. I don’t even know how to make a drink.”) When renovations are complete, they plan to hire a manager and reopen the joint this spring.

In the meantime, a sweet caramel scent continues to fill Canelake’s kitchen, as block after block of butter melts into sugar and cream. Watching the mixture thicken and take on a deep orange-ish hue, Pamela recalled a few of the tips and tricks passed through her family, from one generation to the next. Test the caramel on the table and make sure it’s not too hard or too soft. Follow the recipe exactly. “I just hear my dad’s voice every day,” she said. “It’s comforting.”