Since 2021
A marble slab, a small kitchen, and one stubborn idea
Sugarwren is a two-person candy shop in south Minneapolis. We make hard candy the slow way because the fast way tastes like nothing in particular.
It started with a burnt pan and a bad batch of fudge
I'm Marguerite. In 2018 I was eleven years into restaurant pastry work and tired of plating desserts that people photographed and then abandoned. One January night I burned a pan of sugar badly enough that the smoke alarm went off, and instead of throwing it out I poured the mess onto a buttered baking sheet to see what it would do.
It set clear, cracked when I dropped it, and tasted of scorched caramel and stubbornness. I made another batch the next week. Then I bought a thermometer, then a marble slab from a closing bakery in Bloomington, and then I stopped pretending this was a hobby.
By 2021 the kitchen on 3rd Avenue had a sign on the door, a second pair of hands (my sister, who does the wrapping and most of the math) and a rule we have not broken since: nothing leaves this room that we would not eat ourselves.
How we got here
A short, unglamorous timeline
2018 — the burnt pan
First edible batch of hard candy, made in a rental kitchen in Longfellow with a thermometer that read eleven degrees high. A year of cloudy sugar followed.
2021 — the shop on 3rd Avenue
We moved into the small production kitchen, bought the second marble slab, and started selling at the door on Saturdays to whoever walked past.
2023 — the honest mistake
The spilled blackcurrant that became Nocturne Nebula, and the two months it took to learn how to repeat it on purpose.
Now — seven candies, still two people
We make what we can make well. There is no plan for a second location, a franchise or a factory. The slab is the limit and we are fine with that.
What we actually believe about candy
Sweetness is a texture as much as a taste. A lollipop that is too dense feels sweeter than one that shatters, even when the sugar is measured the same. Most of our work is in the structure, not the flavour bottle.
Restraint beats variety. Seven candies, each with a reason to exist, is more interesting to us than forty that all taste like the same raspberry. When something is not working, we take it off the list instead of adding a colour.
Adults are allowed to like candy. Most of our customers are in their forties and fifties. They are not looking for a novelty the size of a dinner plate; they want something small, well-made and a bit strange, to have with coffee at four in the afternoon.
Honesty is cheaper than marketing. We will tell you when a batch came out soft, when a candy is out of season, and when we do not know the answer. It has cost us a few orders and saved us a lot of nonsense.
A note on the obvious
What this shop is not
We are not a candy museum, we are not a factory with a viewing window, and we are not going to tell you that handmade candy will change your life. It is sugar, colour and flavour, made carefully by two people who have strong opinions about the temperature of a slab.
What we can promise is smaller: it was made this month, in this building, by hand, and someone tasted it before it was wrapped.
Come and taste for yourself
Pickup is by appointment at the kitchen on 3rd Avenue, and we are happy to talk through flavours before you decide.