S. Bonar

Mr. Bear keeps Godiva's 15-piece assortment in a red satin box (left) away from See's traditional red heart with assorted chocolates.

​This week's pre-Valentine's Day Food Fight pits a cute little mom-and-son candy shop against a sophisticated European chocolatier. This well-matched bout won't be over until the combatants are oozing cherry cordial.

See's Famous Old Time Candies was founded in 1921 on Western Avenue in Los Angeles by Charles See using the recipes of his mother, Mary. The See's website states that the company makes its more than 100 varieties of candies from the "choicest and finest grade raw ingredients from all over the world." Today See's is headquartered in San Francisco, and there are more than 200 shops in the West. Since 1972, it has been owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Some of their most popular flavors are Bordeaux, Scotchmallow (layered caramel and marshmallow) and chocolate buttercream.

Godiva Chocolatier was founded 80 years ago in Brussels, Belgium, by master chocolatier Joseph Draps. The company produces elegant, hand-crafted chocolates known for their smoothness, shell-molded designs and gold ballotin box packaging. Today there are more than 450 Godiva shops in more than 80 countries worldwide, including 275 in North America. The first Godiva shop opened in the U.S. in 1972. Many of Godiva's chocolates contain hazelnut praline, a European favorite. (Which is great if you love hazelnut, not so fabulous if you don't.)

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A. Scattergood

Turkish delight at Nory Locum

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If you've never had excellent Turkish delight, deceptively simple bits of chewy, gelée-like candy often flavored with bergamot or rosewater, sometimes shot through with pistachios, you haven't been spending enough time in Middle Eastern shops or reading C.S. Lewis. Or hanging out with Armand Sahakian, the Lebanon-born and Pasadena-raised candymaker who operates a 3-person business out of a tiny shop in Canoga Park.

Behind the storefront, hung with blinds and looking deceptively like a laundromat, a huge sign that says "Nory Locum" -- as if you'd magically know what that was -- and a far smaller sign suggesting that you might ring the doorbell if you want admittance, you'll find Sahakian's cluttered office and stacked boxes of candy like you've stumbled into a confectioner's secret warehouse, which in a sense you have.

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madame-chocolat.com

Hasty To Your Peep Rescue

​There are marshmallow peeps, and then there are Jacques Torres' dark chocolate tuxedo clad peeps (rather unfortunately named Chirp n' Dales, but hey, it's Jacques Torres). The deadline for Easter shipment from Mr. Chocolate, as he dubs both himself and his New York-based online store, has already passed. Not to panic, peep-ophiles. We have Madame Chocolate -- the Madame Chocolate, Torres' wife -- right here in Beverly Hills.

Hasty Torres' pastry career is your standard practical-turned-powdered sugar story. The San Gabriel Valley native ditched her finance job for a sudden urge to make chocolate. Pastry school at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena followed by a stage with Jacques in New York had the expected storybook dark chocolate truffle ending... she returned to Los Angeles to open Madame Chocolat in Beverly Hills. But then there was the unexpected brown butter caramel filling: She married the master chocolatier.

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Here's the situation: you just received the latest issue of your favorite food magazine. As you flip through the glossy pages of recipes and food porn, you spot it: the recipe you're going to make for dinner. But one glance at the ingredient list leaves you stumped. Where in the world do you buy Hungarian paprika? Miniature tart pans? Sanding sugar? Let our top 10 list of LA cooking supply stores be your guide.

Sur La Table

Farmers Market Sur La Table

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This Sunday is a holiday, though not an ideal one for cynics, pessimists, depressives or alcoholics (that's what St. Patrick's Day is for). It is, however, a day to spend money on sinful indulgences, and when you do, we encourage you to shop locally. So rather than importing your chocolates from far away lands like Belgium and Switzerland, give a chance to this week's food fight combatants and neighborhood chocolate specialists at Jin Patisserie and Compartes Chocolatier. I am, admittedly, not a passionate lover of sweets, nor am I the target audience for Valentine's confections. With that, I've decided to bring in the expert advice of a research assistant; a living, breathing female on her first assignment, being paid entirely in chocolates.

N. Galuten

Compartes Chocolatier

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Have you tried pouring gigantic stockpots of hot molten butter and water boiled with sugar and cornstarch onto silicone baking mats, then quickly smoothing it out to form uniform sheets of thin, crunchy, rich sweetness? Needless to say, it's an extremely hot and potentially messy task. Fortunately Max Lesser of Morning Glory Confections has got the dangerous activity of artisanal brittle making down to a series of swift motions.

Photo: Jessica Ritz

Morning Glory Confections' sheets of brittle

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An artist and former private chef, Lesser "kept coming back to the brittle" as a treat primed to be "brought into its renaissance." Since October 2008, packages of Morning Glory Brittle -- produced entirely in Los Angeles and made extra attractive on the shelf thanks to the help of some of Lesser's former comrades from the Art Institute of Chicago and Cal Arts -- have been available at gourmet shops around town. (Morning Glory products are also available online, and are not to be confused by a different foodstuff of the same name.)

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Restaurants and bars are rolling out their holiday specials, their happy hour eggnogs and feasts of fishes, but the folks on 3rd street are going one better. They're throwing a holiday block party. Well, it's more than one block, so call it a neighborhood party. The West 3rd Street Business Association, a non-profit organization of businesses located on West Third Street between Fairfax and La Cienega, is having a party tomorrow night, December 10th, between 6-9 p.m. There will be food and drink, specials and sales in the various shops, and general communal merriment.

"We are a community," says Joan McNamara of Joan's on Third, who had a box full of little glowy rings on her desk the other day in anticipation of the event. "We also need to be a destination to keep people in business." In addition to their usual fare, Joan's will be serving wine and hors d'œuvres, including focaccia, for the occasion. Even with the closing of the late and much lamented Cook's Library, the area is bustling with shops and restaurants, so after a bit of shopping you can stop off at Joan's, or Little Door or Little Next Door, or drop in and have a bite at the bar at Ortolan. One of Christophe Emé's macarons (or his scrambled egg-in-its-own-shell with osetra caviar) would put anybody in the holiday mood.

A. Scattergood

Joan's on Third

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If you're the sort of person who TiVo's Ace of Cakes episodes, haunts the aisles of Surfas and Gloria's Cake & Candy Supplies looking for fondant and gumpaste and cake boards, and thinks making a 3-tiered cake adorned with flowers made from royal icing is a good time, then you're in luck. N.Y. Cake West opened a month ago on Pico Blvd., near the Westside Pavilion. The shop is the West Coast sister store of N.Y. Cake & Baking Distributor, a wholesale and retail store which was founded 25 years ago in Manhattan by Joan Mansour, cake decorator, gold medal award winner by the Societe Culinaire Philantropique and Wilton Hall of Fame inductee.

Jenny Kashanian, Mansour's daughter, runs the West Coast operations and has followed in her mother's cake flour-dusted footsteps, offering classes in baking and cake-decorating. Look for classes on subjects such as Flowers & Borders, Fondant & Tiered Cakes, Chocolate Making, and, yes of course, Cupcakes. And, along with the classes and baking supplies, you now have a new source of edible luster dust.

Photo credit: Roxanne Rubell

Baking and cake supplies at N.Y. Cake West

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N.Y. Cake West: 10665 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles; (310) 481-0875.

If those bars of Valrhona Manjari 64% and Noir 85% from Michel Cluizel are seeming passé, you might want to try Al Nassma Chocolate, a Dubai-made confection which is the first brand of chocolate made with camels' milk. Hand-milked camels' milk no less, from the camel farm Camelicious, which is Al Nassma's sole supplier. The company, which is in Umm Nahad, makes chocolate bars flavored with spices, dates, oranges, and macadamia nuts, as well as whole (camels') milk chocolate, 70% cacao bars, and filled pralines. The most popular item is a hollow chocolate camel, wrapped in gold and available in two sizes.

REUTERS/Steve Crisp

Milking camels for chocolate

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For those us who grew up eating marshmallows out of a plastic bag, those oddly white confections that seemed to taste of nothing but chemicals and stale air, the hand-crafted version is a revelation. Thus marshmallow lovers in this town beat a track to the Little Flower Candy Company in Pasadena, where candymaker Christine Moore makes some of the best of them. Right now she's selling chocolate, coffee and cinnamon-sugar marshmallows, along with the traditional vanilla. During the holidays, Moore is prone to color them and flavor them with mint, which is particularly good when confronted with a large cup of hot chocolate.

Moore's homey shop is also a terrific place to get pastries and cappuccino, sandwiches and soups, and to pick up some of her alarmingly addictive sea salt caramels. Moore also collects interesting candies and sells cookbooks by local authors; it's the kind of place where you can sit and read the paper for a few hours, or come away with a backseat full of treats.

Photo credit: Amy Scattergood

Marshmallows being packaged at Little Flower Candy Company

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