Tom and I recently made a trip to Circleville to visit Wittichs Candy Shop.  I read about Wittichs Candy Shop in “Ohio Ice Cream: A Scoop of History.”  It is a very interesting little book that lists lots of ice cream destinations in Ohio.  Wittichs Candy Shop is not an ice cream shop, but they recently bought and installed the Beechwold  Soda Fountain and counter and now they sell ice cream as well as candy.  Thus it earned its two pages in the book.

What caught my eye, however, was that Wittichs Candy Shop is the oldest family owned candy shop in the United States.  It was founded by Gottlieb Wittich in 1840 in Circleville and is still run by the Wittich family.  Fred Wittich, the great-grandson of Gottlieb, currently runs the business.

Wittichs Candy Shop makes all its chocolate candies by hand, just as it has since 1840.  Tom and I talked to a woman who was making maple creams.  She had the cold balls of maple cream next to her on marble and was rolling them in the warm milk chocolate in front of her.  After rolling the candy, she wrote a little M on each one to mark what kind of cream it was.  No preservatives are added to any of the chocolates so they are always the freshest possible. Fun fact – they make the chocolate in a copper kettle from the Bucyrus Copper Kettle Works that I wrote about here.

Tom had noted the buckeye assortment online before Christmas, so we were hoping to try some of the white chocolate or dark chocolate buckeyes.  After Christmas they only make the milk chocolate buckeyes because those sell better.  The other buckeyes are a novelty item available for a season.

We bought an assortment of chocolates, about 1 pound.  It was fun to pick out what went into the box.  About half of the candies were buckeyes, Tom’s choice, and then I chose a variety of creams.  We got four maple creams because we had watched the confectioner make them.  They sell lots of other candies but the chocolates are the only ones made in house.  I bought a small bag of peppermint taffy, which was delicious.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the buckeyes.  They had an odd extra dollop of peanut butter on the top that was hard.  The buckeyes at Sweeties in Ashland or Schmidt’s Fudge Haus in Columbus are better.

But the creams more than made up for the buckeyes.  The maple creams were some of the best chocolate candy I’ve ever had.  The mint creams with dark chocolate were crave-worthy.  The caramel and marshmallow chocolates were also very good, but when we go back, I’m, sticking with the creams!

If you are passing through Circleville, you need to stop at Wittichs Candy Shop.  I am looking forward to another visit – preferably when it is warmer – so I can try one of their specialty sundaes that blend ice cream with candy-making perfection.  The shop is open every day except Sunday and major holidays.