GLOBAL TRADING: CONFECTIONERS

Sweets presented like jewels in Tokyo; fluffy cinnamon marshmallows in Los Angeles: in our latest "Global trading" round-up, we hunt down some of the world's best places to indulge your sweet tooth ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2008

TORAYA, Tokyo
To walk into Toraya’s main shop in Tokyo is to set foot inside a Japanese culinary institution. Traditional Japanese sweets, or wagashi, are immaculately presented in glass cabinets, as if jewels. Particularly popular are yokan, a firm, rectangular sweet made of azuki-bean paste and seaweed-based jelly. Others take the form of small, doughy cakes or compressed, sugary powder. The sweets travel well too: Toraya, which has provided wagashi to Japan’s imperial family since 1600, also has shops in Paris and New York. ~ KENNETH CUKIER
4-9-22 Akasaka, Minato-ku; +81 3408 4121

CYBERCANDY, Brighton
Connoisseurs of unusual confectionery brands relish the lip-smacking range of imported goodies from America, Japan, South Africa and Canada at this tasty seaside boutique (right). Stock up on Hershey bars and Twinkies or Hello Kitty strawberry biscuit-sticks. Retro-style bubble-gum machines make jolly gifts, while rare American sodas are a speciality--courageous drinkers might try the lime-flavoured, caffeine-heavy Mountain Dew. ~ SARAH DALLAS
98 Gloucester Road, Brighton, E Sussex; +44 (0)845 838 0958

MRS KIBBLE'S OLDE SWEET SHOPPE, London
Peer through the bow window of this striped, sherbet-pink and white store in Soho to find shelves of jars crammed with colourful, old-fashioned British sweets of the schoolboy (and schoolgirl) variety. Choose from candy canes in five different flavours, jelly babies, gobstoppers, mint humbugs and chunks of house-made fudge, all weighed at the counter, where they can be decanted into jars with a personalised label: apt gifts for the young, the sweet-toothed or the simply nostalgic. ~ SARAH DALLAS
57a Brewer Street, London W1; +44 (0)20 7734 6633

LITTLE FLOWER CANDY CO, Los Angeles
An elegant black-and-white awning shades this small but satisfying Californian specialist in gourmet sweet stuff. Of the half-dozen varieties on offer--candy sticks, suckers, giant lollipops--two are handmade in-house (and have a cultish local following): fluffy, oversized marshmallows flavoured with cinnamon, coffee or vanilla, and bite-sized sea-salt or lemon caramels, all free of artificial ingredients. ~ SARA WILSON
1,424 West Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91105; +1 (626) 304 4800

CONFISERIE FLORIAN, Provence
The sun-saturated fruit and flower flavours of the south crystallise on the shelves of this traditional confectioner’s atelier high in a Provençal mountain village (with a second, larger outlet down below, on the coast at Nice). Candied violets, rose petals, mimosa and verbena are sold on their own or mixed into nougat, another regional speciality. Strawberry, jasmine and mint acid drops glitter next to boxes of the fruit-flavoured, iced almond biscuits known as calissons, while jellied, sugared slices of orange, ginger and pineapple make a gourmet alternative to the (glacé) cherry on top of the cake. ~ ISABEL LLOYD
Le Pont du Loup, 06140 Tourettes-sur-Loup, France; +33 (0)493 59 32 91