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Whether You're Creative or Just Pressed for Time, Wayne is the Place for Easy Thanksgiving Desserts

Candy experts at Laurie's Homemade Candies and Chocolate Treasures weigh in on how to impress guests with some sweetness.

Thanksgiving is synonymous with turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes. But these holiday staples shouldn’t limit a cook’s creativity, especially when it comes to dessert.

has everything a do-it-yourselfer needs to make quick and easy chocolate deserts.

has a lot of options for the family who wants to serve something different, but may not have the time to make something.

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Decorated as turkeys, pilgrim’s hats, or pumpkins, homemade chocolates can be a nice, bite-sized way to end a tryptophan-induced meal.

Impress Guests for Less: Homemade Chocolates

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Since the economic downtown, Beth Mozek said she’s seen a lot more people make their own candy. Thanksgiving, she said, provides a great opportunity to showcase some culinary creativity on a budget.

“We always tell people, ‘inspiration is always free’,” Mozek said. “We’d rather help you make your own vision happen.”

A batch of chocolate-covered Oreos can cost about $4 to make. Other easy-to-do creations include chocolate-covered pretzels and non-pareils. These only require a bag of melting chocolate, some molds, a plastic tray, some sprinkles, a microwave, and a freezer.

“Your budget goes a lot farther if you do it yourself,” said Mozek, owner of Chocolate Treasures.

Chocolate Treasures offers anything related to making homemade chocolate crafts. There are thousands of molds and hundreds of cookie cutters available for every occasion, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. The store sells bags of, non-pareils and jimmies in seemingly every imaginable color. For packaging, the store has a lot of different boxes, ribbons, wrapping, and foils.

Mozek has been surrounded by chocolate for most of her life. Her mother fell in love with making chocolates after attending a cooking demonstration with a friend and opened the store on Mountainview Boulevard 26 years ago. Mozek joined the family business 12 years ago so that she could spend more time with her daughter.

“I was fortunate that my parents opened the store,” she said. “Now I’m doing what I love, and I’ve never miss a school function.”

Gourmet Chocolates for the Time-Strapped Cook

For those who have a few more dollars to spend or less free time, Laurie's has a lot of options to easily satisfy your sweet tooth.

Happy apples are probably the product that Laurie’s is most famous for selling.

A take off of a traditional caramel apple, Laurie’s coats the crunchy fruits in caramel and milk or dark chocolate then adorns them with faces made of different candy pieces. About 20 different farms in the area, like Abma’s Farm in Wyckoff and Farmsview in Wayne sell the smiling desserts.

“We’ve sold 30,000 of them this year,” Mazzotta said. “Kids love them, especially some of the ones we make into characters like Frankenstein.”

Laurie’s has solid milk chocolate turkeys, wrapped in colorful foil and adorned with decorative sprinkles, chocolate drumsticks, and other fall-themed products.

Another popular product is a chocolate cornucopia, Mazzotta said, which can be filled with any of the store’s hundreds of different chocolate-covered fruits, non-pareils, or peanut butter-flavored chocolates, just to name a few.

To make it easier for last-minute Thanksgiving cooks, Mazzotta suggests customers bring their own dishes or platters that the store can fill with chocolates. This way, customers don’t have to scramble to unwrap candies or arrange them on a dish come dessert time.

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