left: The original Dinstuhl’s location on Main Street opened in 1902 and featured an oldfashioned soda fountain. above: Hundreds lined up for a glimpse inside Dinstuhl’s Pleasant View candy kitchen last April. below: Family members, friends, and employees gather at the 1962 Dinstuhl’s Candies opening at Laurelwood Shopping Center. Pictured: far left, Tommy Washington; front row middle, Grace Dinstuhl (wife of Gene); Charles Martin Dinstuhl Jr.; Neely Dinstuhl (wife of Charles Jr.); Dr. R. Paul Caudill (Pastor of First Baptist Church); Gary Dinstuhl; and Gene Dinstuhl.
7,000 truffle pops for the Super Bowl. “They were so popular that we were asked to make them for the Kentucky Derby and the NBA Finals,” says Rebecca. Dinstuhl’s truff le pops were in such a spotlight that they were featured on QVC, along with the Cashew Crunch, a buttery cashew toffee coated with flecks of coconut. Other custom orders have included chocolate Cinderella slippers for the Cinderella Ball in Washington, and turndown mints for the American Queen Steamboat Company. When I visited the kitchen, employees in the chocolate molding room were preparing plump Santa Clauses, about a foot high, with hand-painted (in white chocolate) embellishments, for Macy’s. “We’re shipping over 350 of them to Macy’s stores throughout the country for the holidays,” she says. Dinstuhl’s also produces officially licensed Elvis Presley chocolates — specially wrapped Elvis bars, and molded chocolates in the shape of compact discs and guitars. “Doing the Elvis chocolates is always a great pride,” Rebecca says. Perfectly fitting, since Elvis was known to special-order Dinstuhl’s deliveries to Graceland. “When he was in town, he would call and order two five-pound boxes to be delivered to the mansion so there would be plenty of sweet treats for everybody.” Candy-making master Tommy Washington has worked for Dinstuhl’s since 1962, beginning at the original Main Street location; today he spends his work days in the Pleasant View candy kitchen. He recalls making one of those deliveries to Graceland. “When you got there, they’d meet you at the door and
carry you down into the den where he was,” Washington says. “I met Elvis; sure did.” Not one to be star-struck, Washington says it was “just like another day.” At 80 years old, Washington is a focused, hard-working man. Early on, he learned Dinstuhl’s special recipes and has since perfected them. On the Thursday morning I cashed in my golden ticket (sorry, couldn’t resist a Willy Wonka reference), Washington, in a powdered-sugar dusted apron, multi-tasked. Making mint discs, he’d pour the candy mix-
ture through a funnel of sorts, and with a tap of the hand, perfectly rounded dots plopped out onto a sheet to set. Next, he moved on to cutting caramels with a device that looked a bit like a paper cutter, separating a sheet of soft caramel into bite-sized square chews. Afterward, he unmolded white mint bells that had been sprinkled with edible glitter, a special order for what must have been a wedding party, before walking over to the enrober with the biggest block of chocolate I’d ever seen and hammering a chunk of it off
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