Shop Joy: papabubble

(© Saskia Vanderstichele)

Sweet tooths, take note! Next time you are near Grote Markt/Grand-Place, be sure to visit papabubble. At this little sweetshop diagonally opposite the police station, you will find homemade sweets in about twenty delectable flavours.
Every day, you can watch sweet-makers Sophie and Silvana make their wares. They got the idea for their shop from papabubble in Barcelona, where they also learned the tricks of the trade: from boiling the sugar, adding glucose, natural flavouring, and colouring to turning, rolling, cutting, and packaging the sweets. The whole process takes a few hours, but don’t worry, you don’t have to wait that long to try the sweets!
Papabubble swears by natural flavourings, and yours truly was very impressed by the results. Kiwi, grapefruit, raspberry, grape; every sweet tasted surprisingly like real fruit. A number of new flavours will be added soon; the so-called floral collection for the spring, including violet, rose, and orange blossom. Papabubble is already experimenting with different flavours. It seems like the best job in the world, but the sweet-makers assured us that they taste their products like wine: even if they have got the taste just right, they spit the sweet out again.
Papabubble is also the place to be if you want to invent your own creation, with your name, your logo, your own crazy colour combination, or whatever else you can think of. The sweets have already been ordered by big companies, political parties, etc., but they are just as popular for births, weddings, or birthday parties. Sophie and Silvana’s most difficult tasks to date were a 200-kilo order of sweets, sweets for someone with a very long name, and kosher sweets for a bar mitzvah, made in the presence of a rabbi. We are secretly already dreaming of our own Agenda sweets!

papabubble ••••
Kolenmarkt 13 rue du Marché aux Charbons, Brussel/Bruxelles, www.papabubble.be
di/ma/Tu > za/sa/Sa 10 > 19.00 & zo/di/Su 10.30 > 19.30