Aunt Selma’s Candy and Cookie Shoppe

For the sweet-toothed who ever have visions of sugar-plums or want to take the board game Candy Land a bit more serious, Aunt Selma’s Candy and Cookie Shoppe in Mount Laurel is a dream destination.

“If you can dream it, we can make it,” says Pam Orris, 53, of Columbus, owner of the candy shoppe who prefers the title chocolatier.

Inside the cozy candy store nestled in the 711 shopping center on Creek Road, Orris carries everything from tiny chocolate pianos ($35) to six-pound cornucopia center pieces ($95) filled with various chocolate treats.

“Custom party favors for all of life’s sweet occasions,” says Orris. “We will do custom confections, period. The art of doing custom work has been lost. We are revitalizing it with handmade chocolates.”

Taking influences from daily life, Orris along with an seven-person creative team, work each day to develop innovative and unique confections for seasonal, traditional, life and even sporting events.

“We brainstorm,” says Orris. “We work as a team here and everyone comes up with ideas. If we see something, we try to make it out of chocolate or a confection to make something unique that you cannot find anywhere else.”

The team’s newest creations, which coincide with football season, are chocolate popcorn pizzas ($16.95) served in pizza boxes and chocolate chicken wings with cherry chipotle dipping sauce. The idea for wings came from Orris’s husband, Rick.

“He said, ‘We need to come up with something new for football people,’ and I said, ‘Well what do you do when you go to a football game?’” says Orris. “You eat chocolate. You eat wings. You drink beer. I said, ‘Oh my God Rick we’re gonna make chocolate chicken wings. We need to tailgate.’”

The chicken-wing shaped chocolates come in packs of a dozen ($9.95), two dozens ($18.95) and 50 ($36.95) served with a cherry preserve sauce accented with smoky chipotle peppers. Like many of Orris’s products, the wings are something out of the ordinary to bring to a party or celebration.

“There’s only so many real chicken wings you can eat,” says Orris. “You have to have a sweet dessert. Everything needs a sweet ending.”

But Orris and her team aren’t the only creative force behind the store’s candy making. They pride themselves on being able to customize confections according to their customers’ desires.

“We’re also well-known for our customization,” says Orris. “Someone came to us and wanted chocolate sand dollars for her wedding cake and we handmade monogrammed chocolate sand dollars. Another person came for a teacher that was celebrating her 40th birthday and they wanted martini olives. So we molded them, died our chocolate green, put them on skewers and made two giant five-inch olives for the martini glass.”

Orris says she customizes her signature Whimsical Fun Pops, pictured above. To make the pops, she starts with rice crispy treats, which she shapes, then dips in chocolate and decorates.

Marnie Johnston, a stay-at-home mom of three from Moorestown, wanted custom Whimsical Fun Pops to give as party favors for her one-year-old daughter Madeleine’s garden-themed birthday party.

“I brought an invitation with a lady bug and she created the lady bug for me and that was my party favor,” says Johnston. “So she made a lady bug pop and it was hot pink and green. It was really beautiful.”

Johnston says she started going to the store about a year ago and likes Aunt Selma’s because of the product’s taste and Orris’s reliability.

“It’s delicious,” says Johnston. “I know I can count on her, especially when I need something made. A couple times I’ve been in a pinch and she’s helped me out with providing goodies for parties and so on.”

Orris’s personality and presence is as irresistible as her candies. She’s apart of every aspect of the store, whether it be greeting customers from behind the candy counter or working with children in the store’s Creation Station, a themed activity where kids can make their own candy with products provided by the store.

“I consider myself creative to a point but I’m nothing compared to her,” says Kimberly Kolanko, 16, of Lumberton, whose title at the store is “chocolateen.” “Her creativity level and her enthusiasm about the things she does, it makes our customers so enthusiastic about buying from here.”

The junior at Rancocas Valley High School started working at Aunt Selma’s when Orris opened the store three years ago. She says she wants to follow in Orris’s footsteps.

“I’m going to college and I’m majoring in business management just so I can run this once she’s done with it,” says Kolanko.

But Orris’s epiphany to own and operate a candy store didn’t come as young it did for her protege.

Orris says she developed her passion for food from cooking Italian dishes with her father at five-years-old. She says she’s always been creative and even graduated from Rosemont College with a degree in art. But her two passions remained just hobbies to a career as a real estate agent. Then a loss caused her to take on the two passions full time.

“I was downsized from a company and had to reinvent myself,” says Orris. “I decided I should go back to what I did best and that was working with people, using my creativity, and my imagination and decided what better way than to mix that with chocolates and confections.”

Raised in Paulsboro, the life-long South Jersey resident wanted to recreate the candy stores she grew up with.

“When I was a kid, I used to go to the corner drug store and get Lime Rickeys and I wanted to bring out the kid in adults of today, so when they come in here, they reminisce about their childhood.”

In creating a store where adults can reminisce about their past and create new memories for their kids, Orris may may have just brought to life a childhood dream of her own.

“I’ve always done creative things and being able to express it in food is really being able to bring it to life,” says Orris.