Presidential edibles
This one's short (just like McKinley lol)
Hi everybody! I was hoping to get a big post out to you today since the Magnificent Jewels auctions are happening this week in New York, but unfortunately I had to work over the weekend and couldn’t get to it. So I’ll do more of a round-up post later, and this is just a quick note for those of you who have been harboring long-suppressed dreams of making candy in the shape of President McKinley’s head:
William Bunch Auctions is offering this candy mold in its Eclectic Variety Auction tomorrow, and they’re not sure if it was created as a promo for the 1897 McKinley presidential campaign or as a memorial following his assassination in 1901. The former seems a bit more apropos, but wth do I know.
**I will now embark on a small tangent, but I promise it will quickly bring us back to presidential edibles.**
If you’re ever in Philly, please wander down to Old City and stop into Shane Confectionery. It’s the oldest candy store in the U.S., and it’s owned by two brothers, Ryan and Eric Berley, who bought the shop from the Shane family (who had operated it for a century) back in 2010. The Berleys — who are also the guys behind the Franklin Fountain, another don’t-miss spot just two doors down — put a ton of work into restoring the place back to the way it looked in the early 1900s, preserving the antique machinery and maintaining the shop’s everything-handmade standard.1
The Berleys have a huge collection of antique candy molds (around 1,200 or so) and a lot of them are stored in that wall of drawers in the Instagram post above. In addition to owning a McKinley mold like the one in the Bunch auction, they also have molds featuring Presidents Taft, Grant and Teddy Roosevelt, and they actually put them to use during the 2016 Democratic convention in Philly. So if you want to see what McKinley looks like in candy form, check out this 2016 story from NPR.
The estimate for the McKinley mold is $200 - $400. If you have time, scroll through the rest of the auction; they call these things “eclectic” for a reason. Go forth and buy weird random shit.
Back soon! Bye, M xx
I’m not employed by Shane Confectionery or the Franklin Fountain, I just think they’re great.
If I had unlimited funds I would collect SO MUCH random weird shit. Every post you make awakens some new greedy dragon inside of me. Never stop!
Love to see it. When I visited Trier, Germany in 2018, the birthplace of Karl Marx, I found a Karl Marx cookie cutter and got it for my progressive neighbor as a gift. He and his GF made delicious Marx-shaped chocolates, along with a custom box, for the holidays.