Mike’s Homemade Candies

The go to spot for tasty chocolate treats. No frills. Great service… It’s chocolate!

Best milk chocolate sponge candy in buffalo!!! We have been customers for years, haven’t found any sponge candy that compares! Yum!

Just good stuff. Sponge… orange. to die for. I can’t just pick and choose because this is a local institution for those who know about it… and maybe we want to keep it that way.

Mike’s is an institution. Best sponge candy in Buffalo. When I was a freshman at college, my mom sent me a pound of orange sponge. My friends were like WTF is sponge candy? I explained.
Then they asked, WTF is orange chocolate? I’d tell them. You know that people from Buffalo love repping their hometown specialties. «You might be from Buffalo if you know what sponge candy is.» Well, I converted some non-​Buffalonians. Everyone was sold and my mom started sending a couple pounds at a time. At Easter time, and then the three Easters after that.
Where else still has candy shoppes like Mike’s? And who still spells it shoppe? Janice Okun is the food critic for the Buffalo News and once she wrote that we should enjoy what we’ve got till it’s gone. She meant the great, often ethnic, local places. The non-​chains. The shoppes. Point taken. Go to Mike’s for your next chocolate fix.

Went to Mike’s after a recommendation from a friend. We were in for the weekend and so I drove over with my trusty Garmin directing me. It is a little place, so don’t blink. I usually went to Parkside or Watson’s or Condrell’s. Now I will go to Mike’s when I get into town.
There was a family from Baltimore ahead of us (they were going to see the Sabre’s that night). I was in to see the Bills. So I ordered a bunch of sponge candy and then my wife got some other things.
Some others came in and we just stood around chatting for about 15 minutes about Buffalo and things in general. A really nice neighborhood feel.
And they were so nice and would let you sample — oh yes, I want to sample allllllllll of this place…
The sponge candy was really different than other places. Not worse or better just different. And the prices are right in line with places around town.
I would recommend stopping into this place.

So leave it to the locals to point you in the right direction when it comes to seeking out the best source for regional delicacies — in this case, Buffalo’s ubiquitous sponge candy and the mysteriously named Charlie Chaplin logs. While these boards had pointed us to two other well-​known area chocolatiers, the word on the street quickly confirmed that this unassuming little family-​owned candy shop in Cheektowaga is the ultimate desination for sponge candy perfection.
And let me just say, after comparing the sponge candy we bought at Mike’s to the samples we received at Watson’s and Fowler’s, we can once again confirm that locals always know best. The woman who waited on us was making sponge candy when we arrived and was explaining the difficulty of preparing it on hot summer days, especially when rain sweeps through and changes the temperature and humidity rapidly. To show me what she meant, she provided a sample from the backroom that hadn’t come out quite to their standards. It was tasty, but also a bit chewy in the end, as opposed to the perfectly airy, melt-​in-​your mouth sample that followed, which was what she was selling from under the glass counter. We quickly snatched up a few dozen to go, with a nice mix of milk, orange, and dark chocolate coatings.
The Charlie Chaplin logs — essentially a long slab of soft marshmallow filling rolled in coconut and cashews and then covered in chocolate — lacked visual appeal but more than made up for it in their gooey lusciousness. We grabbed two — one milk chocolate and one dark. While I tend to prefer darker semi-​sweet candies, the milk chocolate version proved to be the way to go here. Nobody seems to know how this confection got its name, since Chaplin has no obvious connections to the Buffalo region. But his namesake treat gets two thumbs up on my scorecard, and Mike’s generous version would appear to be amongst the best local versions.
There’s a lot more here we didn’t try, but that’s the stuff of future visits (and future reviewers). In the meantime, more local food buffs need to check out this great destination for candy in Cheektowaga.