Nothing screams love like a brigadeiros at first bite.
Normand Brunelle and Maria Veira-Brunelle of Sturgeon Falls have been selling these handmade Brazilian spherical sweets at the Sudbury Indoor Market.
Softly coated brigadeiros are made with three key ingredients: sweetened condensed milk, cocoa powder and butter.
“About 25 minutes of stirring and lots of love goes into making these,” Normand said.
The first test batch was produced for the Valentine’s Day run last year.
“We sold $1,400 in brigadeiros. Just like that they were gone,” Maria said.
With the fast success and great feedback, Marie and Normand made display boards and headed to the indoor and outdoor markets.
Each weekend during the winter months, they work both the North Bay and Sudbury indoor markets.
“We’ve experienced exponential growth with sales eight times higher than where we started,” Normand said.
It’s perfectly fitting that Normand and Maria met in São Luís, Brazil, while Normand was working on a project there 15 years ago.
São Luís is located on what is known in the region as “the Island of Love”, and shortly after the duo married and are now even partners in the business of brigadeiros.
While the couple started with traditional three-ingredient brigadeiros, they now enjoy experimenting with bold flavours and unique combinations.
Normand loves the butterscotch pecan brigadeiros, resembling his favourite ice cream flavour. He also likes the crème brulée and cranberry varieties. Maria loves passion fruit, churros and pistachio flavours.
It turns out that all the brigadeiros are gluten-free, except for the salted caramel variety.
Recognizing that not everyone loves sweets, the couple recently introduced savoury options.
Feijoada, or black bean stew, is also gluten-free and contains pork chops, ribs and black turtle beans. They also offer a cheese bread called Pão de queijo that customers can take home to cook in their own oven.
Both Normand and Maria offer these tastes of Brazil outside their regular work week. When they aren’t making 1,000 brigadeiros per week, Normand works at Redpath while Maria is in food services at the North Bay hospital.
The couple also likes to cater their flavours to every occasion and with Valentine’s on tap, followed by St. Patrick Day, there are lots of sugary ideas floating around.
This spring, they plan to do more outdoor markets and vintage boat shows. They will also feature their Brazilian sweets at the Maple Syrup Festival in Powassan.
To learn more about Maria and Normand’s brigadeiros venture, visit Brigadeiros.ca. It’s on instagram as well under BrigadeirosBrazilianSweets. The couple and their children frequent the North Bay and Sudbury Indoor Market each week as well.
Anastasia Rioux is a writer in Greater Sudbury. Let’s Eat! is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.
