Lone Cone Toffee in the Media
Where Do You Hide Yours
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Next Generation
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Lone Cone Toffee Trifle
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What's in the bag, Oscar?
Sweet toffee the result of a woman's long journey
If you told the story of Nancy Boru through her toffee, it would go something like this:
Bitter. Bittersweet. Sweet.
Boru, who turns 60 in January, lives in Charlotte in a house she shares with her daughter's in-laws. Three grandparents all happily co-exist right next door, so close they can yell out the windows at the grandkids.
"It's fun," she says. "It's a nice life."
That's part of the sweet. The other part is Boru's Lone Cone Toffee, a blissfully good candy that she makes in the kitchen at Christ Our Shepherd Ministries in Matthews. She sells it online and in a few spots around Charlotte.
The bitter part is the story Boru tells about how she started out. Then named Nancy Broderick, she was a mother of three in Pittsburgh with an abusive husband. While her daughter from an earlier marriage went to live with her father, Christmas 1989 found Boru and her two youngest kids, ages 10 and 8, in a women's shelter,
"There were rats in that place, but I was so happy to be there, I didn't care."
A few weeks later, Broderick and the kids headed out, driving cross-country to get away. On the drive, Broderick changed her name to Boru, after Brian Boru, the legendary king of Ireland. Her father used to tell them they were distantly related, and she thought his name would give her his strength.
They ended up in Colorado, where friends had a house for rent in a small mountain town called Norwood.
"Norwood was far enough away that nobody ever heard of it," she says. "It was up at 7,000 feet, a little ranch town. It was a working ranch town. If you were in a traffic jam, it was because of cattle on the road."
At first, Boru supported her kids by getting up at 4 a.m. to bake things she sold to local stores. Somebody turned her in for doing commercial baking in a home kitchen, so she did odd jobs, like hanging wallpaper. She even helped build a brick fireplace.
Meanwhile, she started dating a guitarist who was nostalgic for a certain toffee. His grandmother had found the recipe in a library cookbook in 1935. The grandmother had died, and Boru's boyfriend wanted to taste the toffee again.
Boru made a batch and discovered it was the perfect toffee.
"It's very tender," she says. "It doesn't break your teeth. It's the ratio of butter to sugar that makes my toffee what it is."
Yes, her toffee. Norwood was close to the wealthy ski town of Telluride. Boru started taking batches there to sell. A few gift shops started carrying it, and a hotel used it as a turn-down treat in the rooms.
The guitarist didn't want her to have the recipe. We'll call that the bittersweet part. But Boru had made friends with his mother, who gave her both the recipe and her blessing in 1996.
Boru named the toffee Lone Cone after a mountain near Norwood. She used a city directory to build a mail order list of wealthy Telluride residents.
Eventually, Boru's kids grew up and moved away. She was still in Norwood in 2003 when her oldest daughter in Charlotte was getting ready to have a third baby. She asked Boru to come down out of the mountains.
That's how Nancy Boru ended up in Charlotte, in a house next door to her daughter. Sweet.
Boru's long journey taught her a lot about strength and tenaciousness. She says she's no longer afraid of her ex-husband - "Now he's afraid of me."
It also has given her a wicked sense of humor.
"That's one of my better assets," she says. "People remember me because I make them laugh."
Here's how she describes her favorite part of her job, watching people try her toffee for the first time:
"They get this look of ecstasy. It's nice to be able to provide that much happiness without having to have sex with them."
Nutritional Value:
None whatsoever. But you'll die happy!
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