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Customers visiting the new downtown shop Once Upon a Chocolate will see treats in dozens of shapes, including alligators, pirates, tea pots and butterflies.

But that’s just a sampling of what Debbie Stephens offers.
 

“I have hundreds and hundreds of candy molds,” the chocolatier said. “And if I don’t have the mold I can get it. … I can make chocolate in just about any shape they can think of.”
Customers can buy milk, dark or white chocolates in the shape of lottery tickets, cell phones, huge aspirin pills, golf balls, cigars, tulips, crosses and many others. Some shapes can be made into lollipops.
 

Stephens ran a chocolate shop in Tampa, Fla., for 18 years before she and her husband moved to Burlington to be near his family.
 

This month she opened shop in a newly renovated space on Piedmont Ave.
 

“I find the town completely charming,” Stephens said of Gibsonville.
 

She said she loves working with customers to create unique treats for events or gifts.
 

“Doing it by hand like this, you get to be creative, and I’ve always been an arts and crafts person. It’s not just chocolate. It’s a way to express something to someone that just tastes really good.”
 

Stephens offers the traditional truffles, turtles and nut clusters and also sells items for weddings, showers, birthday parties and other events. Customers can order custom labels and wrappers for the chocolates at no extra cost. Customers can mix and match for chocolate boxes or gift baskets at the shop, which ships nationally and delivers locally. If they aren’t sure what they want, Stephens will work with them to figure it out.

“They come to me with an idea, and we go from there,” she said. “That is part of the fun of doing it.”

Academy Awards parties are popular in Florida, Stephens said, and one of her more unusual requests came in 1998 from a woman planning a dinner party. The movie “Titanic” had been nominated for many Oscars, and she requested a chocolate centerpiece with a Titanic theme.  Stephens created small, three-dimensional chocolate ships by using molds in the shape of a cruise liner. But making an iceberg was trickier. Stephens started with the largest mold she had, that of a bunny, and filled it with white chocolate.
“And then I took a knife to it and just started hacking away at the bunny until I had sheer cliffs,” she said with a laugh.

Stephens creates the chocolates in small batches, without preservatives. She makes everything she sells, except for the panned items such as milk balls and chocolate-covered nuts and raisins.
 

Once Upon A Chocolate also offers a variety of sugar-free chocolate.

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