Finally – despite the earthquakes, the Queen Anne factory opens at 19 Cable St, Sockburn, Christchurch. Setting up a chocolate factory can be challenging at the best of times but doing it amongst earthquakes adds a new dimension. Not only will we be making our favourite chocolates and marshmallow but also tasty new flavours. Our Apricot creams now feature Otago dried apricots for a real apricot ‘zing’. I will be cooking up more of the original Queen Anne flavours so if you are in the vicinity come and try them.

Proudly made in Christchurch (against all odds), gluten free with all natural flavours and fillings. Beat the shakes with chocolate – I say!  

It usually starts around February – the calls begin “When are the Queen Anne Easter Eggs arriving?” Our Queen Anne Eggs are an annual treat for many. Now we have extended our Easter range to include 3 smaller versions of the big half eggs – in dark or milk chocolate and, from the original Queen Anne ‘Mallomint’, a mint marshmallow egg in dark chocolate. I have taste tested a few of these already – delish!  

Our Queen Anne Pineapple Nougat is a modern classic – the original nougat recipe with natural colour and flavour, chewy and delicious in dark chocolate. I call our Pineapple Nougat the ‘Rolls Royce ‘of pineapple chunks. Taste testing amongst family and friends rates this nougat as a #1 hit.  

When I was researching the Queen Anne brand I came across a copy of an advertisement dated July 1938. It was a drawing of a lovely Hawaiian lady holding up a pineapple. The script said ‘Pineapples from Hawaii’. Vic Kent, the Queen Anne College St Factory Manager, had told me about the lengths they had gone to, to source the best ingredients. A new idea was forming ...  

This selection has evolved from as our Soft Centre assortment. The flavours are a ‘blast from the past’. It wasn’t until recently I was sampling flavours like Lime Jelly (my favourite!) at a Food Show that I realised how popular they were. Coffee addicts love our Coffee Cream - as they would, it’s made with real coffee. The feedback I got was “Sarah - why don’t you just call them a dark chocolate selection?” So I did.  

One of my ‘pet hates’ is not being able to find a favourite product because someone has changed the packaging! So why after 85 years would we do that? It’s been 12 years since I tracked down the originals recipes and rummaged through 2nd hand shops to find old Queen Anne boxes; doing everything I could to recreate those fabulous old chocolates.

However to ensure our Queen will last another 85 years she needed a bit of work. In fact, if you look closely you will see that our ‘new’ Queen emblem is actually our ‘old’ Queen with a foil facelift. Our new look is still white with the beautiful blue script so it’s not that different. We will always have a ‘heritage box’ in our range. You could say we are “embracing the future & cherishing the past”. Sounds like a good line to me!  

After bringing out our Marshmallow Bells in dark chocolate, my phone rang hot asking for more marshmallows in milk chocolate. Strawberry marshmallow has always been a favourite of mine so the idea of matching strawberry flavoured marshmallow (natural of course) with thick milk chocolate sounded delicious – and that is how the our Queen Anne Marshmallow Hearts .  

Fudge was one of the first fabulous varieties which were cooked up by Morton Patterson, the Canadian Chocolatier who set up Queen Anne Chocolates for my Grandfather Ernest Adams. Our fudge is smooth and soft, made with chocolate on the inside as well as chocolate on the outside, for a double chocolate hit. The Fudge was initially in our Original Assortment, however I kept getting calls asking for ‘just a fudge box’ so here it is.

The Fudge Trio contains three flavours of fudge; milk chocolate and dark chocolate fudge, also coconut fudge coated in milk chocolate. The coconut fudge is a ‘reincarnation’ of the favourite Kismet from days of old.  

We were not able to make our Queen Anne Ginger for 2 or 3 years, as I couldn’t find a ginger which right for us. But each Xmas I would get phone calls asking “Sarah, when are you bringing back Queen Anne ginger? We miss it!” So the search was on - you may be surprised to know that it is hard to get square cut ginger (only the best for Queen Anne) but if you look at a ginger root you will see it is anything but square. When our new dark chocolate Ginger came out for Christmas 2005 it was very popular indeed.  

You will notice the change to our Mint Nougat box. Gone is the minty green and back to the classic white trademark Queen Anne brand. We also changed the shape so now it’s a compact little box which can be easily hidden in handbags or office drawers for a sneaking a chocolate ‘fix’ during the day . Another benefit was that we could squeeze one more chocolate into this box.  

Butterscotch is the ‘queen’ of caramels and ours is a chewy caramel blended with New Zealand butter, for that velvety mouth feel and classic taste that every Kiwi grew up with. The Queen Anne chocolate factory in College St, Wellington had a ‘caramel department’ where a whole range of chewy treats were cooked up. In 1998 when I was researching for the recipes I was lucky enough to come into contact with Margaret, whose father Mick worked in the caramel department from the late 1920’s. Her mother also worked in the chocolate factory and a romance started - one of many to bloom under the influence of chocolate.  

Over the years our first ‘Original’ assortment has evolved into the current selection, still containing a delicious assortment of fudge, fondant creams and chewy caramels & nougats. An original favourite is the Strawberry fondant cream made with Otago strawberries (Waimate is the strawberry capital of NZ and where I was born). Another taste sensation is the Apricot cream made with dried apricot pieces for little bursts of apricot flavour. The Coconut fondant is a creamy combination of coconut and chocolate – made to go together. All our Queen Anne chocolates have natural flavours, fillings and colours. They are also Gluten Free.  

What is better than one box of chocolates – 2 boxes of chocolates! That’s what our Queen Anne Special Selection is - a two layer deluxe assortment containing all the flavours from both the Originals and Dark Chocolate Selections. You will notice that our Special Selection is our ‘heritage box’ (fast –forward to 2010 Queen Anne rebranding). Our Special Selection will keep the link between past and present with a full range of delicious Queen Anne classics.  

Following each Easter we would get many calls from Queen Anne fans asking if there were any ‘over’s’. Some people were stockpiling Eggs to keep them going until the next Easter. Caroline from Porirua wrote ‘To my dismay I have become totally addicted to your dark chocolate Easter eggs. I have burnt through many miles in the search for more and am now in despair as there just aren’t any more. Do you have a secret stash somewhere I could purchase from you?’ So the dark chocolate marshmallow Bells were developed for Christmas. As Richard said “we tried your chocolate marshmallow Christmas Bells and they were fantastic, the chocolate was smooth and delicious and the marshmallow was out of this world.... we have added them to our “must have” list along with your Easter Eggs”.  

Fragrant and delicious, ginger has always been a part of the Queen Anne range. Sometimes it was made as a ginger jelly and sometimes glace ginger pieces simply enrobed in chocolate. Along those traditions, our Queen Anne Ginger is a special diced ginger from Australia, seeped in sugar syrup and coated in dark chocolate.
Betty from Whangarei wrote the Queen Anne ginger was a favourite when she was pregnant in the 1940’s. Every week she would send her husband to the Queen Anne Shop saying that the ginger was good for her morning sickness, but she admitted it was the thick coating of delicious chocolate that made it so ‘moreish’.  

The Kismet recipe which was a very popular flavour. Even the name had a story – ‘Kismet’ comes from the Persian for fate or destiny. There were rumours that it’s naming was to impress a young lady in the Adams Bruce College St chocolate factory where Queen Anne chocolates were first made.
This original Kismet was made by a method called ‘hand rolled’ which is as it sounds – the ‘fudgey’ textured cream was made with chocolate and coconut then rolled and sliced into rounds, finally being coated in chocolate.
In 1998 when our new Kismet was launched Beryl from Auckland (and many others) rang me to point out that we had made a mistake - our square Kismet should have been round. She had remembered that detail of her favourite chocolate for more than 20 years. Sadly this was one product which didn’t work for us as we couldn’t quite get the recipe right but fast forward to 2009 our Fudge Trio now has Kismet 2.0 - and it is very delicious!  

Queen Anne was famous for Nougat, made to a special formulation for a ‘chew’ that goes on and on. In the late 1920’s Morton Paterson brought a confectioner from the United States, from a confectionery company called “ Smiles and Chuckles”. He spent several months working in the factory teaching the Queen Anne staff how to make a classic chewy nougat with a foamy texture. Our Mint Nougat was a popular inclusion in our first assortment but by 2001 the nougat was in a box of its own. Jenny from Thorndon, Wellington says her favourite party trick is to pass around a box of Mint Nougat after dinner, and then ask her unwitting guest’s questions.  

The originals Queen Anne Marshmallow recipe was very special, and very secret – and that’s how we like to keep it: dense, moist and delicious. The marshmallow came in various different shapes and flavours but none were more popular that the Marshmallow Easter Eggs. As Robyn from Wellington wrote recently about these seasonal treats “Hoorah that they are back! There will be lots of happy but fatter women around this Easter”. Made in both milk and dark chocolate, the dark chocolate was a particular favourite.  

When I started researching Queen Anne everyone talked about the ‘half pound’ and ‘one pound’ boxes, harking back to the days before grams and kilos. A gentleman called me from Wellington to tell me that he celebrated the birth of each of his children by presenting his wife with a One Pound box of chocolates – she had 5 children. This was a special box for a special occasion. So our One Pound Assortment was ‘born’.  

Our first Soft Centre Assortment was for dark chocolate lovers. These flavours were original formulations including luscious fruit centres and rich fondants thickly coated in dark chocolate. Nellie from Hastings wrote that the dark chocolate soft centre assortments were her favourite and brought back memories of visiting the local Adams Bruce shop to buy her favourite fruit flavours.  

A date to remember with the first ‘new’ Queen Anne Chocolates available for Christmas – and I had taste tested every one of them. What a great job!  

In 1998 the Original Assortment was the first box of our Queen Anne Chocolates to be re-launched. It was a mixture of the favourites - fudge, fondant creams and chewy caramels and nougats, all in the distinctive white Queen Anne box. Pearl from Hamilton wrote a poem ‘Victoria Memory Lane’ about the memories that this box of chocolates revived. ‘When I received that delightful box, and found the content so dear, Once again my mind brought back memories, Of those Queen Anne Chocolates back in yesteryear. We would run out of Reo Motors to look up the street, To see if a queue was there, And up we would rush but... alack and alas, The window and the glass pockets were bare. We slowly and morosely walked back to our job, The male guys with a grin on their face, “Never mind” we’d cry out as we went back to our work, “Tomorrow there will be another queue at Queen Anne’s place”.  

This is where I come in. After spending my working life in my grandfather’s company, Ernest Adams Ltd is sold off to a ‘bigger fish’ and I found myself in the wrong pond, so to speak. Here I was without a job and not sure what to do next. As good luck would have it, I was asked to write a short biography on my grandfather and so began a year of researching Queen Anne. Before I knew it I had a To Do List; find the original chocolate recipes, replicate the iconic Queen Anne boxes,find a manufacture to make those fabulous chocolates again.
Queen Anne was back in business again and I had a job.  

After 50 years of chocolate making, and facing extensive costs to upgrade the factory, the Queen Anne College Street business shut down and was dismantled. Although there was interest from an Australia company to purchase Queen Anne, back in those days selling off New Zealand assets overseas wasn’t allowed, so another popular New Zealand brand disappeared.  

Ironically it was Ernest Adams Ltd purchasing Adams Bruce Ltd in 1974 which signalled the end for Queen Anne. My grandfather’s company decided that they would just buy back the bakery side of the business ‘sticking to the knitting’. The end was near for Queen Anne.