(Radio Iowa) – Communities across Iowa are decking out their town squares for the year-end holidays with a host of colorful parades, winter festivals, and nighttime tree-lighting ceremonies. Later this week, Pella will host its Kerstmarkt, the town’s Dutch Christmas Market. Pella merchant Alie Muller-Heit says the downtown will be filled with an array of local artisans and specialty vendors. “And then we also have our Tour of Homes, which we have been doing in Pella for over 60 years. The whole weekend is enchanting,” Muller-Heit says. “It’s Thursday, Friday, Saturday, this weekend and with the Tour of Homes, you get an opportunity to see four different houses that are all done up for Christmas.”

Visitors will be able to sample authentic Dutch food along the Molengracht, an area inspired by outdoor markets in the Netherlands. “We have carriage rides downtown and just this last week we had what we call our Tour of Stores, and it’s when we turn on Christmas for the season,” Muller-Heit says, “with the kids singing Christmas carols and Santa comes and lights up our big tree that’s on our Tulip Tour and it’s huge. It’s a favorite for all the kids in Pella.” Muller-Heit owns Thistles Flower Market, which has been in downtown Pella more than 40 years, offering flowers as well as home decor and locally-made candles. Within the shop, she’s recently opened Garden Square Chocolatier, with a focus on selections from a dozen gourmet truffles, four each in floral, traditional and seasonal flavors, all crafted in-house.

Photo by Garden Square Chocolatier

“We’re really proud of the chocolate that we’re creating,” Muller-Heit says. “We’re working with French chocolate and we temper it. We heat it up so that it gets melted, and then we cool it on down and heat it just to the right temperature so it becomes a tempered chocolate. That gives it that shine and that strength to have different fillings on the inside of the truffles.” The store-within-a-store is also selling a line of five artisan candy bars, including one in coordination with an East Coast company that makes stroopwafels, a thin, two-layer cookie of sweet baked dough held together by syrup filling.

“We wanted to do something that had stroopwafels in it,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite Dutch specialties, and so they actually send us their Stroopwafle Crumble, the ones that didn’t turn out to full stroopwafles that they could sell, and we’re putting that in a dark chocolate candy bar with our homemade caramel in it as well. It’s called our Dutch Bar.” There’s also a bar called Iowa’s Gold, containing white chocolate, brown butter ganache, corn and soybeans. The store is housed in the same historic 1897 red-brick building which Muller-Heit says once sparked her childhood love of chocolate milk shakes and soda shop memories with her grandmother.