HEBRON - Pretty much everything about Myron and Betty Lapp is sweet.

They have been married sweethearts for 42 years after finding each other, in all places, dragging main in Beulah, and some of their sweetest moments have been shared over a piece of kuchen.

They take a bite, look into each other's eyes and say something like, "Sweetie, I think we did it!"

And thus, yet another kuchen flavor is born in the Lapp Bakery on Hebron's Main Street.

Myron Lapp is a self-avowed chocoholic, and it was his idea to create a chocolate-flavored kuchen.

Now, this is way off Grandma's kuchen map, way into unchartered territory. Grandma stuck with the tried and true when she made the custard-filled pastry, sprinkling fruits like plum, prune and apricot into the custard.

Myron and Betty Lapp experimented with chocolate, using chocolate chips and chocolate syrup and still not quite getting it, until one day, Myron Lapp turned to his wife and said, "What do you think about chocolate powder?"

They retreated into their secret mixing room, and when they emerged, they had found the key to chocolate kuchen.

It is to die for, truly, and it's only one of four chocolate concoctions among 35 kuchen flavors they've devised over the past seven years.

The in-store bakery they added to their grocery store 10 years ago has been expanded five times to keep up with their kuchen business.

They and a crew of five good hands make nearly 500 kuchen a day that are sold through eight distributors to 33 outlets in five states, including steady traffic in their own grocery store in Hebron.

Their fax machine spits out orders from distributors, and their Internet site is another gold mine of orders from individuals who want cases shipped all around the world for weddings, Christmas and other special events.

One kuchen shipment went to the Pentagon, where it was part of a meal served to a German delegation.

Theirs is truly a story of sweet success and they aren't satisfied yet.

They are in negotiations for another distributorship that could double their sales.

They have plans for new flavors - Grandma, hold onto your apron strings - like a key lime kuchen and mocha kuchen. And they're also well into an entirely new product, a breakfast kuchen that has the custard and filling qualities of quiche, with a kuchen dough base, rather than a pie pastry.

The Lapps have become so identified with kuchen, they've just about lost their first names.

"We're not introduced as 'Myron and Betty' anymore. People will say, 'Have you met the kuchen people?' " Betty Lapp says.

The Lapp Bakery heats up at about 6 a.m. and sometime around 9 a.m., the kuchen crew starts "sheeting" the thawed rounds of dough that come from Baker Boy in Dickinson.

The rounds are put into aluminum pie tins, filled, baked, cooled, wrapped and frozen.

They buy thousands of eggs and hundreds of gallons of gourmet cream every week.

Into each batch goes the Lapps' secret powder mix, a thickener, sugar, spices and whatever else goes in, they're not saying.

They test the competition whenever someone comes out with a kuchen product and while they admit their bias, they don't think any other is as good.

"It's like Colonel Sanders' chicken," Myron Lapp said. "We know what's in our kuchen."

When they're not in their kitchen, they're in their motor home, the love of which Betty Lapp says is their only vice.

They pile their motor home freezer with kuchen to give and share wherever they go and their trips end when they run out of kuchen, not gas.

They have more kuchen stories than flavors, and one Myron Lapp likes to tell is about being at a food show next to a booth of culinary students.

He said he cut up pieces of kuchen and invited the students to turn the simple fare into a gourmet dessert and was delighted with their fancy drizzles and fanned strawberries that transformed the humble kuchen into the sublime.

"What they created could go for $14 in a fancy restaurant," he said.

They suggest a retail price of $3.99 per kuchen, but some outlets charge more.

Recent increases in the cost of ingredients - 10 percent since the first of the year alone - may cause them to charge more for their kuchen and Myron Lapp says they may someday get to the limit of how much long distance freight can be attached to a kuchen pie.

The Lapps are much like their own product, a happy outcome of basic ingredients, to which they've added a rural work ethic and love of people.

"It's really fun," says Betty Lapp.

And what, for a life's work, could be more sweetly said?

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)