Bored by Valentine’s Day’s traditional chocolate hearts and red candies of? Look no further than 90 Massachusetts Ave. to get up a new enthusiasm for the holiday. Sweet-N-Nasty, which bills itself as ‘Boston’s Home for Erotic Cakes, Sweets and Novelties,’ supplies sweet treats with an erotic edge.

Since 1976, the Boston store has been baking and decorating cakes for the New England area with well wishes such as, ‘The best is yet to [come],’ ‘Breast Wishes,’ ‘You’ve [come] a long way’ and ‘Make a wish and blow,’ their trademarked slogan.

Owner Niki Novak started the enterprise just out of college after a visit to New York where she saw erotic bakeries.

‘I thought, this could be a great idea. Boston’s full of students,’ Novak said.

She opened her first store in Allston, a very unusual store at that time, with nothing like it around, according to Novak. After ‘a few mistakes’ she got into the swing of the business.

‘I was a bartender; I didn’t know what I was doing,’ Novak said. ‘Immediately it was busy and I realized I had a lot to learn. Luckily I did some research; my father had been in the restaurant business, so he helped me out.’

Novak said at the beginning they weren’t charging enough for the cakes, and it took a few months to get the right recipes.

‘Of course people laugh when they see them, but after they laugh they like to cut them and eat them and that’s important to me,’ Novak said. ‘People are surprised that they are so delicious because of how they look.’

According to Novak, the store customers are ‘lots of different types of people: urban, city, suburb, young and old. When I opened, I was marketing to students, but now my average customer is a 40-year-old woman. Women over 40 think sex is very funny,’ Novak said. ‘However, it’s a product that crosses all age lines and demographics. There’s something here that everyone finds funny.’

She aims to keep her audience laughing, stocking items that she believes her customer base will find funny or useful.

‘I won’t do books and magazines because that’s not our thing, it crosses over,’ Novak said. ‘I want to keep it funny, not intimidating.’

Along with cakes, the store stocks ‘tame’ chocolates such as lips, high heels, phones and dentures, as well as ‘daring’ chocolates shaped like penises, breasts, rear ends, and handcuffs. The chocolates can be made with different colors of chocolate as well, yielding genitalia for all preferences. Sweet-N-Nasty has developed patented molds for the making of these chocolates.

One of the most popular items in the store are the cream-filled penis pops, according to Novak. Although Valentine’s Day is where she sees the biggest increase in business, the store is kept busy at other times by birthdays, anniversaries, bachelor and bachelorette parties, even occasions such as surgeries like mastectomies, vasectomies and breast reductions or enhancing.

‘Whenever there’s a group of people, there’s an occasion to get a cake and celebrate,’ Novak said. ‘We’ve even done a couple of ‘Getting out of Jail’ cakes.’

College of Arts and Sciences senior Libby Jabsky once ordered a cake to celebrate the completion of a mammography project.

‘We picked the design and the flavor out, it was really good real chocolate too,’ Jabsky said. ‘But we saw some pretty vile cakes there too, and we are talking feces and other things you probably don’t want to eat.’

Novak said the store often takes special requests for items and cake phrases.

‘Our customers have come up with some really clever lines. Every once in a while they will come up with something that will surprise us,’ Novak said. ‘One of the best ones was ‘May your genitalia never fail ya.”

Keeping her items reasonably priced is a priority for Novak. Costs range from $18.95 to $64.95 for a full sheet cake; however prices vary depending on design requests. Chocolate costs range from anywhere to $.99 to $24.99 for penis pops called ‘The Whopper’ and ‘The Big Sucker.’

‘I think with the more money you pay, it loses its humor,’ Novak said. ‘This isn’t something you have to have. This is one of the extras. You have to keep in mind that it’s gag gifts – with the economy what it is people still need to laugh.’

College of Communication freshman Emily Black came to the store with Valentine’s Day gift intentions, and emerged bearing gag gifts for her boyfriend.

‘I bought him a lighter of a naked woman, a breast pop with a nipple and a humorous card,’ Black said. ‘I think that it’s funny that they call themselves a bakery though. It looks more like a sex shop that just happens to be a bakery. They have all this paraphernalia from vibrators to masturbating kits.’

Novak said that many people who visit the store are planning to buy items, yet some still get embarrassed by their orders.

‘Some people when you take an order can barely say penis,’ Novak said. ‘We like to keep it professional so the employees call things by their names, breast, penis. We keep it more medical than anything else, but … it’s hard to keep a straight face when taking an order for a penis cake.’

COM freshman K.C. Geen was stunned on her birthday recently when her friends brought out her cake.

‘I thought it was hilarious,’ Geen said. ‘I was on the phone with my dad when they took it out, so I was sort of speechless at first, but once I hung up I couldn’t stop laughing.’

Geen’s cake featured a ‘giant chocolate crunch penis sticking out of the cake, with frosting around the base to look like hair,’ she said.

‘Having a birthday cake with the writing ‘K.C. the best is yet to [come]’ and a penis on it made it one of the funniest birthdays ever,’ Geen said. ‘There was even frosting on top of the penis to make it look like [semen].’

Novak said the demand remains steady, except when an item is specially featured on television or in a magazine.

‘After 20 years of buying the stuff, we know what people will buy and not buy. High cost items generally won’t sell as well,’ Novak said. ”The Rabbit’ vibrator was featured on ‘Sex and the City’ and that was a big seller for awhile.’

Novak said the store highlights special Valentine’s Day presents.

‘We have beautiful heart boxes with lace and ribbon, then you open them up and we fill them with bite-size dirty chocolates, a box full of erotica. Red condoms and lips are in there too; it’s a funny gift,’ Novak said. ‘Edible underwear is also always popular on Valentine’s Day.’

Novak said the average amount of money people spend in the store is usually around twenty dollars.

‘It also depends how many girlfriends or boyfriends you’re buying for,’ Novak said. ‘Sometimes we find people buying cards that say something like ‘You’re the only one,’ and then they buy three.’

According to the 2002 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. Business Report, Sweet-N-Nasty turns sales of $750,000 a year.