If you can convince people to pay a premium for a MoonPie during Mardi Gras in Mobile, when they can be found flying through the air for free, you’ve got something.

In this case, that something is chocolate. Lots of it.

Three Georges Fine Southern Chocolates, a local confectionery with more than 100 years of history, is once again offering its chocolate-dipped MoonPies. They line the counters at the shop at 226 Dauphin St., among other seasonal treats such as white chocolate butter pecan cakes with purple and gold icing.

The idea sounds decadent, and it is. Whatever that waxy, variously flavored coating is on the outside of a MoonPie, Three Georges brings the real deal. A bite reveals one of its improved MoonPies to be topped with a slab of good stuff almost as thick as a Hershey bar, and as crisp.

The whole dynamic is changed: Normally you find yourself with a mouthful of marshmallow, given some extra texture by that Graham-cracker crust, topped by chocolate, mint, banana, salted caramel or whatever new flavor they’re putting out this year. (Word is that the new blueberry ones taste like a blueberry Pop-Tart, but that has yet to be verified.)

After the Three Georges treatment, the marshmallow and cracker register much, much lower in the mix, literally drowned in chocolate. Milk chocolate. Dark chocolate. White chocolate. Rich? Half of a full-size pie becomes a meal for an adult.

And before you can ask, no, they don’t catch them in the wild.

“I get cases of them over at Toomey’s,” said Three Georges owner Scott Gonzalez. “So we’re not going out to the Mardi Gras parade and getting them off the street.”

Gonzalez said the idea originated as a response to the challenge posed by Carnival.

“In Mardi Gras, everybody’s getting candy off the floats for free,” he said. “That’s tough for a candy business. So if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

Or build a better MoonPie.

“What’s better than something with chocolate, but then double-dip it in chocolate?” he said. “Our malt balls are triple-dipped. If some chocolate is good, more is even better.”

Few people in Mobile see more chocolate than the Three Georges employees who work in the “dipping room” down a hall behind the soda-fountain-style showroom on Dauphin Street. A recent weekday morning found Candace DelaRosa and Bobbie Ferry sitting by two spinning vats of chocolate. Ferry sat in a comfy chair with arms, tending to a vat of white chocolate, hand-dropping clusters of white chocolate and pecans.

She’s been at this for about 25 years. “I lost count,” she said of her tenure. “This is a quality job. You get involved in this, you can’t leave.”

DelaRosa, who’s been working at Three Georges for four or five years, sat on a stool with a tray of mint MoonPies that she was covering in milk chocolate. The only sounds were the whirring of the two machines and a melody that DelaRosa hummed as she worked. One at a time she’d pick up a MoonPie, dunk it in the endlessly flowing chocolate bath, then raise it up and make a couple of passes over a scraper to send the drippings back into the tub.

Then she’d lay the treat back on the tray, run her hand over the scraper to collect any excess left on her glove, and pick up the next one. She figures 100 MoonPies an hour is a pretty good production rate.

The downtown shop seems prepared to meet a considerable demand, but there’s a new factor this year: Three Georges has a “store within a store” at the big new Piggly Wiggly in west Mobile, and Gonzalez has said he expects to sell more Three Georges merchandise there than at the mothership.

Early results seem to bear that out. “Now that we are at the new Piggly Wiggly, we’ve been dipping a lot more,” said DelaRosa.

The MoonPie earned its place in Mardi Gras culture by its cheapness and its ballistic properties – it throws well but is unlikely to give anybody a black eye. Before that it earned its place in American culture by being the biggest snack a worker could get for a nickel. Topped with some decorative icing – because what this deal needed was a little more sugar – and nicely packaged for presentation, these sell for $4.95 for a small one, $7.95 for a large. That’s a lot of nickels.

On this particular day in the shop, mint and coconut MoonPies seemed to predominate. “We dip all flavors in all varieties of chocolate,” said Gonzalez. “Certain ones will come to the top. I believe the chocolate mint is the most popular.”

“Just have fun with it,” he said. “That’s the important thing.”

The ladies in the dipping room were already bracing for holiday overlap. It won’t be long before they’re working on eggs and bunnies and chicks for Easter. But before that comes Valentine’s Day, which falls on Ash Wednesday this year.

“Mardi Gras day is one day, Valentine’s Day is the next,” said DelaRosa. “Hopefully nobody’s giving up chocolate for Lent.”

Three Georges Fine Southern Chocolates is at 226 Dauphin St. in downtown Mobile. For full information, visit https://3georges.com/.