THE FEW, THE PROUD, THE CHOCOLATIERS : The art of candy making by small entrepreneurs is melting into fewer hands--and Easter is their prime sales time.

If you’re looking for people who don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, forget about going to the candy maker.

There, you’ll find not only true believers--consumers and vendors--but assorted bunnies that seem to multiply every late winter and early spring like, well, rabbits.

At a confectioner called The Candy Factory in North Hollywood, for example, the shelves are stocked with Easter bunnies--each 2 1/2 feet tall and made of seven to 10 pounds of pure chocolate.

They stand as ample testimony to Easter’s preeminence on candy makers’ calendars, the biggest single holiday nationally in sales volume, according to the National Confectioners Assn.--bigger than Valentine’s Day (but not Christmas or Hanukkah, which are considered not individual holidays but seasons lasting a few weeks). The association reported sales of $864 million in chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs in 1992.

As proprietor Frank Sheftel of The Candy Factory points out: “Easter, in terms of candy making, offers more chances to be creative. There’s a bigger variety of symbols--eggs, bunnies, chicks--and you’re not restricted to just one or two colors. At Easter, we use all shades of pastels.”

But that’s not to say the Easter Bunny stands tallest everywhere.

At Custom Candy by Pam, an Agoura Hills chocolatier, Easter runs second to Valentine’s Day, if only because Easter’s appeal--as a religious holiday--is more limited, co-proprietor Jerry Seidman says.

“Easter, of course, is very busy for us,” says Seidman, who with his wife, Pam, has operated their 1,000-square-foot shop, mom-and-pop style, for five years in a shopping strip. “But our clients keep us a lot busier during Valentine’s because it has no religious theme. On the other hand, Easter treats aren’t something people are inclined to order if they happen to be Jewish or any other religion that doesn’t recognize Easter.”

Although chocolatiers make up a growth industry ($6.7 billion a year), the art of candy making by small entrepreneurs such as the Seidmans, Sheftel and their handful of Valley-area peers now melts into fewer hands because the risks are said to outweigh the rewards.

“Most shopping malls charge you an arm and a leg to lease space in them,” Sheftel says. “To pay the rent at $3,000 a month, you’ve got to sell a lot of $1 pieces of candy.”

What’s more, hand-dipping--and tempering the chocolate, instead of offering simply chocolate- coated candy--are skills that require painstaking attention to detail, Jerry Seidman says.

“Our candy is a specialty item that used to be made by a lot of folks who had enough and decided to retire after 20 or 30 years,” says Seidman, who operates a tempering machine that stirs molten chocolate imported from Belgium and Switzerland, assuring that when the chocolate hardens after it’s molded into candy, it won’t melt at room temperature.

“But today,” Seidman says, “a lot of people simply go to their supermarket, pick up a box of candy that’s been coated--and somebody has thrown color onto it--and they’ll say, ‘Wow! Look at this!’ ”

The relatively few storefront candy makers who remain acknowledge that some of their competition comes from underground--an undetermined number of “bootleg” chocolatiers who operate in their homes in defiance of health codes.

Los Angeles County health officials say they know of no specific code violations by bootleg candy makers, but bootleggers are tolerated by at least one commercial candy maker because some are believed to be customers also.

“If they go out of business, then I go out of business,” says Joyce Boston, proprietor of Candy Plus, a candy and cake maker in Lancaster for five years since moving her shop there from Burbank.

For Jovina Zetlian, the road to entrepreneurship started when she happened to meet a woman who owned 10 candy-making shops in the Midwest.

“When I saw what she was doing, I said, ‘That really looks like fun!’ ” Zetlian recalls, adding that she ultimately persuaded her father, Panos Zetlian, to let her piggyback candy making onto his Mediterranean pastry shops.

“I told him, ‘Listen, we can make it!’ but he was skeptical,” says Jovina, who operates Jovina’s Chocolates at Panos in Encino, as well as two other shops in Hollywood and Glendale. “Finally, he told me, ‘Well, as long as you’re my daughter, I’m sure you’re going to make it.’ ”

In Agoura Hills, Custom Candy by Pam traces its candy-making origins to the egg--the chocolate Easter egg.

“I started making them at home as a child,” Pam Seidman says, “and when I grew up around the Farmers Market, I watched the cake decorators there for hours.”

Today, she and Jerry Seidman often work 12-hour days two doors away from a Weight Watchers outlet (“They love us,” Jerry quips) to meet the demand for their specialty chocolates (including a coffee-stirring spoon made of chocolate), which they fashion from as many as 8,000 different clear-plastic molds and can ship overnight around the world.

For his part, Sheftel, 31, of The Candy Factory cranks out not only Easter candies but edible studio props for Hollywood--chocolate champagne glasses devoured by a hot-tubbing couple in TV’s “Star Trek: the Next Generation” and a miniature top-of-a-wedding-cake bride whose head was chomped off by Kirstie Alley in “Cheers.” He says he’s been sworn to secrecy about a prop he made for “Coneheads,” a movie-in-production with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin reprising roles they played on “Saturday Night Live.”

Mostly, however, Sheftel caters to customers who order novelty chocolates crafted from molds of thousands of objects rated G to X and who attend candy-making classes or birthday parties in his 2,000-square-foot shop.

His full-service shop engages not only in retailing and wholesaling but in packaging and labeling, even printing inscriptions on ribbons and cards with a tiny hand-press--all under one roof on Magnolia Boulevard.

His inventory consists of chocolate bottles, chocolate calculators, chocolate Easter eggs, chocolate GI Joe dolls, chocolate high-heeled shoes (filled with truffles and other candies), chocolate Oscar statuettes, chocolate paintbrushes, chocolate potato chips, chocolate pretzels, chocolate soap bars, chocolate telephones, chocolate videocassettes, chocolate wristwatches and myriad other chocolate items, many custom-ordered and imprinted with corporate logos or personal inscriptions.

And anyone still searching for Elvis Presley can find, inside Sheftel’s shop, a miniature face of the King, sculpted in white chocolate.

Each novelty chocolate is made from among the more than 6,000 clear-plastic molds that Sheftel and his co-workers also sell retail. Others that they’ve designed are stashed in a back room.

For example, Sheftel says he obtained an informal agreement on the mold of Elvis’ face by “dealing with the people at Graceland and letting them know in advance that we weren’t going to do anything behind their back.”

In the front room of The Candy Factory, Sheftel hosts private parties for seniors, schoolchildren or any others who sit on 30 stools at counter-height tables, each pouring molten chocolate into those plastic molds and whetting his sweet tooth.

“When kids come here for parties, we know--to the very minute--when the chocolate starts to take effect on them,” Sheftel says. “Forty-five minutes into the party, those kids are really hyper! Then their parents sometimes have a hard time keeping them under control. They ask me: ‘You do this every week? How do you do it?’ ”

Well, Sheftel says, it’s a piece of cake--or candy.

Pacing his shop’s black-and-white-checkerboard floor and clad in a royal-blue bib-style apron, he radiates a kid-in-a-candy-store ebullience that seems inspired by the inscription on a sketch of a chocolate moose mounted above the kitchen door: “A day without chocolate is like a day without sunshine.”

A graduate of Grant High School in Van Nuys, Sheftel took a proprietary interest in confections when his parents owned a company that distributed nuts and candy for vending machines. (His mother, Gloria, helps him teach candy-making classes). He is The Candy Factory’s third owner, having purchased the business two years ago after it was started by two schoolteachers in 1978.

“I used the product--now I own the store!” he says.

But all who “own the store” agree that candy making is a decidedly seasonal enterprise.

As Joyce Boston of Candy Plus in Lancaster says, “Our season starts around Halloween and lasts until Easter.”

And what happens during summer?

“We make cakes then,” she says, explaining that chocolate candy too often melts outside. “Around here, we’re looking at 100 degrees, 30 days out of every summer.”

Sweet Sources * The Candy Factory, 12510 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. (818) 766-8220. * Candy Plus, 42156 10th St. West, Lancaster. (805) 942-0605. * Chocolates by Gayle, 5983 Reseda Blvd., Tarzana. (818) 342-2639. * Custom Candy by Pam, 28912 Roadside Drive, Agoura Hills. (818) 707-7039. * Jovina’s Chocolates at Panos, 17145 Ventura Blvd., Encino. (818) 783-9361.