Oh, Halloween! For a Candy Addict, it truly is the most wonderful night of the year.
As a kid, I would spend hours on the streets of my neighborhood, trekking from door to door to door, opening my pillowcase and shouting, “Trick or Treat!” in my neighbor’s faces in the hopes of collecting lovely chocolates and sweets. My sister and I had Trick-or-Treating down to a science: we’d mapped out routes, planned time schedules, and figured out ways to crisscross certain streets in order to maximize our candy-haul potential. At the end of the night, we’d usually end up with about 150 fun-size bars (and a few full-size bars, because believe me, we knew exactly who gave them out and where to find them).
Our post-Trick-or-Treating ritual was always the same; we’d dump our pillowcases on to the living room rug and start categorizing our candy into separate piles. Not only did this make it easier for us to decide which bars we wanted to trade (”I’ll give you 4 Kit-Kats for 4 Baby Ruths“), but it also made it easier to spot the most important candy bar in the pillowcase: the all important Halloween Gem.
As a true Candy Addict, I like to make sure I have candy on me everywhere I go. I usually have some snack size bars stashed in my desk drawer at work, some candies hanging out at the bottom of my purse, and a few sweets stashed in my glove compartment. And now, thanks to the help of Aquolina’s Chocolovers perfume, I can literally keep the sweet scent of chocolate on me at all times.
I bought my first bottle of Chocolovers last spring, en route to the All Candy Expo. I was at Sephora (where the perfume is sold) picking up a few things for my trip when I encountered the adorable, heart covered bottle. I’m not going to lie to you guys - I saw the word “choco” on the bottle and bought it without even smelling it. I can’t help it!
One of my favorite candy bars in the entire word is the Reese’s Nutrageous bar, a slab of choco-peanut goodness that comes wrapped in the beloved and obnoxious orange packaging of all Reese’s products. The Nutrageous bar came on the scene in 1994, when I was in 7th grade, and it was love at first bite, as far as I can remember.
The Nutrageous has everything I look for in a candy bar: peanuts, caramel, and milk chocolate. As an added bonus, there’s the ingredient that really makes the Nutrageous special: whereas most peanut/caramel bars have nougat as their centers, the Nutrageous is held together by a thick, creamy layer of the famous Reese’s peanut butter. It doesn’t get much better than that.
As you wander around the candy aisles this October, you’ll no doubt notice an array of Halloween-themed bags, with pumpkins, spiders, and bats climbing atop your favorite candy bars. But another color might catch your eye amidst the array of bright orange Halloween bags: the color pink, the official color of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Throughout the month of October, several major candy companies are joining the fight against breast cancer by releasing limited-edition products designed to raise awareness as well as funding toward breast cancer research. My M&M’s will be donating 10% of its “Promise Blend”, an online-only mix of pink and white M&M’s imprinted with a “running ribbon” on one side and “For the CURE” on the other, to the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for breast cancer. As with all My M&M’s products, personalized messages are also available on the Promise Blend M&M’s, to allow customers to send messages of encouragement and inspiration to loved ones.
I am a big believer in the idea that candy should, above all things, be fun. And there is perhaps no candy on earth as fun as the candy with Fun right in its name - the legendary Lik-M-Aid itself: Fun Dip.
If you’ve never had Fun Dip before, you are missing out on one of the greatest candy experiences of all time. There’s nothing particularly fancy or high class about Fun Dip; it’s the kind of candy you fall in love with when you’re in elementary school and never quite grow out of, the kind of candy that is both simple and wonderfully ridiculous, the kind of candy that makes dentists cringe and kids flip out with sugar-induced happiness. Fun Dip is candy at its best: sour, sweet sugar that tastes great and is super fun to eat.
The taste of Fun Dip is extremely similar in taste and texture to that of Pixy Stix. In fact, eating a packet of Fun Dip is a bit like eating a bowl of Pixy Stix sugar, which, I must say, is pretty awesome.
Fun Dip currently comes in three flavors: RazzApple Magic, Cherry-Yum-Diddly, and Grape-Yumptious:
Every year, the internet spews out a million lists of overrated and underrated things. This band isn’t as good as your brother thinks it is; this movie was tremendous, even though only four people saw it; this book may be a best seller, but it’s pretty lousy; nobody appreciates the greatness of slugs, and so on and so forth. These lists can be annoying, as some people tend to hate everything that is even remotely popular, but at times the lists can also be incredibly validating: sometimes it’s nice to see a popular-yet-stupid thing get ripped to shreds, and even nicer to see an underrated gem get its due.
It’s with this in mind that I tell you, Candy Addicts, that the Nestle Chunky bar is the most underrated candy bar of all time.
Let’s start with the basics: a Chunky bar, (which got its cringe-worthy name in the 1930s, after inventor Philip Silvershein decided to name the bar after his granddaughter, who apparently was also called “Chunky” - for obvious reasons), is a slab of creamy Nestlemilk chocolate, raisins, and peanuts. It’s a bit like a giant Raisinet/Goober hybrid, as if someone left a box of Goobers and Raisinets to melt atop each other and then re-harden into a trapezoid of awesome.
Every year on my birthday, my parents would take me out for a special dinner. I used to love getting all dressed up and heading out to what I considered to be a fancy restaurant; the kind of restaurant that required reservations, served Shirley Temples in sparkling crystal glasses, and had beautiful chandeliers hanging from the ceilings. My mother would lay out a freshly ironed dress and a pair of patent-leather shoes for me, and I’d quickly get myself ready for my big birthday night. But it wasn’t the fancy lights or the Shirley Temples or the general fanciness of the restaurant that got me excited - those things were just added bonuses, background prettiness for the real star of the evening: the fancy awesome birthday dinner dessert.
Every year, my parents would “surprise me” by ordering a piece of birthday cake and having the waiters come over and embarrass me to death with a variation of the birthday song. And every year, I’d hand the cake over to my dad and order a big old glass of chocolate mousse.
There’s nothing better than good chocolate mousse. When you go to a restaurant that does it up right, eating chocolate mousse is akin to eating a giant vat of melted 3 Musketeers, with a dollop of whipped cream on top. It is brilliant and lovely and wonderful and all of the things that chocolate should be. Bad chocolate mousse is another story, as it tastes like stale chocolate milk crossed with an egg-crate mattress. It’s bad news, bears.
Oh, how I love this commercial. An old school gem from the early 80’s, this is the type of M&M’s commercial that carried the brand through the decade: happy jingles, close up shots of the (now retro!) bag of Plain M&M’s being poured into someone’s hand, and the happy M&M’s themselves, dancing about. Though our M&M friends have gotten a makeover over the past 25 years, what with computer animation, a slightly darker sense of humor, and clearly lower voices, the heart of these commercials remains the same: M&M’s are a fun and delicious candy, and, as the jingle here states: all the world loves them.
Be sure to look for my buddy, Tan M&M, who makes an appearance in this commercial. We will never forget you, Tan M&M! Though I’m not sure if it’s you in the commercial, or Orange M&M, I’m going to choose to believe it’s you! That’s how desperate I am to see a Tan M&M, people!
Also worth noting in this commercial is the computer the two kids are using. I’m pretty sure I played Oregon Trail on that computer in 1986. And I’m also pretty sure that I did it with a bag of M&M’s by my side.
I’m fairly certain that I have a condition known as Tootsie Pop Amnesia, where I can go for years forgetting how much I love the chocolaty chew of a Tootsie Pop before someone hands me one at random and all of my happy Tootsie memories come flooding on back.
In college, I ate about 9,009,209 Tootsie Pops. I kept the wrappers tacked to my wall. Whatever it is I thought I’d see, became a Tootsie Roll to me. But alas, after college I moved on to other treats, and left the Tootsie Pop behind. As always, I forgot all about the sweet, sticky, “what flavor is this in the center, I mean, it says chocolaty chew, but really?” delight of eating a Tootsie Pop. So when we hit the Tootsie booth at this year’s All Candy Expo, and I saw an unfamiliar color in the Tootsie Pop dish, I almost had to sit down, as my Tootsie Pop amnesia once again gave way to Tootsie Pop fever, and I was overcome with excitement trying to find out what flavor lay below the new, peach-colored Tootsie Pop wrapper.
On my way to the dish to fish out a pop, I imagined various flavor scenarios: dark chocolate? Cranberry? Tropical? Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the new Tootsie Pop flavor was the oh-so-trendy star of the All Candy Expo: Pomegranate.
The new M&M’s Premiums line has arrived, and as soon as you see a box you’ll realize that these are no ordinary M&M’s. These M&M’s are something special. From presentation to taste, M&M’s Premiums are quite impressive, hitting the mark in both style and substance.
The presentation is fantastic, starting with the outer packaging. The typical M&M’s bag has been swapped out for a sleek, upscale-looking box that is resealable on the outside as well as on the inside, as both the outer carton and the plastic inner pack of M&M’s come with resealable tabs to keep the candy locked in and fresh.
It’s a small but wonderful innovation, as it allows buyers to carry, share, and store the M&M’s without worrying that they’ll spill. You can also pour out a handful for a friend and then save the rest for later without having to resort to the old school M&M’s pack method of rolling the bag as tight as you can and shoving it in your pocket, which is nice.
The M&M’s themselves are also quite striking: with pearly shells of soft mint green, royal blue, shimmering copper, raspberry red, and a dazzling lavender, the M&M’s provide a lovely visual that I’m sure will be quite popular for parties, gifts, and holidays. Their decorative quality is fancier than your typical holiday-themed M&M, which makes them appropriate candy decor for weddings and other formal events as well. They really are quite lovely. Almost too pretty to eat.
Almost. But come on, now. A pretty candy shell isn’t going to stop me from shoveling M&M’s into my mouth in the least dainty way possible. I can’t help it, man! I’m a Candy Addict!
