I recently took a week off from my regular job to visit the beautiful city of Montreal, Quebec. But that doesn’t mean I also neglected my duties as staff writer for Candy Addict. No, I made sure to keep my eyes peeled for a truly Quebec-specific sweet. But at first, I found only the same overpriced gift-shop candy you can find anywhere in Canada: cheap chocolate-covered almonds packaged as “moose droppings” and hard candies “made with real maple syrup” (read: 90% regular sugar and 10% of the good stuff). But then, while exploring Montreal’s Chinatown, in a hole-in-the-wall storefront, I discovered something truly unique at last.

(Later, once I’d had time to do more shopping in areas that weren’t 90% tacky tourist gift shops, I also found some great candy stores and artisan chocolatiers. But that’s a subject for another review.)

The white, wispy objects in the photo above, believe it or not, are candy. They’re called Dragon’s Beard Candy, and they were apparently a favorite sweet in China’s Imperial Court, making them over 2000 years old. Dragon’s Beard Candy consists of fine, hairlike filaments of sugar surrounding a center of (according to the stall’s owner) peanuts, coconut, sesame, brown sugar and chocolate.

We’ve actually reviewed them once already. But those were expensive and had to be shipped all the way from China, and these were cheap and freshly hand-made – the stall prominently featured a bin of nutty filling and a big lump of brown rock sugar. How could I resist?

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When I was a kid, my candy preferences consisted of the longest-lasting candies I could afford on my meager candy allowance. But when I felt like splurging, that splurge was often Bridge Mixture.

To my childhood self, there was something sophisticated about Bridge Mixture – the mixture of dark and milk chocolate coatings, the way that you never quite knew which filling you were going to get, just like in a “grown-up” box of chocolates, the fact that it was named after a complicated grown-up card game at a time when I only knew how to play Old Maid and Crazy Eights.

Bridge Mixture seems to evoke a love-it-or-hate-it response in people, so I vowed to track down the elusive candy and see if it lived up to my childhood memories. But first, a little background info. Bridge Mixture, for those of you who don’t know, is nothing more than an assortment of chocolate-coated centers – caramel, a selection of fondants, peanuts and raisins, and two flavors of what the Internet calls “Turkish Delight,” but has always seemed to me like a pretty standard jelly. (Note that they have no relation to the Licorice Bridge Mix we’ve previously reviewed.)

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Ok, confession time: I’m not into the whole organic/natural food thing, for two main reasons. One, I don’t believe in quick-fix solutions to the complex health, environmental and sociological issues that plague today’s food industry; and two, I just love my artificial flavors and colors too darn much. After all, the candy aisle would be a pretty boring place without them.

Still, the idea of a candy that’s truly guilt-free (I’m talking eco-guilt, not calorie-guilt) remains a tempting one, even if it’s just an illusion. So when I noticed a display of products from Shopper’s Drug Mart’s new organic line, Nativa, it was naturally the candy that jumped out at me. Though Nativa also makes organic gummy bears and fruit gummies with natural flavors and colors, it was the cola bottles (or “soda bottles,” as they’re called on the bag) that grabbed me.

Now, gummy cola bottles are among my all-time favorite candies, especially the sour variety. (Confession number two: I once ate an entire industrial-sized tub of sour cherry cola bottles from Costco – AND I’D DO IT AGAIN.) So I was very curious as to how the organic variety would stack up to the real thing. At $2.99 for a 100 g bag, they were pricey (a common problem with organic foods), but I decided to give them a try.

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Here in Canada, something strange has been happening to the packages of Sour Patch Kids, Fuzzy Peaches, and an array of other familiar gummies. They’ve gotten package updates that prominently feature the name Maynards – a very minor branch of Trebor Bassett known only for making Wine Gums, hardly the most popular of candies.

Fortunately for gummy lovers, this rather baffling marketing decision has also led the way for a number of new Maynards gummy products, including Juicy Squirts, fruit-flavored gummies with a juicy center. They sound like a good idea in theory, but in the past, I’ve found them somewhat lacking in the execution.

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Around here, when you’re eating Thanksgiving dinner with your grandparents and someone passes around a box of chocolates, it’s likely to sport the familiar purple and gold wrapper of Purdy’s.

Purdy’s, which has been around since 1907, is a fixture in the provinces of Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. It’s one of those mid-range chocolate companies that’s definitely a cut above the likes of Hershey or Nestle, but isn’t selling single-origin curry-flavored bars for $12 apiece either. It’s upscale yet nonthreatening, the kind of chocolate that your average Joe is comfortable buying for a Christmas gift or a dinner party with the boss.

In addition to gift boxes and filled chocolates by the pound, Purdy’s also does a very nice selection of chocolate bars, at least one of which I can usually count on finding in my Christmas stocking or on top of a birthday gift. In my mind, Purdy’s chocolate is inextricably connected to special occasions, so it felt very extravagant to simply walk into the store and pick out something for myself. I settled on a half-remembered item from Christmas stockings past, the Chocolate Chewie.

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Back in 1996, a new candy appeared on the scene here in Canada. They were created by two guys from Winnipeg, Chris Emery and Larry Finnson, who decided to try marketing their Grandma’s candy recipe. They were an overnight sensation, and today they’re found on store shelves everywhere next to the big boys like Werthers’ and Starburst. The name? Clodhoppers.

According to the Phrase Finder website, clod hopper is a very old term for “a rough, unsophisticated countryman” or, more recently, a pair of ploughman’s boots. Clods, of course, refers to clods of dirt. What kind of candy names itself after a lump of dirt? A darn good one, as it turns out.

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I live in Canada, where it’s a fact of life that many aspects of our culture are borrowed from our neighbors to the South – our TV shows, our chain restaurants, our food brands. And for the most part, we’re cool with that. The only problem is, we don’t get all of those things – just whatever sells well enough in the United States to be worth importing. (Vanilla Coke, Wild Cherry Pepsi, I miss you guys! Come back!)

So, when I got into this whole Internet candy thing a year or two ago, I was surprised to learn that many of my childhood candy staples like Coffee Crisp and Aero are not sold in the United States and, what’s more, they have legions of rabid American fans exchanging the addresses of obscure import grocery stores that carry the elusive candies – candies that are available at any gas station here in Canada. I’m too polite to say “Turnabout is fair play” – I am Canadian, after all – so instead, I’ll get right to today’s candy: the Cadbury Crunchie bar.

The Crunchie bar is technically of British origin, but it’s widely available here in Canada. (In the States, not so much.) Behind its extremely generic name, the Crunchie is actually pretty unique. It’s based on a traditional candy called sponge toffee, honeycomb, or cinder toffee, which is made by adding baking soda to molten sugar, causing the sugar to expand in a froth of bubbles. Once cooled, the foam becomes a light, airy, crunchy treat. It can be eaten plain or, as is the case with the Crunchie, coated in chocolate.

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As you may or may not know, Smarties in Canada and Europe are totally different than the candy we call Smarties here in the U.S. Ours are pressed-sugar discs (which are called Rockets in other countries) while the Canadian/European Smarties are candy-coated chocolate similar to M&Ms but made by Nestle. I wrote about this before and have been looking forward to trying the chocolate Smarties. I finally got my hands on some thanks to the good folks at Nestle who heard my plea and hooked me up.

The European/Canadian Smarties have a slightly larger circumference than M&Ms and are slightly flatter and the colors are much brighter and seem more fun than M&Ms. They come in red, yellow, orange, green, mauve, pink, brown and blue and, according to the Smarties website, the orange has orange flavoring in the chocolate center though I didn’t notice it myself. (Weird - orange Sixlets are like that too). Their shells also seem a little thicker than M&Ms though I don’t have a micrometer to verify this.

So, how do they taste? Great! They remind me of Cadbury Mini Eggs (which I LOVE). The chocolate has that Cadbury taste to it and the slightly thicker shell just works for me. So, I now have a new favorite candy-coated chocolate candy. Here are my rankings:

• European/Canadian Smarties
• Kissables
• M&Ms
• Sixlets

Yes, the European/Canadian Smarties are that good and now sit at the top of my list of favorite candy-coated chocolate, bite-sized candies.

• Smarties homepage

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According to the Smarties (Canadian, not U.S.) package, “Canadians eat enough Smarties each year to circle the Earth 350 times.” That got a 6th grade math teacher in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada thinking and she had her class do some math.

Then they took the size of a single Smartie and worked out how many it would take to form a 40,000-kilometre necklace around the planet. To make the company’s claim true, each Smartie would have to be bigger. “Three and a half metres,” (about 11.5 feet) says student Kaylie Rankin. “It’s about the size of our chalkboard. I don’t know if I’d be able to eat it.”
[Read more]

After writing three letters to Nestle, the company has agreed to change the packaging next year.

• Original article at CBC News
• Comparison of U.S. vs U.K. Smarties
• U.S. Smarties website
• Canadian Smarties webpage

tags: candy smarties chocolate math canada teacher students

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