When Candy Addict last went to the All Candy Expo, the writers came back raving about the Medlow fruit pectin jellies they sampled, and lamented how hard it was to source them locally. Of course I had to laugh - being the only Australia-based writer, I could get these all the time! It made a nice change from all the candies reviewed here that I can’t get my hands on.

I offered to send them some Medlow jellies, and began hunting around for them. They’re readily available, I’ve seen them in several stores here… but sadly, a search of a half dozen stores left me empty handed. Since then, I’ve been searching high and low and they are nowhere to be found. A recent shopping expedition to Sweet As netted me a box of interesting sounding fruit jellies. It was only once I had the box in hand that I realized I’d found the Holy Grail!

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In my recent review of Nama Kokuto Ame black sugar candies, I said that the best part of traveling to a new place was getting to try new candy. Well, it turns out that the best part of having friends and family travel to new places is also… getting to try new candy! So when my sister jaunted off to Italy for three months, I fully expected her to deliver on some very sweet souvenirs. Sure enough, upon her return, my sister presented me with a gorgeous tin of Pastiglie Leone mixed lozenges. (I love you, Angela!)

Pastiglie Leone’s website proclaims the company as “Since 1857 the king of sweetness.” This highly-regarded Italian confectioner produces a large selection of tempting-looking treats, from gummies to chocolates. However, Pastiglie Leone is best known for its tiny lozenges, or pastilles - tiny, crunchy candies that come in a dazzling array of fruit and “healthful” herbal flavors including mandarin, rhubarb, vanilla, myrrh mint and citron sage. The lozenges are also known for their beautiful tins and boxes, which can be viewed on the website.

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The whole energy food and drink phenomenon is a total anomaly to me. On the one hand we’ve got jillions of kids out there being diagnosed with ADHD, and we do everything we can to calm them down. Then once all these hyperactive kids grow up, we dose them up with No-Doze, cans of Red Bull, and candy like the Maxxed Energy Pop. Is it only me who sees the problem with this? I seem to recall getting high enough on the amount of sugar in candy like Blow Pops, without the lovely people from Charms feeling like they needed to add more stuff.

These enormous lollipops are packed with loads of somewhat questionable stuff - taurine, ginseng, guarana, b-vitamins, caffeine. Sadly, they forgot one essential thing on that list - flavor! These lollipops taste hideous! I actually kept it in my mouth for quite a while, hoping that somehow the taste would improve. It didn’t, and I have no problem with saying that this lollipop is so nasty, it verges on the inedible. The texture is incredibly like sandpaper and the size is so huge as to appear almost obscene.

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What is old is new again, and this couldn’t be truer in regard to the recent resurrection of the classic candy Good & Fruity. Many of you may be familiar with this one already, and if you are, I’m very jealous! I’m too young to have enjoyed the original Good & Fruity (or Good ‘n Fruity as far as the original goes) back in its days of glory. I was hoping that the fact that Hershey’s was bringing it back would make me feel like a more “complete” candy lover; like how a modern gamer would feel finding an original Nintendo Entertainment System to play or a wine connoisseur discovering a long lost vintage. A chance to take a step back in time and taste something that “once was.”

Although, like Zombies brought back from the dead, things just aren’t as good the second time around. The original Good ‘n Fruity were pastilles with a bland jelly center and the actual fruit favoring came from the colored candy shells. As the legend goes, the formula was changed in 1988 to enhance the flavor by making the jelly centers fruity to match the candy coating. After that there’s no word on how Good ‘n Fruity slipped out of favor with the candy eating public and ended up discontinued.

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Candy is serious business. Well maybe not exactly, but it’s generally thought to be a bad idea to muck with things that people are personally invested in. No matter what it is, someone out there loves it and they’re going to be angry when it changes.

Case in point: Willy Wonka substituted cherry and lime with pineapple and mango in its popular Runts candy this past year with less than stellar response. Mango is a highly unusual flavor to see as far as candy goes, although I found the Runts version to be adequately pleasing. Pineapple, while usually popular enough, is executed horribly for Runts. Both the shape and the flavor are crude representations of actual fruit and it is not very pleasing to the eye or the tongue.

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I was a little confused when a colorful package from the people at POP! arrived on my doorstep. I’d checked out the website before they were sent, and the product information describes them as a “delectable frozen confection.” It’s true, they arrived beautifully boxed and carefully nestled in foil cold packs But when I opened the box, I found an assortment of fudgy-popcorn treats, not ice cream, as I’d been expecting.

Still, I wasn’t about to turn up my nose to these lovely chocolatey little globes, so I decided to just assume the makers of POP! want me to enjoy them cold (even if they wouldn’t melt at room temp), and leave it at that.

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As a hardcore Candy Addict, I consumed a good deal of candy during my childhood. My mother even packed full-size candy bars in my sack lunches! Mysteriously, Mike and Ike candies were absent from my candy-eating repertoire. I wasn’t exactly sure why, since I did like candies in the jellybean category. Well, I recently had the honor of reviewing five selections of Mike and Ike candies, and I think I know why.

The five kinds of Mike and Ike candies included Original Fruits, Berry Blast, Tropical Typhoon, Tangy Twister, and Lemonade Blends (which is due to be released nationwide in the summer of 2008). We’ll start with the bad then work up to the good, okay?

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