Caitlin told you about these goofy election candies a few weeks ago, but here’s a quick report that the Bipartisan and Republican Sets are now available. (Candy Addict stands firm in maintaining that candy knows no political party; candy loves red, blue, and purple states; and candy always seeks common ground.)
Now, supposedly the McCain face was undergoing a makeover (hmmmm), and yes, his lollipop face doesn’t look too bad because the eyebrows are pronounced. But take a look at McCain on the little candies in the lower part of the photo above. I’m not sure you can tell, but I coulda sworn that was Casper the Ghost! I’m not saying McCain’s old, but… seriously, when you see one of these in person you’ll think it’s a comic book character of the spectral variety.
In our continuing coverage of the ‘08 election (hey, everyone else is covering it, why shouldn’t we?), today we bring you Kai’s Campaign ‘08 Candies. Kai’s makes traditional handmade Japanese rolled candy (kumi ame) in various cute and fun designs. For this election season, they’re offering both Lick Obama and Lick McCain candy sets. I got a chance to try the Obama set, and while I can’t claim the candies set new heights in confectionery deliciousness, I will admit that they’re pretty darn amusing!
The Obama set includes several lollipops with a cartoon Obama face, a bunch of little blue lozenge-shaped hard candies with the Democratic donkey, and similar candies in red, white and blue with the word “Vote.” For now the Obama set also includes a McCain pop, and the website says that they’re redoing the McCain face - in the meantime, only the Obama set is available.
The candies themselves taste fairly typical - the Obama ‘pop is mostly just sweet (the website says it’s lemon-lime flavored), while the lozenges have very slight flavors - lemon-lime for the donkeys and lemon for the vote candies (the lemon-lime of the lozenge tastes different than the lemon-lime of the Obama lollipop). McCain’s ‘pop sports a flavor that seems to be that of burnt sugar, though the website claims it’s strawberry. It’s not totally unpleasant, but I’m not sure I would ever have come up with strawberry if I hadn’t read it.
What’s cool about these is that the images go all the way through the pop, so even after you’ve sucked on them for a while, you can still take it out of your mouth and proudly display it for coworkers or admirers. And while the flavor may not be astounding, they’re certainly good in a general sugary kind of way. But really, we aren’t buying these for their flavors, are we?
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 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.
Florida-based Sugar Sugar is a candy shop straight out of Willy Wonka’s imagination! They specialize in small hard candies in a crazy assortment of flavors. Sugar Sugar sent a little sampler pack to review, and I was really excited to try all the goodies–the Rock Mix of hard candies (they call them lollies), which includes 21 different flavors, Peanut Brittle, and a strawberry lollipop.
See how pretty the little lollies are? Sugar Sugar was kind enough to send along a flavor list, but you don’t really need it, since it’s pretty clear what flavor you’re eating by looking at the design on the candy. The candies were pleasant enough, but I tend to favor strong, sour flavors in hard candies, and the only flavor that came close was cherry. It had a nice, tart cherry flavor. I thought maybe the citrus flavors would be potent, but they were rather mild. The same goes for blueberry, green apple, raspberry, and watermelon.
The first thing that struck me about the peanut brittle is how buttery the flavor was. I was enjoying this buttery sensation, and then I bit down on it, and, well, my teeth got stuck in it. My friends, this peanut brittle is not for the weak teethed or the filling enhanced! It’s really, really sticky. I seriously thought it was going to pull out my fillings, and they don’t come cheap, so I had to stop eating it. If you like buttery, sticky peanut brittle, then this is for you!
The strawberry lollipop reminded me of those oversized, swirly ones I always pined for in my childhood. Like the little lollies, the lollipop had a subtle strawberry flavor. It was kind of hard to eat, too–it was just a hair too big for my mouth, so if I stuck the whole thing in there and just sucked on it, it would make me kind of drool, which isn’t too attractive. I also didn’t have the patience or the time (I was multitasking) to just hold it in one hand and lick it. I ended up cramming it into my mouth and trying to suck it down quickly so that it would shrink enough to fit comfortably in my mouth. By then, though, I was kind of tired of eating it.
Sugar Sugar also makes personalized lollies. You can get your company logo on there, your name, whatever you want. They also have lollies to celebrate births, and hey, wouldn’t you rather have a little sack of “It’s a Boy” candies than a nasty old cigar? I think Sugar Sugar is a fun company with fun candies, but if I were to purchase any candies from them, it would be for the novelty factor rather than taste.
Melding the chocolate chewiness of a Tootsie Roll with the classic crunch of a peppermint candy cane seems obvious, since chocolate and mint have intermingled happily with each other forever, but Candy Cane Tootsie Pops are a new (to me) addition to store shelves. Tootsie Roll doesn’t seem to have a separate webpage for this flavor either, so I’m guessing it’s not going to stick around after December.
Each pop is the same size and shape as a Blo-Pop, and I wonder if they used the same molds to form them. They’re wrapped in clear plastic like a candy cane, which shows off the eye-catching design of the lollipop. Red and white swirls. Very festive and a really nice touch.
I love crunching down on hard candy, and candy canes are no exception. As tempted as I was to get to the Tootsie Roll center, I took one for the team and just licked and spun the pop in my mouth instead. The outer shell is a familiar peppermint flavor. A little sweet, a little minty, and neither side overwhelmed the other. As I got closer to the center, a subtle fudge flavor started to mingle in with the mint. I really liked this gradual introduction of chocolate, which later intensified as more of the center was revealed.
And then? And then I couldn’t help myself. I munched through the rest of the shell and chewed the Tootsie Roll off the stick, which is my usual way of finishing a Tootsie Pop.
I’m a Tootsie Pop fan, and these Candy Cane Pops are a great seasonal addition to the regular lineup. The chewy, chocolatey center mixes much better with peppermint that it does with the regular fruity flavors. So if the idea of eating grape with chocolate isn’t your thing, maybe you can give these Tootsie Pops a try.
“Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?” Everyone remembers that commercial, right? (To relive it, click on the image above to watch it on YouTube.)
That question has played on the minds of thousands of Tootsie Pop fans for years, even driving engineering students to create licking machines and compare the results of their experiments with human volunteer results. Now, Tootsie Pops has given us three new reasons to the answer for ourselves.
The top-selling lollipop brand, consistently available in chocolate, cherry, orange, raspberry, and grape, is now adding one flavor each of strawberry, watermelon, and blue raspberry to Tootsie Pop bags.
If you want a more adventurous lollipop experience, Tootsie Pops Tropical Stormz are available in Berry Berry Punch, Orange/Pineapple, Lemon/Lime, Strawberry/Banana and Citrus Punch. The basic Tootsie Pop premise is the same as the original—a hard candy shell surrounds a Tootsie Roll—but the shell is a combination of two flavors swirled together.
If you’re a truly dedicated Tootsie Pop fanatic, the Online Tootsie Store has a lot of cool stuff to collect. My favorite is the Lick O Meter Keychain. It’s a plastic contraption that holds a Tootsie Pop and counts your licks on an LCD readout. It’s $5 and comes with batteries and a pop. I’d like to get one and compare its count to my own, although I bet I’d do what I always do with Tootsie Pops—lose my patience and ruin the experiment by taking a big bite before I’m halfway to the center.
Steve over at The Sneeze has an interesting post about Tootsie Pop Wrappers. I totally forgot about those characters on the wrapper and I never heard about getting the Indian on your wrapper and exchanging it for free candy. Maybe that was before my time? Anyone ever hear of that before?
