I don’t understand why I am hesitant to eat mint-flavored candy. I mean, I do like the taste of it. Hand me a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and watch me make it disappear in seconds. But probably because of my dislike for gum, I avoid most mint products. It isn’t that there isn’t a non-gum mint candy out there, but not enough of them, and not enough of them done well.

As I strolled down the candy aisle at my local Dollar Tree Store, a pretty red box caught my attention. “Andes Cherry Jubilee Thins” the box proclaimed. Hmm I thought. I never much cared for regular Andes Thins: Crème de Menthe, but we all know that I am a sucker for fruit in chocolate.

Maybe because it was the cherry, maybe it was because I wanted to branch out from my mint horizons, or maybe I will just buy candy because I love it, but whatever the reason, I picked up a box and headed to the register with a dollar clenched in my fist.

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Candy is always good, but when you can successfully combine two different types of candy into one, then you’re in business. And though it’s a seemingly difficult feat, I have always thought the most successful attempt to be lollipops with filled centers.

My personal preference is for Tootsie Pops, the combination of a delicious hard candy shell with chewy Tootsie mockolate in the center. Despite my own proclivities, I recognize the even more popular version is the cousin of the Tootsie Pop, Charms Blow Pops.

Blow Pops were the epitome of candy for me as a child. You had the artificial (in the best possible way) fruit-flavored candy shells, coating a middle of bubble gum. Had I been a fan of gum, I think I would have consumed a lot more of these as a kid instead of just eating the outer shell and throwing away the gum. Grape and cherry were my personal favorites, which was fine since my siblings didn’t care for either and fought amongst themselves for the strawberry, watermelon, and sour apple varieties.

Over the years, new flavors have been introduced, but I never enjoyed blue raspberry or the sour versions as much as the original flavors, so I rarely purchased them. However, on one of my meandering candy scouting sessions through local gas stations, I came across a bin of these: Tangerine Mango Madness Blow Pops. Sounds interesting, right?

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Tootsie’s Junior Fruit Cremes are probably the most notorious candy to hit the shelves this year, or in recent memory for that matter. Many other candy bloggers have reviewed/lambasted them, and the results have all been the same: abomination (and that’s the nice way of putting it).

So why do you think I wanted to try these after everyone warned me not to? Well, why did anyone go see Sylvester Stallone in a new Rambo movie? In the sagacious words of Mr. Owl, “The world may never know.”

The only thing that prevented me from buying these was that I could not find them anywhere in Austin. Recently, however, I had visited Oklahoma City for work, a place I have never been to before. One of my favorite things about going to a new city is seeing what sort of candy they stock in their supermarkets, gas stations, and drugs stores, as any good candy addict is aware of the regional differences. At the Dollar Tree store, among the outdated and probably expired Carnival Skittles and Coconut 100 Grand Bars (both of which I still bought and consumed), I finally came across Junior Fruit Cremes!

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Some of you may remember Kojak, the police detective television series that aired in the 1970s. The character of Kojak was played by actor Telly Savalas, and he often had a Tootsie Pop lollipop in his mouth. Kojak would smoothly deliver his signature phrase, “Who loves ya, baby?” with the Tootsie Pop stick dangling from his mouth. I always wondered what he did with the stick when it started to disintegrate, because that’s what the sticks would do on me – the paper would start to sort of ball up and fall off, sometimes in my mouth.

I’m not self-centered enough to believe that Tootsie developed Tootsie Pop Drops (“Tootsie Pops WITHOUT the Stick!”) just for me, but it’s a great idea, isn’t it? The drops are a nice little nugget, a bit smaller than a Tootsie Pop, but the perfect size to pop into your mouth. The Tootsie Pop Drops come in five flavors: chocolate, cherry, blue raspberry, orange, and grape. You would think they would taste identical to the Tootsie Pops, but I felt some of the flavors were slightly different. Maybe it has something to do with the round shape of the Tootsie Pops versus the more disc-like shape of the Drops? Hmmmm.

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To all who know me, it’s no secret that I can eat my weight in Junior Mints, so when I first heard about Junior Mints Deluxe, I checked the mail impatiently every day until my samples arrived. When they did, I was a little sad to see that the Florida sun had taken a toll on the confections, but they were still mostly intact, and I got ready to chow down on some minty, chocolaty goodness.

The Deluxe candies are shaped a lot like cherry cordials, but otherwise the concept is the same as regular Junior Mints – dark chocolate on the outside, soft, minty filling on the inside. Here’s what Tootsie Roll Industries has to say about their latest Junior Mints product:

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