Temperature Sometimes Matters

One of the key issues I have when one candy replicates another is when there's a temperature difference. I find that some flavours only work well when they're presented at a certain temperature. Cola is a great example of this, as it really only works well when it's cold. Ice cream is also another flavour that works so much better when it's cold. It's not only cold things though, a slice of apple pie should be warm, so it's a little odd when you have an apple pie flavoured treat that's room temperature or even cold. I'm not saying that these are hard and fast rules, you can break them, it's just very challenging to keep the spirit of some flavours when presenting them under different temperatures.

Check out the latest temperature variating snack and let me know if you think it works.

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Chinese New Year Thoughts

 

As you may or may not know, I have a separate list of treats that are themed to various holidays. It includes Christmas, Valentine's Day, Halloween and a few others. The one holiday that I've always thought about adding, but really couldn't think of treats that are themed to it is New Years. While posting my latest review I realized that I could actually make a category for Chinese New Year. While the western New Year doesn't really have that many treats available, Chinese New Year has so many, including the treat I tasted this week.

Check out this Chinese New Year Kit Kat bar.

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Obviously You'll Want This T-shirt For Christmas

Olga the Opossum T-Shirt
by candycritic

 I've got t-shirts for every letter of the alphabet featuring beasts and the treats they love. If you know someone who's name starts with "O", this one will make the perfect gift.

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Just A Carrot?

 

With all kinds of state and provincial fairs going on right now, weird food flavours comes to mind. This week's featured review falls in to the category of candies that I wish tasted really bad. I even go off on a bit of a rant about it. It's strange how I crave weird foods, yet at some state fairs right now they're making crazy concoctions that I really have no interest in trying at all. In some ways I feel like there's a difference between ice cream that tastes like a cheeseburger and gummies that taste like carrots. In some ways I feel like it's okay for gummies to have strange flavour, but maybe certain flavours should be left alone when it comes to ice cream. Fortunately I also feel like my mind can change, and I hope it does each and every day.

Check out my disappointment at these orange flavoured gummy carrots.

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Travel With Fruit

I have a theory that's probably very unpopular. I believe that fruit is more often than not, bad for road trips and hiking. Don't get me wrong, I really like fruit, but it often gets a reputation for being the perfect road trip or travel snack, and frankly I disagree. I've decided to make a collection of common fruits, and give it a score based on how well I think it travels. I'll also give a short write up and justification about why I think it doesn't travel well.

Each fruit will get a score out of 10 1 being horrible for travel 10 being slightly inconvenient for travel. Keep in mind that this is an argument that all fruit is hard to travel either hiking or road trip, and no fruit is going to "win". The thing that I'm most excited about writing this is the fact that I get to eat all this fruit... for science.

Watermelon - 2 out of 10 - This is probably one of the worst fruits for traveling. If you want to keep watermelon in good shape, the best thing one can do is not cut it. I've kept watermelons in my fridge for over a month uncut and it still tastes great. However, after I cut into a watermelon it feels like you have at most a week before it starts to go. It's even more so if it's out of the fridge. 

Let's also not forget about the trash left behind with a watermelon. This includes the rind and all the seeds. The seeds also create a problem as picking them out can make a mess. Even if you're some kind of watermelon seed ninja, in general watermelon is a fruit that requires a shower after eating it. This is not only a horrible road trip fruit, it's like the worst road trip fruit with one exception (see below).

Orange 5 out of 10 - The peel is the first and most obvious problem with bringing an orange on a road trip. If you happen to be driving the car, you'll have to pull over and peel the orange before you can even think about eating it. Even if we assume that you've pulled over and thrown away the peel, even if you're willing to lose that much time to get a little extra vitamin C. Then you have the stickiness. 

Orange stickiness is no joke. There's two dose of sticky to contend with too. There's the obvious juice that you'll have to deal with when eating the orange, sure sometimes it's contained in the wedges, but that's pretty rare. Even if you have a lucky orange, you'll probably already be sticky because the peel releases a stealthy sticking liquid that I contend is worse than the juice on the inside. This ninja spray that comes off the peel is even a pain to wash off your hands, so you're probably looking at more wasted time scrubbing your hands at the next truck stop.

Banana - 6 out of 10 - Bananas are deceptive, because they may at first appear to be a great road trip or hiking snack. They're self contained in single serving packages and they taste great. But let's start off by looking at this self contained package. Banana peels have the ability to go brown and rot faster than any other fruit by-product. I feel like the banana peel starts to rot before you even finish the banana. If you're on a road trip your trash bag is going to smell like rotting banana very quickly. This is even worse if you're hiking and have no place to dispose of the peel. And don't go throwing that peel on the ground either, I've seen enough black and white comedy movies to know that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The other thing about bananas is the fact that they go bad really quickly too. Even if you leave the peel on, I feel like bananas have the ability to go from just ripe to a sock full of mush in minutes. And god forbid you happen to bump it in any kind of way. A bruised banana will be a sack full of liquid in no time.

Apple - 6 out of 10 - I think we can agree that the core of the apple is the worst thing about eating any fruit. Even in the perfect environment when you have a cutting board and knife, the core is going to be the biggest challenge you'll have with an apple. You have to make one of two choices when eating an apple, either go in deep and try to clean the core off running the risk of eating a seed or those sharp seed pods, or agree to waste some apple and leave a little extra room. No matter which you choose, you'll still have a core to deal with, and similar to the banana peel, the core of an apple rots at breakneck speeds.

There's also the juice problem. Some apples are very juicy and you'll find beads of juice running down your fingers for sure. Other types of apples may not bleed juice, but all apples will likely give you a light misting of sticky juice. Maybe a baby wipe or a stop at a roadside rest stop might help you, but I feel like that spray of stickiness will likely find a way to stick around.

Grapes - 7 out of 10 - I'm going to be honest, I think grapes might be the best fruit to bring on a road trip or hiking. They're not perfect, but I think they're as good as it gets. The thing is, there are very particular stipulations to make these an acceptable road trip fruit. First of all you have to get rid of the stems. This means that you have to break them into a bunch of very round and easy to lose pieces. If you have a container than you might be okay (but then you're carrying around an empty container all day). 

If your grapes have seeds than consider the advise above null and void. I understand that seeds are the key to life when it comes to plants, but if there could be some way of outlawing seeds in grapes that are sold to the public as food I would not disagree. Seeds in grapes have been something that has made me sad many times.

Honorable Mentions - I just want to mention a few other of my favourite fruits that are also not great for travel. Dragon fruit is a terrifying looking fruit that actually might be one of the better road trip fruits. I've peeled a dragon fruit by hand and feel like you might be able to enjoy it while on a road trip. It'll likely be kind of messy, but not nearly as messy as the last fruit I want to mention, the mango.

Fresh mango is probably one of the most amazing fruits one can buy. If you live in a colder climate you might not understand what I'm talking about, but a quick visit to Pakistan or India will teach you how great this fruit can be. The problem is getting into it, particularly on the road or hiking trail. We once decided to pick up a mango while on a road trip in India. It was an amazing looking mango, super soft and ready to eat. The problem is we did not have a knife or cutting board to deal with it. We did some research and only came across warnings about how intensely messy it is to peel and eat a mango by hand. We ended up in the shower, in our underwear, covered in juice enjoying one of the tastiest fruits we'd ever eaten. In a car this would have been disastrous. Having said that, there are two fruits I can think of that are just no goes at all...

Pineapple and durian.

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It's Specifically Orange Taffy

Olga the Opossum T-Shirt
by candycritic

 We all have our favourite flavours of taffy, even opossums.

Check out all the shirts we have and some posters in our store.

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What Colour Gummy Bear Are You Eating?

One Last Gummy Bear Face Mask
by candycritic

Tell the world you're eating a gummy bear while staying safe.

We have more candy themed stuff in our store.

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An In-depth Look at Which Flavour in a Classic Package of Starburst is the Best Flavour

While there are several special editions varieties of Starburst taffy candies, the classic, or original flavours are lemon, strawberry, orange and cherry. The point of this article is not to review Starburst, you can go here to read my review of original Starbursts, the point of this article is to look at each flavour individually and pick out the best one. This is a debate that has been going on in the candy world for generations, and I don’t think that this article is going to solve anything, I’m hoping it’s just another footnote in the great debate.

I’m going to look at the original Starburst candies in several ways, then take this information to attempt to make a rating. Keep in mind that this is the workings of a man that is obsessed with candy, and not any kind of final decision. Most of the opinions expressed in this article are mine, except for the part with the informal pole, where I asked several other candy fanatics to list their favourite in order.

There are only two reasons that the information from the article will be of any use to anybody. It might be useful to a person if they’ve never tried Starburst before, and for some strange reason decided that they will only purchase a bulk package of the candy containing only one flavour. That, or it might be useful to someone who likes candy and is really bored, or wants to find something to disagree with on the internet. Let’s start by taking a look at the colour of the candy.

Colour

The idea of this category is to simply look at the candies colour and see how much it evokes the flavour, as well as how appetizing the candy looks. When I say how much the colour evokes the flavour, I don’t mean how much it looks like fruit (more on that later), but instead how much it reminds me of the fruit.

Lemon – Yellow and lemon are pretty easy to put together. This is a fairly bright yellow and it makes me feel like the flavour of this candy is going to be strong, and maybe a just a little sour. It’s bright and it’s fun.

Orange – The orange is well… orange. It’s kind of a no brainer to make this orange, but I feel like it could have been just a little bit deeper an orange colour. It doesn’t make me think of fruit explosion, just simple orange.

Cherry – My memories of cherry Starburst have them being much deeper in colour than these are. Sure, they seem red in colour, but similar to the orange, the red just doesn’t seem to jump out at me.

Strawberry – This pink seems like it’s kind of muted. It seems like this should be a strawberry and cream flavour, and not just strawberry. I think that there are deeper or brighter pinks available to use in candy colouring. I just feel like this colour of pink reminds me of an un-ripened strawberry, and not a juicy ripe one.



Flavour

Cherry – When I started the idea of writing this article, I kept telling myself to keep an open mind, and look at each flavour with fresh eyes. I kept remembering cherry as being my favourite flavour as a kid, but I wanted to give the other flavours a chance. I tried, I really did, but these cherry Starbursts are really the best of the best in the original Starburst lineup.

Orange – Orange is never my favourite flavour, but it’s also the flavour that I never hate either. I always think of it as middle of the road. It's a fine flavour, but it's not impressive, or that much different than any other orange flavoured candy out there. I’m enjoying this Starburst, but it’s not wowing me.

Strawberry – It’s in my nature to like red candies more than the others, with the exception of watermelon and red apple flavoured candies. This one on the other hand doesn’t really stand up to some of the others. I feel like they’re really watering the flavour down with some kind of creamy flavour. If they called it a strawberry and cream Starburst, I’d probably like it more, but then it wouldn’t fit into this collection of flavours.

Lemon – I’m kind of surprised but I don’t really like the lemon flavoured Starburst. I feel like there’s something missing, something like a zing of flavour. I think if the lemon was just a little more tart it would taste a little bit better. For now, it just tastes like it’s trying to be flavourful, but it just stops short.

How the Flavour Compares to the Real Fruit

Orange – The problem with orange candies, and that includes these Starbursts, is that there’s a reference as old as time that we can relate to the flavour, Tang. Orange has been one of the fruit flavours that they’ve been manufacturing the longest, and rather than improve it, there seems to be an acceptance of this fairly fake flavour as being orange. If you think about it, there is something kind of orange about it, but I don’t think I could call it one hundred percent orange.

Lemon – This lemon Starburst tastes almost nothing like a lemon. This is probably a good thing since lemons are so sour that it’s hard for most people to enjoy the flavour. This tastes more like a candy with a slight essence of fake lemon flavour.

Cherry – These fall into a very unique category, they don’t really taste like any kind of real cherry, but I associate the flavour that they are with cherries. It’s a strong fruity flavour that for some reason I would call cherry, but compared to real cherries, it’s not that close. It’s more like a fruit punch than anything else.

Strawberry – This taste nothing like strawberries at all. It tastes like some kind of creamy, but slightly sour fruit punch. I would have a hard time picking this flavour out as Strawberry unless I’m given the context that I’m eating Starbursts (because this flavour is so connected to strawberry Starburst).

Other People’s Opinions

In order to find out which Starburst people liked the most, I informally asked people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit, which one they liked most. I eliminated all those who just picked one or two flavours, as that would skew the results. I will say that most people who only voted on one flavour voted for Cherry, so I guess that says something about people who like Cherry Starbursts the most. Had they actually answered the question in full, it might have changed the results of this as well. Either way, here’s the list of favourite Starburst flavours as voted by you… or at the very least people.

Strawberry – 56 points – Only one person voted strawberry as their least favourite.

Cherry – 51 points

Lemon – 39 points

Orange – 34 points - No one voted orange as their favourite.

Conclusion

I think I’m most surprised by how much I didn’t like the strawberry Starbursts, I really thought they would rank second for me in most cases. This is truly a case where they don’t taste like what I remember. I find this even more amazing considering how much people in my pole liked the strawberry Starburst. I really thought cherry was going to win that pole, but it turns out people have very different tastes than I thought.

I think the one thing we can all agree on is that Starburst do not taste like any kind of real fruit, however they do taste like something special. Even the worst flavour of Starburst still tastes great, even if it doesn’t taste like lemons at all.

CC

Candy In The Media - Reese The Movie

I'm not sure if I'm missing something, or I'm just too old, but I managed to sit through this movie for about 15 minutes. Let me know if you make it further, and what I missed.

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Easter Greeting Cards From Candy Critic

One Up Gummy Bear Greeting Card by bewarethecheese
View Gummy Cards online at zazzle

Hey gang, why not pick up a fun greeting card for that special someone this Easter.  Candy Critic has a whole bunch of designs for you to check out including this snazzy one.

Click here to check out the store to see a few more of our cards, t-shirts, and posters.

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The Origins Of Lucky Charms or Circus Peanuts Cereal

A few months ago I was doing research for Snack Facts (our Instagram feed). I was researching sugary cereals, in particular I was reading about Lucky Charms. Lucky Charms are the king of sugar cereals, and in my house were always the example of a cereal that isn't healthy. I'm pretty sure my mother never once bought us a box. Fortunately my grandfather had a different perspective and when we would visit him there would always be a box waiting for us.

While researching the cereal that proves grandparent’s love their children more than their parents, I came across an interesting fact. When the creator of Lucky Charms wanted to find out if marshmallows would work in a cereal, he took a bowl of Cheerios, cut up Circus Peanuts, mixed them together, and added his milk.  So that means technically if someone asks what was the original marshmallow in Lucky Charms, you could say chopped up Circus Peanuts.

Seeing as I am still not allowed to have Lucky Charms in my house (I'm sure it's some kind of wife/mother conspiracy), I decided to take matters into my own hands.  You see, Cheerios are perfectly acceptable in my house, and I managed to acquire a large amount of Circus Peanuts.  So I decided that it would make perfect sense to make my own, old school, Luck Charms.  Although I don't know if you can really call them "Lucky Charms" since I don't believed sliced bright orange peanut can be found in any leprechaun fables.

The first thing I did for this experiment, after photographing Circus Peanuts in various set-ups with Cheerios, is slice up the Circus Peanuts.  When I read this history there weren't any specifications as to how the Circus Peanuts should be included with the Cheerios.  My best guess was to slice them up to roughly the same thickness as I remember the Lucky Charms Marshmallows.  This was a little difficult because I did not have any Lucky Charms as reference because as mentioned before, my wife cares a great deal about my health.

I was also unsure about how many Circus Peanuts to chop up.  The bowl I was using is rather large, it holds about two servings of cereal, and it looks really cool.  I have a long story about why this is the best cereal bowl in the world, but I'll get into that on another blog post sometime.  For two portions of cereal, I started with four Circus Peanuts, it seemed like it needed a few more, so I added three more Circus Peanuts to a total of seven.  I stirred the cereal and Circus Peanuts together before adding the milk.  If not all of the "marshmallows" would have floated to the surface, and what fun would that be.

After mixing them up, I loaded up an old episode of one of my favourite Super Hero cartoons (Super Friends), sat in the living room, and prepared to be brought back to days at my grandfather’s house.  The cartoon was awesome, but the cereal was the real surprise.

My thoughts before doing this was that the "marshmallow" Circus Peanuts might just melt into oblivion the minute the milk hit them.  I assumed this because they kind of melt on your tong when you're eating them.  I wasn't sure if that was because of the heat of my mouth or the saliva.  If these were in fact quickly water soluble, I was expecting a bowl of Cheerios in orange coloured overly sweet milk.  Fortunately I was wrong, as it turns out Circus Peanuts are not really water-soluble. In fact they stayed fairly dry for a long time while floating in my milk.  That information was both pleasant and disturbing.

Flavour wise I was a little worried about how well the orange, yet banana flavoured, Circus Peanuts might go with the Cheerios.  Surprisingly again, it was actually very pleasant.  The milk and cereal really watered down the banana flavour of the Circus Peanuts.  Instantly I was surprised at how similar this combination was to regular Lucky Charms.

After my first bowl, I have to say there was only one "gross" part of this experience.  The milk afterwards had gone fairly orange, and it was super sweet.  Some people like the sweet milk left after a bowl of sugary cereal, but I really don't like it at all.  I actually dislike it so much that I will often eat my sugar cereals with no milk in the bowl, just a glass on the side.

My suggestion to any fan of Lucky Charms, or anybody who's not allowed to have sugary cereals, is to give this a try.  It's not that bad, and it's pretty close to the Lucky Charms experience. I would even say that this is probably the best experience I've ever had with Circus Peanuts.  I'm normally not a big fan, but the additional texture of the cereal, and the fact that this knocks the strong flavour of banana out of the Circus Peanuts, makes them fairly tasty.

I'm not saying that I'm a creative genius or anything, but I think if anybody making Circus Peanuts is listening, making a Circus Peanuts cereal might be something to look into.  And for those of us that aren't allowed to have sugar cereals, this might be a way to get around this rule.

This Week In Candy

Merry Christmas all you candy loving people out there.  I sure hope that Santa drops all kinds of sweet treats into your stockings and under your tree.  I hope at least one of you gets a Toblerone bar so big that it takes two people just to unwrap it.

Later this week we're going to be posting an blog post all about Christmas gummies.  What's that you say, you don't really know any "Christmas gummies"?  That's exactly the problem, a problem that we hope to fix with a couple of cool Christmas gummy ideas.  None of these ideas exist yet, but hopefully they'll be something you see on the shelves next year.

Here at the Candy Critic offices, we're watching a lot of the television show "Flash", that has nothing to do with the work we should be doing, I just thought the series deserves a plug.  What we are working on is the new and improved Junk Fud podcast, set to debut in January.  The first episode is ready to go, and the second will be ready by the end of the week.  We hope to have at least three episodes going up each month.

The only thing we're not doing over the holidays this year is Snack Facts.  We have to give up some time to bake all of the delights we're taking to the parties we've been invited to, and this just cuts out the time we use to update Snack Facts every day.  But don't worry, Snack Facts will be returning to our Instagram feed, Twitter feed and Facebook page in the new year with all kinds of fun facts about the snacks we love.

Today's new review is a Christmas classic, although I'm not convinced it was designed that way.  After all the first version of this treat was a chocolate apple, not a chocolate orange, and that's not very festive at all.  I've been in front of the building where these were invented, and the famous "Terry's" logo is still etched into the facade, event though it's now a jewelry store.  Make sure to check out the latest review perfect for the holiday season, the Terry's Chocolate Orange.

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This Week In Candy

I'm getting ready to go on an epic journey, and I'm worried. I always worry before I go on a trip.  Will I pack the right things, will our plans go well, but most importantly will I find some interesting foods?  Every time I step foot into a new place I go into a panic mode.  Even in the airport I check out every store and restaurant to try and get an idea about what the foods of this country or place might be.  The first thing I want to do when I visit a place is head to a grocery store to check out what the locals buy.  I spend at least 20 minutes in the candy aisle of these stores just scoping things out.  I get nervous that I'll miss the important foods, the foods that I can't miss. In the end, I've never missed out on anything.  I eventually learn that the foods you find on your journey are the foods you need to try. They'll be obvious, or they're not really the foods of that country.

This week on Snack Facts we're looking at the gumball.  It's round, colourful, and is probably one of the most iconic candies ever.  Make sure to check our Instagram feed to keep up with all the Snack Facts fun.  If you don't use Instagram, don't worry, Snack Facts can also be found on our Twitter feed and Facebook page as well.

This week's new review is a classic candy that's been around my entire life.  Orange Tic Tacs played a pretty vital role in my childhood, and that's pretty obvious in this week's review.  Click here to read more.

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A Cool Candy Thing

With the cold weather here, it's about time to think about how to keep warm.  Why not drape the most important part of your body in a stylish M&M's hat (or as they call it in my home town a "toque").  I'd never thought about how well these characters work as hats, after all they're round and colourful, and heads are round and look good when covered in colourful fabrics.  So what candy would make for good mittens or scarfs?

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This Week In Candy

My friend Randi posted a photo of what I can only describe as either the best, or worst name ever for a doughnut shop.  If you don't get the joke, chances are you may not want to. If you're too young or conservative to get it, then the first thing I can tell you is don't Google the name of this place (without the word doughnut).  While the name of this place is a little... edgy? The donuts look fantastic, and I think I may have to stop in this summer when I'm back in Toronto.

Make sure to check out our Instagram feed this week, also known as the "Snack Facts" feed, because we're looking at famous snacks that taste like oranges.  It's amazing how many famous treats taste like orange, and how many of these treats have some interesting histories.  If you're not on Instagram, we also publish our Snack Facts onto our Facebook page, Twitter feed, and our Tumblr feed.

The time for my triumphant return to Canada (for a little while) is near.  While I'm all excited about trying some classic treats from my past while I'm there, I'm also interested in trying some new things as well.  The problem is, I haven't really been keeping track with what's new in Canada.  If you happen to know of a new fun snack, candy, or junk food that I can't miss, make sure to let me know.

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Classic/Creative Candy Advertising

There's something very satisfying about licking the cheese powder off of your fingers.  Although, when I'm in public I try to be as discrete as possible when I do it.  I feel ashamed about doing something that I love.  Apparently I'm not the only one.

I found this ad here.

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Pixelated Gummy Bear Shirts All Week - Part Orange

Pixelated Orange Gummy Bear Tees by candycritic
Create one-of-a-kind custom tee shirts on zazzle.

I read somewhere that the colour orange comes from the fruit.  In other words, before oranges where called "oranges", the colour orange didn't exist.  Instead most people referred to orange as a shade of red.  So if you built a time machine and wore this t-shirt back thousands of years, you'd actually be wearing a red gummy bear t-shirt, and not an orange one.

Click here to check out all of the shirts we have available.

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It's Our Wednesday Japanese Candy Review!

I really want to come up with a better name for this new regular Wednesday event where we review a Japanese sweet treat.  Our friends at oyastucafe.com once again provided us with this week's treat, and they deserve to have an awesome title for helping us out.  Maybe I could call this our "Weekly Japanese Sweet Treat", or "Fun, Strange, Tasty, Japanese Review".  I have to give it some thought, but I'm also welcoming any suggestions you might have.

All of these reviews are brought to you by our really good friends at oyastucafe.com, and if you want to buy anything you see being reviewed for this special weekly review visit them and enter the code "candycritic" to get yourself a nice discount too.

Click here to read this week's Japanese review.

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Stuff I Want To Try

The Big One Jaffa Cake  - McVitie’s - Since Jaffa cakes are normally really small, wouldn't a big one just be like a normal sized cake? - Click here to learn more about this treat.

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Baking Today/My Greek Cookbook - Candied Fruit

 My most recent experiment, for my Greek Cookbook, has been to make Orange Peel Spoon Sweets.  It was easily the most nerve wracking, baking/cooking experiment I've made so far.  My biggest fear was making a mistake, and sampling my first concoction, only to realize that I did something wrong and the bitterness of the orange peel hand't gone away.

 I researched many recipes and discovered that the key seems to be regular boiling.  I assume that boiling takes the bitterness out of the oranges.  So I boiled my orange peels many times over.  Even though my first batch looked right, I was still really nervous about sampling my first piece of orange peel. Fortunately it seemed to work very well and I was left with a mouth full of slight tart, but most sweet orange peel.

I'm not really sure who came up with the idea of taking the worst part of a fruit, and turning it into something better.  It sounds like the result of a bet.  "I bet you can't eat this entire orange. I bet I can."

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