America is the land of the free and the home of the disposable income - where advertising is an art form and product design is a religion, where treating yourself is a human right and tomorrow's invention is already yesterday's news. It's weird candy paradise.
Read on for coconut M&Ms, chocolate nerds with popping candy, tongue tattoos and fruit which tells your fortune …
M&Ms: Coconut
These are an improvement on normal M&Ms. Why? Why, because they’re more interesting, silly!
I like coconut – but can’t be doing with the wood pulp aspect you get with Bounties and other coconut ice-like confectionery. I feel I shouldn't have to extract the flavour from the plant myself - surely we have machines for that? These babies solve the problem - having a strong, aromatic coconut taste, but smooth as the chocolate inside the crispy shell.
They’re also, mysteriously, bigger than normal M&Ms, which is great because you can eat them individually rather than needing a few at once.
Plus, they come in coconut-themed colours (brown, white and green) and some have cute-as-a-button little palm trees or beach umbrellas on. Lovely. 4/5
Wonka Tinglerz
Hands up who likes popping candy. Me too, but it freaks some people out – people who object to tiny explosions in the centre of your skull which carry on even when you can’t feel the rocks in your mouth any more. One colleague told me about eating some when she wasn’t supposed to as a child and thinking the explosions were punishment for being naughty. Obviously we then fed her some Tinglerz.
These are rice krispies (oh how it hurts to spell that with a ‘k’) and popping candy covered in chocolate, in little Nerd-like clumps.
So you get a range of explosions, from the tongue-contact crackle of the krispies to the all-out grenade effect of the pop rocks. What's particularly exciting is that the chocolate coating delays the pop, so each mouthful carries on for a long time.
There are also a lot of these clusters to the bag - these just keep on giving. The choc’s not the best, but it’s fine, and the concept alone deserves a high rating. Brilliant. 5/5
Tung Toos
Oh for heaven’s sake. Really. These sheets of paper are very powerful food colouring in patterns.
They don’t slip off the paper like ordinary skin transfers, they’re just dye which you press to your tongue. The problem is, if the thing moves at all, it’s curtains for the elegant American flag, bat or slogan with which you want to (sic) tickle your tastebuds. But once you get the technique down, it does print ok onto your tongue tung.
The taste is generically sweet/sour, but it’s more about the aaahhht, dahhhling than the flavour. So I can’t rate it highly. I’m never going to get these again – but I can see the appeal, partly because it gives you a good excuse to stick your tongue out at people. 2/5
Betty Crocker Fruit roll-ups
Dear suffering Christ. This is fruit, is it? This neon-coloured strip of Fruit Gum is presented as one of your 5-a-day. Roll-ups are very popular in America, and I think that says about as much as needs to be said.
In case turning this 'dried fruit' bright blue and sweetening it and steamrollering it into a tiny candy carpet isn’t enough to make little Madison eat her fruit, these roll-ups come with lickable fortunes. Huh? Yeah I know. Huh.
Well, there’s a layer of even more intensely coloured fruit on top of the brightly-coloured fruit, which you can lick away – and printed on the mat beneath in (one assumes) edible ink is some sort of ‘fortune’. Blimey. What will they ever think of next? No wonder we lost the colonies, if this is the sheer force and boundless energy of American creative thinking. I’m serious about this. It’s mind-blowing.
Ok, so this is pear, actually, along with its fruity friends corn syrup, dried corn syrup, sugar, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, citric acid, sodium citrate, acetylated mono and diglycerides, fruit pectin, malic acid, natural flavor, vitamin C and color. It sticks to the teeth. It tastes ok. It's not fruit. 2/5
Coming up next week: Weird Candy: Asia!
There's something a bit bubonic about your Tung Toos demonstration.
Posted by: Michael Willoughby | 06/25/2010 at 03:53 PM