Eat your words

You've got to love it when you open a package and find this:

This is from Swallow My Words, a chocolate company that combines yummy chocolate, interesting add-ins and words. For example, you could order a Cereal Killa bar which is toasted corn flakes, seasoned Cap'n Crunch, pretzels and orange balsamic caramel. Then you can have them write your own personal saying on it, like "I've made a huge mistake" or "You're killing me, Buster!" I love these because, not only is the chocolate smooth and rich, but the add-ins are unique.The 3-ounce slabs are $5.95 plus an additional $2 for engraving. It's the perfect gift for birthdays, weddings, break-ups and Wombat Day. Check them out at www.swallowmywords.com.

State of candy emergency

It's Teacher Appreciation Week! Hooray! For those of you who don't have kids, let me explain what this means. On Sunday night all across the nation, weary parents finally get around to reading their e-mails from the weekend. On this particular Sunday, the e-mail reveals that each day during the upcoming week, little Mary Jane and Baby Ruth have a special assignment to make their teacher feel appreciated. For example, on Monday, each child should bring in a cardboard flower decorated with paint, glue, glitter and so-forth and write why they love their teacher on it. On Tuesday, they should write a poem extolling the virtues of their classroom, and so on and so forth. Tomorrow, the Sugar Baby is supposed to bring in a sweet treat for his teacher. No problem for me, right?
Um. We have a problem. My first idea was to bake cookies, but I realized too late that I didn't have any butter. (I'm already in my pajamas so I'm not going out.) My second thought was the frozen cookie dough I'd made a few weeks ago. Oh, but I gave that to my sister. So it was time to raid the candy stash. Surely the writer of a candy blog, a self-admitted sugar addict, would have something special on hand to pass off, right? This is all I could find:

A package of leftover Peeps and a single Dum Dum.What am I going to do? In times of personal emergency, I know I can always resort to a bag of chocolate chips, but somehow I don't think she'd get the wry wit behind that. I think I might just have to write her an I.O.U. 

You win some, you lose some

Yes, Easter came and went without a peep (no pun intended!) from Candy Yum Yum! I took lots of pictures of some of the new candy that I saw on the shelves, but I just wasn't motivated this season. Even the Easter Bunny didn't really pull through for the Sugar Baby. He brought some jelly beans, some gummies and a chocolate rabbit, but overall it wasn't a big sugar rush here. I guess I've just been in a candy funk lately. That doesn't mean I haven't been eating candy, of course. It's just that there's not much to say about eating half a bag of Hershey Kisses, especially when you only meant to eat four.

In any case, here's something new that I tried recently: a Trader Joe's PB&J Milk Chocolate Bar. My first thought was, why ruin a peanut butter cup with jelly? But then I tried it. It's a different taste experience than a peanut butter cup. Obviously, first of all it's a bar. The peanut butter is very smooth and creamy and the jelly is more like the liquid filling you find in "fancy" candy bars, like the Godiva raspberry bar. It wasn't overly sweet, which I liked. I would definitely do this one again.
However, the same can't be said about the Snickers 3X Chocolate. Snickers with three times the chocolate? What's not to love, right? Well, let me just say that this bar was a dud. It was actually 2 mini bars inside one package. I like that concept, because sometimes you just don't want a whole candy bar. The description says "milk chocolate, chocolate flavored nougat, chocolate caramel and peanuts." All of that adds up to, well, practically no taste difference between the ingredients. I missed the lip-puckering maltiness of the regular Snickers nougat and the chocolate caramel just seemed blah. I really uphold Snickers as probably the most iconic candy bar, so this was a huge disappointment.