ZOMG, Candy!

The folks at Chocri wanted me to let y’all know that they’ve officially launched in the U.S. They aren’t exactly cheap, but their bars are tasty! Check out my reviews here, here, and here.

I was surprised to get an email from Katharine Weber, asking if I’d like a free copy of her latest novel, True Confections. After all, I specialize in writing about candy, not books.

True, I’ve referenced Steve Almond’s Candyfreak, but that’s nonfiction and very candy-centric. I assumed that in Ms. Weber’s novel, about protagonist Alice and the fake candy company Zip’s Candies, candy would be just a plot device and that the characters would take center stage.

But then I read the New York Times’s review of the book. The following blurb really caught my attention (emphasis mine):

“There are two narratives at work here. One is about Alice’s doomed attempt to assimilate into the Ziplinskys and her husband’s ultimate betrayal. The other, even more compelling, concerns candy itself: how some of the brands we remember so vividly — Abba-Zaba bars, Peeps — owed their existence to the kitchen experiments of immigrants.”

That was intriguing - clearly Ms. Weber did her candy homework. Further evidence of her research can be found in her personal blog. Check out this blatantly racist Abba Zaba box from the 1920s that she managed to track down!

The Times Book Review and Ms. Weber’s blog convinced me that True Confections was candy-centric enough to warrant a news post here, the assumption being that if I found it interesting, y’all might too. There’s also a contest tie-in, where basically all entries get some sort of prize.

Ms. Weber kindly sent me a copy of True Confections, even though I told her I’d write a news post about her book without one. She promised that candy bloggers and candy conventions would feature in the story, so I’m even more excited to start reading. Just as soon as I finish the other three books I’m simultaneously reading…

In an article and video in the NY Times Dining section, the Minimalist writer Mark Bittman breaks down the process of tempering chocolate (messing with its chemical structure to get a nice, glossy sheen).

While his method is all fine and good, I find that microwaving works just as well for me. Go in short spurts and stir in between. It’s okay and even desirable for your final spin to leave you with tiny, not-yet-melted nubs from the centers of your chocolate pieces. They’ll melt soon enough from the residual heat in the melted parts, and their existence will keep you from overheating and cooking the chocolate.

Once you’ve mastered tempering chocolate, check out these tips for making chocolate dipped/covered things from Lauren Pett of Rich Chocolates and Candies, via The Kitchn.

I hope these tips come in time to help you put together something tasty and homemade for Valentine’s Day!

Today, y’all get the latter half of my take on Cybele’s list of the 110 Essential Candies for Candivores. In case you missed it, the first half of the list posted last Friday. I’ve bolded what I’ve tried before and sprinkled comments and photos throughout, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

From a long-over contest at Re-nest, the Chocolates Birdfeeder from Vanishing Creatures Chocolates. The box contains 15 pieces of organic dark and white chocolates that look like endangered animals.

When you’re done with the chocolates, the packing can be converted into a bird-feeder, and the bird seed is included! There’s a little animation on the Vanishing Creatures Chocolates website that I can’t directly link to. Click on shop, the rectangular box that’s the bottommost picture in the left sidebar, and “see how it works” in the resulting main photo.

As clever as that is, at $112 a box, I’d rather buy a box of chocolates and several bird feeders.

Via Candy Yum Yum, the French design firm 5.5 and the Spanish chocolatier ChocolatFactory have teamed up to give the folks at Mary and Matt a run for their creative chocolate design money.

They’ve got a similar chocolate pie chart that’s customizable, a chocolate bar graph in which each bar is labeled with its caloric content, and my favorite, a nested series of domes of decreasing size and increasing cacao content, finally ending in a single 100% cocoa… bean! Photos and details here.

To kick off 2010, Cybele from Candy Blog posted an exhausted list of the 110 Essential Candies for Candivores. She suggested that we repost it with what we’ve had checked off and add our thoughts. Great idea! But so much work…

I’d been putting off doing so because Cybele’s list was so intimidatingly thorough, but I’m ready now! 1-55 will post today, while 56-110 will post next Friday. Yes, it was so much work that it warrants two days’ of posts for me, and on review days, no less.

After the jump, I’ve bolded the ones I’ve had, added random thoughts throughout, and sprinkled in some pictures.

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Economy Candy (of which I am a huge proponent) gets a shout out in a NY Times’s 36 hours in NYC article. I hope it brings them tons of extra customers; they deserve them!

Here’s the blurb from the article:

“A giant Gummi rat. How New York is that? You can pick one up to take home, along with giant pixie sticks (99 cents), wax fangs, Mallo Cups and classics like Hot Tamales and Mike and Ikes at Economy Candy (108 Rivington Street; 212-254-1531; www.economycandy.com). Crammed with what seems like every candy bar ever known, plus hard candies by the pound, nuts and dried fruits, it’s a playground for the sugar-obsessed.”

A personal tangent after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

I have been to Boston/Cambridge, MA at least a half dozen times, always with the intention of visiting L.A. Burdick’s brick and mortar cafe. I loved the box of their truffles that my former associate master gave me, so it’s not that I lack the motivation to visit (or maybe I do lack motivation because I know that I visit Boston fairly often?).

Well, now they’ve opened a shop in Manhattan, so now I can really want to but somehow manage to not visit them the next time I’m in New York City. I’ll just look at and drool over Serious Eats’s Ed Levine’s photos and descriptions instead.

Eating on the Road’s “What Should I Eat?” food flowcharts have gotten good press in the blogosphere. Now that they’ve come up with a Candy Edition, I’m hopping on the bandwagon. Though I do feel like the novelty’s worn off a bit since the original, you have to give them props for the work that goes into producing these ginormous charts.

Check out the Candy Edition here in manageable form and here in giant, hi-res form.