If you couldn’t already tell, I love taking photos of candy. And I love looking at photos of candy. This morning I saw a wonderful gallery of photos by Daniela Edburg called Drop Dead Gorgeous. They feature photos of death by various foodstuffs ... with candy playing a major role.

Check out the interview in The Morning News and of course a full gallery of the photos.

If you’re in the Miami area you can see the photos in person at Kunsthaus, the exhibition is entitled Bittersweet.

(Pictured above in the mosaic are snippets from Death by Nutella, Death by Gummi Bear, Death by Lifesavers and Death by Cotton Candy by Daniela Edburg.)

SweetRiot released a new flavor for the holidays to go with their current array of chocolate covered cacao nibs.

Flavor 70 Cinn is 70% cacao with a hint of cinnamon over cacao nibs. The last time I tried SweetRiot I gravitated towards the darkest as well.

The light hit of cinnamon was more evident in the scent than in the taste. There’s a little spicy kick on the tongue at the start, but basically it’s a rich roasty chocolate taste with a solid acidic hit and a mellow bitterness. The nibs themselves were crunchy and not the slightest bit fibery (which is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to nibs).

I covered SweetRiot and nibs pretty well in this review back in the spring, so check that out.

Each SweetRiot tin comes with a little geography “fortune” and mine went like this:

Cacao Country Sierra Leone reveres a tree, the “Old Cotton”, for standing through terrible storms & furious battles. These days cats get stuck in them all the time.

SweetRiot also has a “riot club” where you can select from two different delivery plans so you can get your cacao nib fix regularly (and at a better price). They also have their sets that bring the price down when you buy a mix of three. Ordering a whole box of 12 of course brings the tins down to $4 a piece. Still, not to sound like a broken record, it’d be nice to buy a quarter pound or half pound on the website and be able to refill my little tin myself.

The little tins change throughout the year, with new artwork featured periodically. If you’re interested in having your art considered, check out this page.

I must have been very busy because I forgot to post the results of the Favorite Nut poll a couple of weeks ago.

Wow, I was totally surprised to see that Cashews were by far the most popular but also that Pecans tromped Walnuts.

I voted for Cashews, but Pecans are a close second. But nothing really tops the flexibility and price of peanuts.

The most recent poll was about favorite Christmas candy classics.

I was suprised at how well Toblerone bars performed but of course nothing pleases me more to see that traditional homemade items are still by the far the biggest winner.

For those who picked homemade, what are these items?

(I voted for hard candies because Christmas has traditionally been the only time I could get a hold of barley sugar candies.)

I have my favorite candies, and I’ve been pretty faithful to them over the years. But there’s always this longing to experience new candies and how different cultures, countries and regions express their love of sweets. That’s part of the reason for Candy Blog, to help everyone overcome that fear of the new and different and embrace the new and different.

This is a story about my first “exotic” candy.

Sometime when I was a kid in grade school I was given Botan Rice Candy. I know I’d been exposed to foreign candy already (Torrones, Toblerone & other European chocolates), but this one was exotic because of the pictures on the box and that it had no associations with a holiday at all. It’s possible I had it at school as an observance of Lunar New Year, or just a show & tell from another child whose parents bought a box for them to bring into class. It came in a simple little box that’s pretty much unchanged today. At one end of the box was a little compartment that contained a little toy, like you would also get in Cracker Jacks back in the day. In the other 3/4 of the box were little cellophane wrapped jelly candies.

Things have changed a little since then. There is no longer a little toy in the box, but now a “Free Children’s Sticker” instead. But I guess this leaves more room for candy.

The candies are little cubes of jelly with a mild orange/lemon flavor wrapped twice. Though it seems like it’s not that different from those sugar encrusted jelly orange slices, these are less flashy. And this is what’s important about the Botan Rice Candy - the inner wrapper is edible. It looks like a slightly clouded cellophane, but it’s really made from rice and will dissolve in your mouth. (I was also fascinated with this ‘edible’ packaging in the classic Torrone as well, which have a starch wafer to keep them from sticking.)

What could be better for a kid looking to expand her horizons? A candy you could show to your friends and freak them out when you eat the plastic wrap plus a little toy!

Sometimes I like to pick the inner wrapper off as completely as I can. For no real reason of course. It’s not like it’s tasty. It’s kind of gooey, starts sticky and then becomes slippery on the tongue. Later when I had sake for the first time, it reminded me of yeasty rice candy wrappers. (Not really in a good way either, I don’t care for sake at all.)

As a candy, Botan Rice Candy is okay. It’s sweet and mild, though a little sticky sometimes. It has some of the barley sugar or millet jelly taste that I like, but the real appeal has to be the edible wrapper. There’s not much in the box either, at 3/4 of an ounce, there are only six pieces in there. With import costs, it’s usually about a dollar a box, even down in Chinatown where everything is cheap.

I went poking around the ‘net to see what else is out there and found another brand that also features the rice wrapper but looks like it could be of higher quality.

My box came with a sticker of a giraffe. Here’s a nice article that shows some other stickers. Other Reviews: Candy Addict & Junk Food Blog.

So, what was your first experience with Botan Rice Candy?

UPDATE: Several folks have mentioned White Rabbit in the comments since it also has an edible inner wrapper, here’s my review on that.