Sometimes I pick up crazy things at the Dollar Tree that I wouldn’t ordinarily buy. I’ve gotten a few emails about Jones Soda’s new line of fizzy pop flavored candies. I saw that they’re going for over $2 a tin for 50 candy bits but I couldn’t find out if they use sugar in them or artificial sweeteners so I decided to go on the prowl for the something else. (I was afraid they were going to be like those expensive and lackluster Bawls.)

I went to the Dollar Tree in search of Easter goodies and came away with this little sixpack. The little pop can looking packages hold 30-35 little carbonated candies in four flavors (two cans each): Grape Splash, Lemon-Lime Sprint, Orange Crash and Loca Cola.

The little candies are almost like the original Tart n Tiny candies (except these have a slight dome on either end of the bitty cylindral instead of being flat).

As a novelty item, I think they’re fun. I wouldn’t buy these and shovel them down day after day, but they’re a fun little diversion ... a novelty candy. Because the package comes with six little cans, they might make a nice little theme element if you’re planning a party or gift basket or just a little pick-me-up to leave in a co-worker’s cubicle.

Each can contains only 7 grams of candy that adds up to 25 calories. So they certainly have the portion control down.

(For a little perspective, the cans are 2” high and 1” in diameter ... in case you were going to look for them at the store and were expecting something as big as the picture on your screen.)

Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate announced that the public comment period has been extended to May 25, 2007

June 25, 2007.

I’m so happy to hear that the momentum that’s built up over the last few days will lead to more people will be able to properly read up and make their comments. This also provides all of us an opportunity to contemplate what else might be in that FDA Petition that we haven’t thoroughly considered, so you might want to review it again with that in mind.

As for the Keep it Real Raffle? Well, the current one ends today, but I’ll run another one for the next month as well (different but equally scrumptious prize). So if you feel like keeping the conversations going out there and spreading the word even further, there will be another opportunity to win.

Hopefully we’ll all win when we Keep it Real.

UPDATE 4/27/2007: The comment form has been restored on the FDA site featuring a new expiration date of June 25th. I’ve revised this post to reflect the newest information.

I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, or perhaps just pining for the classics. So I went back to one of my favorite fair-weather candies, Sugar Babies.

They come in a friendly yellow package with no frills. Just a the name blazoned across it and the simple description “Delicious Candy Coated Milk Caramels.” Think of them as jelly beans with a heart of caramel. (Mmmm, caramel hearts.)

Sugar Babies were originally made in 1937 by the James O. Welch Company. Not only was he the producer of the whole Sugar Family (Sugar Daddy and Sugar Mama and later Sugar Step-Mama) but also Junior Mints and Milk Duds as well as a long-gone line of fudge bars. Welch sold it to Nabisco in 1963. The Welch family of products changed hands a few more times, going from Nabisco to Warner-Lambert then to Tootsie in 1993, who makes them to this day.

The little morsels are rather soft. The chew is a little grainy at first because of the sugar shell, then becomes smooth with some nice buttery tones and burnt sugar flavors. Then it gets grainy again at the very end before dissolving into a sweet mess.

They’re such simple little candies and complement a wide variety of snacks. I always enjoyed eating them with some salted popcorn or Fritos (I haven’t had Fritos in probably ten years). They go great with ice cream (they get rock hard, then soften up), pretzels, M&Ms or Reese’s Pieces. And they’re cute! Look how cute they are ... have I ever mentioned that my dog is the same color as Sugar Babies?

Sometimes they’re a little stale, but a quick warm up in the palm of your hand or inside of a hot car revives them. I tend to shun chocolate products during the hot summer months, but then I begin to crave creaminess - Sugar Babies kind of straddle that line with the rich caramel taste but added durability of the sugar shell.

For your enjoyment and education, here is the older Sugar Babies wrapper that I grew up with. The Tootsie site also features a recipe for a Molasses Spice cookie that uses Sugar Babies. You may also still be able to find the limited edition Chocolate Covered Sugar Babies.

Related Candies

1. Holiday Edition Sugar Babies

I love the names on all of these candy bars! Santos of Scent of Green Bananas gave them to me a while back. They reminded me a bit of my uneven bunch of Peruvian candies.

Tourist
A crisp wafer plank with two domed compartments with a chocolatey paste inside.

The brand Gandour heralds they have the ingredients for happiness. Those ingredients include shea butter. Okee dokee.

The chocolate filling is rather firm, a little salty and pretty creamy. It’s not very chocolatey, more on the fudgy side. The crisp wafers are fun, though a little dry. The whole thing reminded me of the Happy Hippo, though there’s no hazelnut in this creme paste filling.

6 out of 10 (Halal)

Safari

This one is sporting a sassy jungle green wraper and woodsy font. Inside is a stack of wafers and creme then some caramel and crunchies with a mockolate coating.

It’s a big old jumble not jungle inside the package. The lumpy crispies and mockolate don’t quite get a good grip on the caramel and wafer center. It just doesn’t work for me. There’s too much mockolate and not enough caramel.

4 out of 10 (Halal)

XL’Z

M&M knock-offs made with mockolate. These were kind of a hybrid in size between Smarties and M&Ms. They’re bigger than M&Ms but thicker than Smarties. The colors were vivid. Though the package showed red, blue,  yellow, green and orange, I only had orange, red and green in my bag (which held 17 morsels). The mockolate was less milky than the other products and passably good. It actually tasted better than Garfield’s Chocobites. Kind of smoky and rounded, though not quite the smooth mouthfeel of cocoa butter chocolate. For a treat for little kids, I guess these would be just fine, but I could probably only bring myself to decorate a cake with them.

4 out of 10 (Halal)

Tofi Luk

This is one that I had no clue about judging from the name. But the description and image on the wrapper seemed pretty agreeable. A biscuit bar with caramel and a chocolate flavored coating. So it’s like a Twix! The bar was just a little flatter and a little shorter than a Twix, but it’s kind of fun that they sell these smaller portions. It looked pretty good, with the same rippled appearance on the coating.

The inside was a lot different from a Twix. Instead of being a very dry shortbread, this one was a little salty and reminded me of a dense Ritz Cracker plank. The caramel was not chewy or gooey here, just a sweeter texture between the cookie and mockolate (and not always there either). The whole thing had a rather strong “butter flavor” to it.

5 out of 10 (Halal)

Today has been quite a scramble. (Sorry that there’s no new review today ... but I did two yesterday ... whaddaya want from me?)

Last night I was mentioned in a Slashdot post on the topic of the FDA considering the change in the definition of chocolate. I went to bed happy, because I saw quite a few new entries into the Keep it Real Raffle, which meant that the FDA was really going to hear what we thought. (There’s a lot of edumicated folks on Slashdot, the thread has over 600 comments, so I know that if they do end up telling the FDA how they feel it will be many different points of view ... which is cool and exactly they way it should be!)

This morning I found that the interview that I did with Bloomberg news was finally published: Hershey Battles Chocolate Connoisseurs Over Selling ‘Mockolate’ by Adam Satariano. I’m quoted and now everyone knows how old I am (at least Newsday didn’t run my photo ... then all the magic would be gone from Candy Blog). Later I did a companion pre-recorded radio interview with the cocoa-buttery-voiced Steve Geimann. (I’ll try to grab a link to that at some point, I might have missed it, there might be a podcast though.)

I was contacted by NPR for Talk of the Nation and went to their studio at lunch today to do a little 10 minute piece on the subject. The other guest on the show was Fran Bigelow of Fran’s in Seattle. (I didn’t tell her that her salted caramels are lovely ... I had to stay on topic.) The host, Rebecca Roberts, was really on top of things and I think helped to bring a lot of the nuances of the issue out. (Blog of the Nation link.)

I also did a phone interview with a reporter at the Washington Post. I think that’ll run tomorrow.

And tomorrow is when it’s all over. Well, that’s when this chapter ends. (Go log your opinions at the FDA site!)

My sincere thanks to everyone who has been working so hard to pass the word along. Instead of reacting to something like this after the fact, we’re able to have a voice and exercise our power to remind the FDA that they are supposed to be working to protect us. It’s a nice warm feeling, isn’t it?

UPDATE: the comment period may have been extended to May 25, 2007. (It’s not on the FDA site, but Don’t Mess with Our Chocolate says so.) Stay tuned!

UPDATE 04/27/2007: The comment period is extended to June 25, 2007. Here’s the new page on the FDA site for entering your thoughts.