I hesitate to call this a new contest, but M&Ms is running a promotion for the new Dark M&Ms. On the second anniversary of the theft of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” from Oslo, M&Ms announced their commitment to finding the painting by adding to the current reward of $2 million. Now the reward has an additional bonus of 2 million M&Ms.

In case you were wondering how many M&Ms that is, well, it’s a lot. 2.2 tons. So if you’ve got that Scream painting sitting around taking up room in your house, just know that by returning it you’re going to have to make a lot more room for 40,000 packages of Dark M&Ms. Of course if you’re the one returning it, you’re gonna go to prison. But fret not! You can make your very own art with M&Ms.

Here’s the press release on the subject that includes information about consumer attitudes towards dark chocolate.

Guggenheim Museum, NY, NY: To herald the arrival of M&M’s Dark Chocolate, George Morrisey of Masterfoods, unveils a painting, which brings a bit of fun to a well known dark subject, Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The original painting was stolen on August 22, 2004 from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. M&M’s is offering 2 million of the new dark chocolate M&M’S as a reward for the return of the painting.

UPDATE: Holy Moly! The Scream and Madonna (also stolen at the same time) were found! They were found by the police who have been systematically looking for the paintings ... no word yet if M&Ms is gonna send those couple of tons of candy to the cops.

UPDATED UPDATE: M&Ms has responded!

I knew that Mentos was unofficially delighted about the geyser videos circulating on the internet (with over 5 million hits) as well as the appearance of it on CBS’ NUMB3RS series and later The Late Show with David Letterman.

Little did I realize that they’re looking to give it a little push to continue.

Mentos is running a promotion on a separate website called MentosGeysers.com  where they list all the stuff you can win for submitting the next great Mentos Fountain movie.

First prize is 1000 iTunes downloads and a year’s supply of Mentos (which they say is 320 rolls ... no word on whether or not Pink Grapefruit is among the choices).

Even if you just enter you get a cap, tee and towel!

Here are the full entry rules (hosted by youtube.com)

More on the story here.

Deadline is 9/30/2006

Be sure to leave a comment here with the URL of your entry!

So at the end of every month I give my webstats a little peek. It’s a way for me to check what people are thinking about and what they’re looking for. Most of all, it tells me why people come to Candy Blog.

So I thought I’d start sharing the top candy searches that lead people to Candy Blog each month:

1. m&ms
2. kissables
3. turkish delight
4. rockaleta
5. butterfinger
6. max brenner
7. choxie
8. razzles
9. marathon candy bar
10. ice cream skittles

Of course there are other searches going on out there on the engines that didn’t lead them here.

I went on vacation last week. All the posts from last week were “prewritten” so there’d be no interruption in reviews here at Candy Blog. It was an interesting experiment to see what I’d eat when I didn’t have the blog as an excuse and it turns out that I probably a little bit less candy (but had more desserts and far more cheese than normal). But now that I’m back home I thought I’d do a little digest about the new things that I tried that I probably won’t make full posts about:

Scharffen Berger Nibby Bar - I picked up this little 1 ounce bar in Healdsburg, CA at a Scharffen Berger store in the town plaza on my way north. Though I’ve said before I’m not a huge fan of Scharffen Berger for munching, this bar had a lot to offer. The nibs were crunchy and packed a powerfully chocolatey crunch and the chocolate was smooth and complex. It didn’t have the unpleasant acidic note that I complain about most of the time.

While we were there, they also gave us a taste of the new Kumasi Sambirano bar, which was really nice. It was much more fruity, it had some grassy and floral notes with a strong raisin taste to it, which balanced the normally sour taste of their chocolate. I also got a taste of the chocolate covered ginger pieces as well, which I was really looking forward to, but found that the acidic notes and the ginger spice really blended too well for me to have both the chocolatey experience and the slight burn mix in a satisfying way. I’m still curious about how the dipped figs would taste.

Almond Joy Toasted Coconut (Limited Edition) - I figured I should pick up the limited edition bars while I could and when I saw this at the market it seemed like the perfect bar for taking out on a hike. The inside is a dark and and creamy beige color instead of white and has a slight caramelized note reminiscent of toasted marshmallows. I’m not usually one for the Almond Joy, though I love almonds, because I find the milk chocolate a little too sweet for the coconut, but this was a nice change of pace.

Cashew Cookie Lara Bar - not technically candy, this is just a bar of mashed up dates and cashews. It’s sweet, a little creamy and kid of dry but wholly satisfying. I ate three of these during the week.

Almond M&Ms - I bought a “medium” sized bag of these for the trip, which is 11 ounces (sound pretty large to me!). They’re wonderfully crunchy with the crisp shell and fresh almonds combined with the super-sweet milk chocolate. The perfect snack.

Swedish Fish - these are great driving candies. We logged about 1,800 miles in the car, so a little pick me up to combat the hypnosis of I-5 was welcome. We ate them two different ways, chilled out of the cooler and then later heated from sitting in the car. I like them practically molten inside. But chilled gives them a nice chewy snap.

Pink Grapefruit Mentos - How could I resist taking a roll of these on the road with me?

Green Apple Mentos - these were rather different from the Sour Apple ones I had a couple of months ago and I prefer them. The Green Apple Mentos taste a lot more like apples than any other apple candy I’ve ever had - almost like apple juice. They’re nicely floral and tart. I’m not wild about them, but I’d finished the Swedish Fish already.

Citrus Hard Candies - I have no idea who made these, but there was a complementary jar of them in our room at the Hotel Rex and they looked like little slices of fruit. Lemon, Orange, Grapefruit and Lime. I pretty much emptied the jar. They were pretty and tasty and just the little pick-me-up I needed before all the walking around town!

It doesn’t seem like I ate much candy last week but there were desserts though, which I don’t always have. In Trinidad, CA I indulged in one of my all-time favorite desserts - a chocolate pecan pie with hot rum sauce at Larrupin’ Cafe. My husband had a lemon cheesecake that was also pretty darn good.

In Olema, CA we had a fantastic bread pudding with currants and a caramel sauce (that they added cardamom ice cream to for us instead of whipped cream) at the Olema Inn.

In San Francisco at Rue de Jacques in the Nob Hill area I also expanded my dessert horizons and tried a soft meringue in a strawberry soup that sounded good. In reality it was a piece of fluffed egg white on top of a too-sweet strawberry syrup. I would have preferred a more home-styled strawberry puree. But on the plus side, I can’t imagine that there were many calories for such a small portion and of course no fat. My husband had a warm chocolate cake that was practically flourless and not sweet at all but super-rich.

Of course the best dessert had to be the one that had the best ambiance (not that the rest of the places weren’t great!) were the cookies and brownies we had from the Bovine Bakery (Pt. Reyes Station, CA) that were served to us by our kayak guide on a small sand spit in Tomales Bay after we kayaked about two miles. We had some hot coffee and sat watching the waning light and low clouds as we waited for dark when we would see the natural bioluminescent bloom of the warmer side of the bay.

Tomorrow I’ll return a little more rested with the usual reviews and a rundown of a candy store I found in Windsor, CA (thanks to several reader’s tips) called Powell’s and a visit to San Francisco’s Ferry Terminal.

Overall, I give this vacation a 10 out of 10.

Okay, I thought this was hilarious.

It’s the elimination rounds of the World Cup represented in Jelly Belly.

Click on the image to go to the flickr page where all the teams are marked!

Image from Supermietze ... check out all the World Cup stats here.

What flavor is your favorite team?

I’ve been reading a lot of candy books lately, so it was nice to be approached to read something a little different: a virtual book tour.

The book is Dirty Sugar Cookies by Ayun Halliday. Think of it as Erma Bombeck meets David Sedaris.

Much of the book speaks to me for the sole reason that Ayun is a scant two years older than I am, so we have many of the same perspectives on pop culture and experiences with food (and candy). It traces her life from picky eater with a gourmet cook mother to ‘food adventurer’ to mother who has a picky eating daughter of her own.

(Though I was also a picky eater as a child, I chalk that up to bad, recurring throat infections that sapped the fun out of eating. But the book did capture the parental battles about eating very well, no matter the reason for why we wouldn’t even put the stuff in our mouth.)

Ayun has far more fun with her pickiness and, of course, uses those incidents to full effect in her book.

Here’s a bit of our discussion on the book and perspectives:

Candy Blog: Do you think that you were picky when it came to candy or just when it came to meals?

Ayun: candy? no. the only thing i didn’t like was black licorice and conversation hearts. they both made me feel like I was going to throw up in the car. I got over the conversation heart thing when we used them as props in a short NeoFuturist play called “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”. I would eat so many of them backstage that we’d wind up with a shortage - they were to be smashed with a hammer at certain strategic points in the song, “My Funny Valentine” but somehow we always kept coming up short, the hearts giving out long before the final line.

Candy Blog: What are your daughter’s favorite candies now? Does she share some or your loves/hates?

Ayun: Watermelon gum balls from the laundromat, lollipops that the guy at the liquor store gives her, and m&ms. Anything she can get her hands on, basically. She loves it when there’s a pinata at a birthday party. She stashes her portion on this little shelf at the head of her top bunk, where I can’t effectively monitor it. On those rare occasions that I change the sheet, I find a goodie bag full of empty wrappers.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

God, I loved camp.

Feasting on sugar was hardly limited to mealtime. Twice a day, a bell summoned us to a wonderful thing called ?commissary?. At the start of the session, parents had the option of depositing funds in a commissary account that would entitle their camper to ?purchase? candy after swim and before campfire. Perhaps because I had no siblings, I always felt hesitant to ask my parents for gum, quarters for the pinball machine and all the minor expenses my friends treated as their due. I could never have brought myself to lobby for something so extraordinary as the candy of my choice, dispensed twice daily for fourteen days, but fortunately, my father saw all the other fathers coughing up an extra ten bucks for their children?s commissaries and did likewise without comment. I was in!

I spent a good portion of every swim session drifting around the lake on an army surplus inner tube, deliberating on what to choose from the bulk candy cartons the commissary counselors would set out upon our return. Fads sprang up around the preferences of popular campers, but for the most part, I preferred to explore the unwholesome fringes. As much as I loved chocolate, I couldn?t help gravitating toward whatever would last the longest. My miserly side was attracted to things that came in multiple units: Spree, Sweet Tarts, Hot Tamales and Bottle Caps, which looked like their namesake and tasted nothing like the root beer, orange soda and cola they were supposed to, though they did seem vaguely carbonated, provided one ate enough of them. My temperament steered me toward the Stix family which came in many flavors, Green Apple and Fire being my favorites. Stix were basically just Jolly Ranchers elongated into six-inch lengths. They shattered easily, were difficult to separate from their cellophane wrappers and gave a satisfyingly loud report when bitten, though clearly, they’d been designed for sucking. In other words, they were perfect. Long after my bunkmates had wolfed down their frozen Snickers, my stick prevailed, honed to lethal pointiness. When the bell rang for dinner, I’d refold the torn cellophane over the inch or so remaining and tuck it away under the eaves, between my flashlight and the bottle of Apricot-scented Earthborn for which I had snubbed Prell, our de facto family shampoo. While I was out, my candy stash would invariably attract swarms of tiny brown ants, whom I?d later discover partying like Bacchants beneath the untidy wrapper.

Nature?s invasion would have amounted to tragedy had it happened at home where there was no commissary, but here, I could head for the trash pail with an unemotional if revolted shrug. At camp, there was always more where that came from, for me as well as the ants.

Candy Blog: I’ve often regarded candy for children as one of the first ways that we express our independence from our parents. We’re given allowance or sometimes free run in a store to pick out one thing ... you remarked in the section on camp that you didn’t really have that luxury before. Did you notice this among your peers, that they had more discretionary cash or greater abilities to procure the snackstuffs that they loved?

Ayun: Yes. I was a very late bloomer with regard to bicycles. I had this little green Schwinn from which I refused to let the training wheels be removed. One weekend, we went to visit my father’s longtime friends, the Ackermans in Columbus Ohio, whose youngest child Sally, was a year my junior. Mrs Ackerman gave each of the kids, including me, a dollar - a princely amount - so that we could ride bikes to the drugstore for candy. Well, I was sort of stricken, because none of their bikes had training wheels, but they did have this old red bike named Rosie, who had no rubber left on her wheels, just the metal rims. These were wide enough, and unyielding enough, to give me the confidence it required to ride to the store with the rest of the herd, where following Sally’s example, I bought my first Marathon Bar. And when we got back to Indianapolis, I had my father remove the training wheels from my green bike and immediately pedaled away.

Candy Blog: You write in several instances about your consumption of raw materials when in search of a sugar fix. I, too, discovered Jello-O powder (pineapple was my favorite) at an early age, and my frugality meant that I could find them on sale at 10 for a dollar and stock up on quite a bit of it with my paper route money. What sorts of pantry items would you eat dry?

Ayun: Tang. My grandmother always took a jar of it with us when we drove to Florida. I had to be extra sly when mainlining that stuff, what with my mother and both grandparents on the other side of the vinyl accordion curtain separating the vanity outside the bathroom from the rest of the motel room. The thing about dry Tang is it was so light, it looked like it was steaming. There was always a cloud of these micro-fine crystals hovering above the spoon.

I also liked eating Nestles Quik straight from the can.

About a month ago, after reading the excerpt above I agreed to do this little featurette, so I send Ayun a little box of candies. It had some SweeTarts, Laffy Taffy, Chewy SweeTarts, Pixy Stix and other pure sugar concoctions.

Candy Blog: So, what did you eat from the package I sent? What did your daughter consume and what do you see in her tastes as with yours?

Ayun: I don’t think the kids got a single piece of it. It has been a pinata-heavy month. As for myself, I started out with the gummy insects, a Sweet Tart product apparently, and I felt guilty for gnashing them up so mindlessly, while watching Deadwood. I cleansed my palate with some Laffy Taffys (I slowed down long enough to see that there’s a joke printed on each wrapper. I’d always assumed that Laffy was the only thing marketing could come up with to rhyme with Taffy.) Then I started on the Chewy Sweet Tarts. We had the big ones at Gnawbone, but they were never Chewy. Chewy is new(y). Then I got kind of disgusted with myself and worried that my spleen would give out from all that sugar, so I boxed it back up and then we took it to Coney Island with us for the kids to throw at the crowd when we marched in the Mermaid Parade. Now THAT was a good use of cheap, artificially flavored candy.

Candy Blog: What do you think about candy today? There are certainly more “wholesome” candies available now that actually taste good, in addition to some really disgusting indulgences of course. Are there things you wish you could have had when you were a kid? Are there things you wish they still made or that you miss being able to have?

Ayun: Those little Gummi candys that resemble miniature versions of non-candy type foods are pretty cunning, the sushi and pizzas and such. Milo received a gummi Crabby Patty, and it was quite the hit until he tasted it.

I’m really into the Aji Ichiban stores in Chinatown. though the dried, salted plums took some getting used to, even for someone like me, who is constitutionally bound to order things like salted plum soda in Vietnamese restaurant, because it’s a more vibrant part of the experience than say, Diet Coke. Every year, they have these compelling little capsules that you can fill with hard candy. One year it was pigs. This year it seems to be metallic pineapples…

Read some more excerpts here and then if you like what you see, buy Dirty Sugar Cookies at Powell’s.

If you live in Los Angeles (or you’ll be here this Friday), there’s a big party for readers (and contributors) to Blogging.la - part of the Metroblogging network that I’ve been writing with for a few years.

The Farmers Market
3rd & Fairfax
Friday, June 30th
6PM till closing

I’m extending an invitation to all Candy Blog’s local readers, too!

Look for the group near La Loteria (here’s a map). There’ll be free drinks (beer & lemonade) courtesy of blogging.la and of course I’ll bring some candy with me!

Here’s a cautionary tale.

I’ve been traveling lately and I haven’t been able to spend as much time with my candy as I’d like. And of course if you don’t care for and tend your candy properly, you can get some nasty surprises when you get home.

Witness what happened to my lovely Root Beer flavored organic candy floss.

Oh, sad day.

It’s deflated.

There was about half left ... and this is what it all boils down to, a scaly residue on the bottom of the tub.

In the future, I’ll need to make sure that the lid is on tightly. Even sadder, the lid of the detestable Cotton Candy flavor is just fine.