Candy Blog

I’ve been working on a list of Frequently Asked Questions for CandyBlog, but I’m sure there are plenty of Frequently Unasked Questions as well.

What would you like to know about CandyBlog? Post something here in the comments section and I’ll add it to the FAQ to be posted late this week.

Regular candy reviews continue as usual below.

This weekend is the Sweets Expo in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It’s a consumer trade show and fantasy destination featuring sweets, candy and confections a-go-go.

Sadly, I’m not there, but happily one of CandyBlog’s regular readers, g, is there and covering it all on a special blog: Sugarholic.

Check it out ... she’s already had her first chocolate experience since arriving in Toronto and the show doesn’t start until tomorrow!

Jealous? Fear not, there will be another Sweets Expo this summer in Montreal and this fall in Vancouver. I’ve never been to Vancouver ... hmmmm.

This isn’t so much a review as a rewind. I’ve had Pixy Stix plenty of times before. I’ve been eating them for so long I don’t even remember when I first tried them.

My earliest memory of the Giant Pixy Stix was at Little Buffalo State Park in Pennsylvania. We went up there for the day for swimming and general summer amusement with another family who lived in the area. They had an awesome array of swimming pools. At some point we were given quarters and allowed to go to the snack bar where I bought the most amazing thing I’d ever seen - a Pixy Stix that might have been as tall as me (I was probably about six at the time and a tiny thing at that). Okay, maybe it wasn’t that big, but it seemed huge to me. It was grape.

It seems that Giant Pixy Stix are sold at swimming pool snack bars, because later when we moved back to Mechanicsburg, we had summer passes at the public pool and they had them there too. There’s something about chlorine that makes me crave fake grape and pure sugar.

Here’s a little history of the Pixy Stix:

Pixy Stix used to be made by Sunline which started in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Pixy Stix started out as an accident really, with kids driving the development of the product. Originally it was a drink mix in the late 30s, sold as Frutola, but J. Fish Smith found that kids were eating the sweet & sour powder right from the package. He shifted the name to Fruzola and added a spoon. Later it was repackaged with a dipping candy stick as Lik-m-Aid and also sold in little straws ... Pixy Stix. It wasn’t until parents complained about the grainy, sticky powder that Sunline came up with a compressed tablet form, the SweeTart in 1963.

Sunline was sold to Roundtree Mackintosh of the UK, which was then bought by Nestle. Nestle maintained the Sunline brand for a while and only recently has rolled the SweeTarts, Pixy Stix and Lik-m-Aid into the Wonka brand, which already had a strong line of sugar candy, such as Tart ‘n Tiny, Nerds and Runts.

So, you’re wondering about the Giant Pixy Stix? I did my due-diligence research and can tell you that a Giant Pixy Stix has slightly more than three tablespoons of candy powder in it which weighs in at one ounce. The Giant Pixy Stix are approximately 21 inches tall. (They might have been taller when I was a kid.)

The most frustrating thing about them is that they’re hard to open. The traditional Pixy Stix is a paper straw and can be torn open, or unfolded. The Giant Pixy Stix are thick, flexible plastic and cannot be torn. I recall at the pool that they would snip it open for me, but there were times that I ended up just gnawing off the top.

Giant Pixy Stix currently come in four flavors: grape, Maui punch, cherry, and orange. The regular Pixy Stix also come in green apple (which used to be lime but was changed in 2001). The primary ingredient in Pixy Stix, not surprisingly, is dextrose. Dextrose is just a fancy way of saying glucose, which is a mono-saccharide. Dextrose is generally made from vegetable starches (corn syrup). Sucrose is what’s makes up cane and beet sugar - it’s a di-saccharide (it’s made up of two molecules - one of fructose and one of glucose). It has a slightly different mouth feel. Some folks can actually tell the difference between fructose, dextrose and sucrose. Often you can feel the “cool” feeling of dextrose on the tongue.

So how do they taste? Well, if you’ve never had a Pixy Stix (and I met someone on Tuesday night who hadn’t) it’s rather like eating unprepared Jell-O or drink mix. It’s sweet and cool on the tongue, with a tart bite and some flaky, grainy bits that seem to linger a little longer. There’s not much flavor, but enough to be able to tell the difference, especially if you inhale the dust (not like snorting it, you know what I mean).

I don’t eat Pixy Stix very often anymore; because of that dextrose thing they do go straight into the bloodstream and can cause pretty severe blood sugar crashes on an empty stomach to those of us who are sensitive to such things. But last night I responsibly had a nice, high protein dinner, and then ate my three tablespoons of Pixy dust out of the measuring cup. Yes, I just stuck my tongue in there. Yes, eventually my tongue had acid burns, but I kept eating. Yes, eventually I got a rather sour stomach, but I kept eating. I love my Pixy Stix. It’s a good thing I don’t buy them that often.

In the future, I think I’ll stick to the regular paper straw ones. A little easier on the portion control. But I loved it when Pixy Stix were bigger than life.

(Pixy Stix Box photo from CandyWarehouse.com)

Pop Rocks are a Spanish product, so it’s only natural they would angle some of their product towards the large Hispanic market in North America. I this at the Walgreen’s in Echo Park, which is (or was) a rather traditional Hispanic neighborhood in LA. Half of the package is in Spanish, just as half the packaging in Canada is in French.

The top half tells us that it’s Salt and Lemon Pop Rocks ... Popping Candy. The bottom half says Sal y Limon ... Dulce con Chasquido.

I didn’t know what the word chasquido meant (though by context it means popping) so I looked it up on babelfish. No luck there ... so I googled the word and found a page in Spanish that had a definition, which I then ran though the translator. So, the bad internet translator says:

chasquido

  1. n. Sound that takes control of the whip or the sling when they are shaken in the air.
  2. Noise that takes place when breaking itself some thing.
  3. Noise that takes place with the language when separating it of blow of paladar or when rubbing the yolks of the fingers heart and thumb of a hand:

But you want to know about this strange savory, sweet and tangy version of Pop Rocks, right?

First, you have to shake it well because the salt and rocks tend to separate. Then I poured it on my tongue and I admit it was a riot of tastes - they’re all there. The salt is, well, intensely salty. It’s the first ingredient on the list, so there’s a lot of it in there. Next, it was bitter, like some sort of mineral taste. Then the rocks started popping and releasing a bit sugar and there were other little snaps of sour released as well.

It was hard to keep it in my mouth. It’s really salty. I’m used to salt as a condiment, not as the main dish. There are 984

grams

milligrams of salt in this little package - that’s about 50% of your daily allowance or about as much as you’d find in a serving of canned soup. Of course the recommended “portion” for these Pop Rocks Limon is 1/8 of the package.

I had one mouthful of the stuff and then tried dumping some out on a piece of paper and just eating the rocks but it’s just too salty for me. I’d also like it to taste more like lemon. How hard would it be to put a little zesty lemon flavor in there too? I’m thinking someone might be able to come up with something interesting to do with this savory version of Pop Rocks. Maybe use it as the final garnish for a salad or something. Could be the next trend in haute cuisine.

The one thing that I did really like about this version of Pop Rocks is the packaging. The long, narrow tube is much easier to handle than the flat packs that Pop Rocks usually come in. It’s easy to fold over and reseal and easy to dispense onto the tongue.

So Easter is over and your supply of Peeps are gone and there’s no hope of more until Halloween. Where do you turn?

I thought Marpoles, which are long twists of pastel colored marshmallow, might be a good subsitute.

The twists are soft and flexible and covered in starch, instead of colored sugar. They’re also lightly flavored. I think it’s strawberry, but it’s hard to be sure. They smell kind of like cotton candy.

It was soft without being too foamy. Most of all, I had a good time playing with them: tying them in knots, rolling them up into discs and braiding them together. I even put one in the microwave, which made it puff up really big and become sun-surface hot on the inside. I didn’t really taste any different but it made the microwave smell like strawberry Pop-Tarts.

These aren’t really a fair replacement for Peeps, but they’re passably tasty. I can’t really see myself eating these as a treat, but they might be fun for decorating other sweet edibles.

There might be some creative applications like decorating cupcake trees or creating summer dessert kebabs. You could probably cut them smaller and dip them in chocolate or use them for chocolate fountains. They’re a nice treat for kids, as they’re only 40 calories each but look really big, if I were doing a kids party, they might be a nice favor. If you’re decorating your dessert table you could use these as napkin rings and tie them around the napkin and fork. At 10 cents each, there are a lot of possibilities.