Candy Blog

Name: Curly Wurly
Brand: Cadbury
Place Purchased: India Sweets & Spices
Price: $.99
Size: 26 grams
Calories per ounce: dunno
Type: Caramel

Upon reading Steve Almond’s Candy Freak (one of these days I’ll put up a comprehensive review), I found out that the discontinued bar from the 70s called Marathon is kind of available in the UK as Cadbury’s Curly Wurly.

The concept behind this bar is simple. A loosely braided caramel plank is covered in milk chocolate.

And they did it beautifully. The bar smells of carmelized sugar, very sweet. The caramel is soft but plenty chewy. I find it’s important to give the bar a good bite or else you’ll end up with little bits of chocolate flaking off on your clothes.

Now, with that out of the way, does anyone else know what curly wurly means? I’m familiar with it from the lyrics to Blinded by the Light:

And go-cart Mozart was checkin’ out the weather chart to see if it was safe outside.

And little Early-Pearly came by in his curly-wurly and asked me if I needed a ride.

Tell me, what is this curly wurly that Early Pearly is riding in?

Rating - 8 out of 10 (it’s gotta be easier to find for me to give it tops)

Related Candies

1. Dolfin Chocolate Bars

I just found out that Hershey has a cool free offer. For 15 wrappers you can get one of six retro designed logo tees.

More info here. There’s a $2 shipping and handling charge, but totally worth it if you dig these candies and logos. If you love the shirt and just don’t want to eat that much candy (what’s wrong with you?), you can order them for $16.95 each. 

Unfortunately I can’t get part of their freakishly elaborate flash site to load the terms & conditions, but I’ll post more as I find it.
Thanks meme for the heads up!

UPDATE: I caved and went to their site using IE and found this page which should tell you most everything you want to know. Except what I want to know, which is whether or not the Twosomes count. But Meme, you’ll be happy to hear that for all five it’s only 55 wrappers!

Name: Gummi Clown Fish
Brand: Haribo
Place Purchased: CandyWarehouse.com (sample)
Price: $19.50 ($3.90 per pound)
Size: 5 lbs!
Calories per ounce: 100 calories (based on Gummi Bear package)
Type: Gummi

This was my biggest score from the recent trip to the CandyWarehouse. It’s a five pound box of gummis. Whew!

These little cuties are shaped like clown fish (yes, like Nemo from the movie). Each little fish is about two inches long and an inch wide. They’re big gummis. Luckily Haribo gummis are not sticky, so they’re easy to hold while you take a bite or pull it until it snaps (you can get it to about four inches before it gives way).

While real clown fish come in one color - orange, these come in three. Yellow (lemon), Green (sour apple?) and Red (berry?). I had a lot more trouble telling the flavors apart on these. I’m positive yellow is lemon, but that’s as much as I can commit to.

Soft, tart and sweet, these are excellent gummis. The large size makes them kind of fun to chew on, you get to decide how much you want by the size of your bite - but it’s harder to mix flavors. The size of the package is a bit daunting. I opened the bag the afternoon I got them and plowed through maybe a dozen fish and then separated them into little baggies of about a half a pound each. All my friends will be getting a fun hostess gift whenever they invite me over.

If I had my druthers, I’d do different colors and flavors than they chose. I’d like a pink grapefruit, an orange orange and keep the yellow lemon. Yes, they’d all be citrus. I’d call them Citrus Clown Fish.

Rating - 8 out of 10

Name: Tadelle Wafer
Brand: Sagra ?
Place Purchased: India Sweets & Spices (Los Feliz)
Price: $1.49
Size: 1.23 oz
Calories per ounce: 155
Type: Wafer

There’s a cookie that’s practically a candy that I really enjoy called Chocolatiers, made by Lu. They’re little wafer sticks with chocolate cream coated in sweet dark chocolate.

This is like that, only instead of just being a chocolate cream, it’s hazelnut cream. Yummy. The description on the package says “compound chocolate coated wafer with crocant filling.” Not as appetizing as it tastes. In fact, the label is in a multitude of languages. The bar itself is made in Turkey, but the ingredients are translated for the entire United Nations: English, German, Russian, Czech, French, Arabic and I think Romanian. They must send this bar everywhere.

The bar feels very light, as it’s mostly air. The wafers are crisp and light and bring a lot of air into the tasting of the bar, which help the hazelnut aroma penetrate the chocolate and sugar. The chocolate is not a highlight here, as it’s not even real, but the crispy wafers are delicate and star in this bar. I’m a sucker for wafers and hazelnuts ... if only it were better chocolate, I would follow this candy to the ends of the earth.

From the wrapper: “none of our products contain pork fat”

Rating - 7 out of 10

An ever helpful reader suggested a couple of weeks ago that I visit India Sweets & Spices in Los Feliz to find some other international candies.

Boy did I score.

India Sweets & Spices is a non-nonsense grocer and vegetarian restaurant. The store appears to have no air conditioning, so upon entering it has a musky and damp smell of curry (which I find exceptionally comforting). A large store, there are rows and rows of premade curries, curry powders, spices and seeds by the pound, in addition to other Indian products like shoes, clothes, cookware, incense and groceries. There was a row of freezers which sit idle and empty but what was most fascinating was the fridge section which had a large selection of dairy products and CANDY!

Yes, they kept their candy in the fridge and bless them for that.

Most of the candy was Cadbury and Nestle, with some other brands that I’d never heard of (the Dido bar seems to be a KitKat and the Tadelle is just plain good). I’m most excited because I found a Curly Wurly. For those of you old enough to remember, in the States there was a candy bar called Marathon. It was a braided length of caramel covered in chocolate. It came in a red package with a ruler on the back. It was discontinued years ago, but our European friends still have their version and now I get to try one.

More info on each of these purchases later!