Easter Candy

Easter is an amazing holiday for a kid, yet a dichotomous one for a Catholic kid. All that candy! You want to please your parents and CCD teacher, right? All that candy! But how can you focus on the Easter miracle, sitting on a hard church pew, when everyone else you know is already digging in to their sugar-filled baskets? All that candy! Well, you learn to cope for about an hour and then you dig in.

Some kids would wake up on Easter morning and go on a hunt for the candy left by the Easter Bunny himself. We, however, were in on the accumulation of our basket contents. Tradition took us to Antoinette’s Sweets, a chocolate dream that seemed to be in a far away land. Turns out, it was only about 7 miles from our house. Walking into Antoinette’s you were instantly hit with the aroma of chocolate wafting through the air. You had to walk past the ice cream parlor to get to the hall of chocolate. I’m sure it wasn’t that big of a room, but I swear it was the size of a football field at the time. Every size, shape and flavor of Easter candy existed on their shelves and tables. Hollow and solid. Milk, dark and orange? Bunnies, chicks, lambs, crosses and eggs. Oh, the joy of being able to pick out what we wanted. Upon returning home, we’d haul out the Easter baskets and fill them up just so. After the obligatory plastic grass went in, the candy set up followed. In went the chocolate of various sizes, shapes and flavors. Then add lots of jelly beans, Peeps (well-aged, of course), Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, malted milk eggs and more jelly beans. Part of the joy of the Easter basket was finding those long lost jelly beans at the bottom after you thought all the candy was gone!

Antoinette's Sweets

Nowadays I still enjoy Easter candy. We don’t make the trek to Antoinette’s anymore; we usually hit the drug stores and supermarkets the day after for 50% off deals. There’s nothing like Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs. They’re still as good as I remember. I think I could survive just by eating those alone. Peeps are still “cured” in an opened package until they reach peak crunchiness. Pastel M&Ms and jelly beans cater to the Easter sweet tooth just as well as anything. It just goes to show you that you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy the Easter candy season.

How do you eat your candy?

My previous post got me thinking: How do you eat certain candy?

When it comes to M&Ms, I’m a color sorter. Browns go first and then the orange ones. Sometimes I’ll alternate throughout the remaining colors; other times I work my way through one color at a time. Usually, red is the last color I savor as a tribute to its hiatus from M&Mdom for about 10 years due to “red dye scare.” I save the best for last. Then what do you do once they’re in your mouth? Some people suck on them until the shell is dissolved, others crack the shell open and then melt the chocolate out of the shell, and I imagine a select few just chew them all at once. I can’t imagine the latter. Don thinks I’m a bit insane, as he cares not about color or chewing habits; he’s a straight out M&M consumer, not an artist.

What about foil-wrapped candy like Hershey’s Kisses, Miniatures and the like? Again, Don says it doesn’t matter what you do once the chocolate is out of the wrapper. True, but I suppose it might reveal a little about who you really are. So what does it mean that I tend to fold my wrappers rather than scrunch or ball them up?

Any other candy quirks? Let me know!

Chocolate: The Early Years

"If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?" - Marquise de Sévigné

Chocolate ice cream, chocolate cereal, chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, chocolate licorice. Bring it on! I’ll even take vanilla ice cream with any kind of chocolate in it. Mint chocolate chip is always a favorite, but not because of the mint. In terms of cereal, I enjoyed Cocoa Krispies and Cocoa Puffs way more than any fruity counterpart like Fruity Pebbles, Trix or Fruit Loops. As far as cake, there had to be some form of chocolate in and/or on it. A birthday cake was at times a Carvel cake and since it had the heavenly chocolate crunchies in the middle, it passed the chocolate test. When we went homemade, it was almost always a Texas sheet cake: chocolate cake and chocolate frosting! Don’t forget a Black Forest cake every now and then. And Chocolate Sin... Cookies were always better with some kind of chocolate in them. Oreos were a staple in the pantry, but there was nothing like a homemade chocolate chip cookie (or just the dough). Even muffins are better with chocolate chips. Then there’s chocolate licorice. OK, so it’s not actually licorice, but it looks like licorice and tastes like chocolate. I was glad to find out that chocolate licorice wasn’t just a Buffalo thing. There are chocolate Twizzlers and a local farm market carried a homemade version as well. Chocolate Necco wafers even do the trick. Good to know I can still get a chocolate fix in many different forms.

It’s all good, but then there’s just chocolate. Whether it takes the form of a bar, a bunny or a wafer, I’ll take it. Thinking back to my trick-or-treating days, it was all about the chocolate. I was never into gum, Smarties, Skittles, suckers and other fruity fare; I savored the Nestle Crunch bars, Kit Kats, Hershey bars, M&Ms, Milky Ways, Reese’s, 3 Musketeers, and Snickers- when my mom wasn’t trying to steal them and stash them in the freezer. My hands-down favorite chocolate candy: M&Ms. I eat a lot of them. I eat them often. As for how I eat them, that’s another post altogether.

My only question: Who decided that Halloween candy bars are “Fun Size?” If they were truly “Fun Size” they’d be the size of my laptop!