I tried to stop buying and posting about Easter candy, but there’s just too much out there. So you can expect more Easter sweets for the next month or so. I picked up two more eggs, both made by Mars but vastly different. The Snickers Egg and the Dove Milk Chocolate Truffle Egg (I looked for a dark chocolate version but didn’t see them).

The Snickers Egg is exactly what you’d think it would be. It’s the familiar Snickers bar, which is a peanut nougat topped with caramel and peanuts and covered in chocolate. They come in a variety of colors of foil wrapping, each with a different sunglass-wearing rabbit on the front. The only real difference between this and a regular Snickers bar, besides the shape is that this is molded chocolate, not enrobed. I know it’s a tiny difference, but in general I prefer enrobing to molding for filled chocolates.

I happen to like Snickers quite a bit, though I don’t buy them very often. This little egg was exceptionally fresh, the peanuts were crunchy, the caramel salty and the chocolate very sweet. Everything was very soft, for some reason I’m used to my Snickers being a little more firm. I suppose the best suggestion for these would be to stick them in the freezer.

Dove Eggs and Snickers eggs happen to be made by the same company, Mars. Oddly enough, they also have the same design on their chocolate shells. They’re not exactly the same size, the Snickers is more like a half an egg, the Dove is less than that.

The Dove Milk Chocolate Truffle Egg is quite a little indulgence. The dark purple foil gives it a rich appearance that the contents fully deliver on. It’s milk chocolate, through and through. The milk chocolate shell is smooth and creamy and very sweet and the filling is buttery and dense. Milk chocolate truffles just aren’t my thing, but if you dig Dove milk chocolate truffles, definitely pick a few of these up, they’re really indulgent. I’m going to keep my eye out for dark versions. According to the ingredients label the filling is just milk chocolate and coconut oil.

I just thought I’d pop a little note up that CandyBlog.net (well, Typetive.com as a whole) is migrating to a new hosting company this weeked.

Hopefully you won’t notice any interruption of our fine standard of service here, but it might mean that some recent comments might get lost and perhaps you won’t be able to access the site and all this sugary goodness for a little while.

I’ll have more info on the how and why come Monday, but you have my apologies if you’re unable to get your sugar fix at any time over the next few days.

UPDATE: (Saturday 9:20 AM) All the missing posts have been restored, but all new comments since Wednesday were lost. I have them as emails, so I’m going to restore them (as best I can). My apologies if yours doesn’t make it back onto the site or if there are any cut & paste errors. I welcome you to add your thoughts again if I missed something.

UPDATED UPDATE: (Saturday 10:15 AM) I’ve restored all of your comments, but if you were watching a post (where you get an email when someone else comments) that’s probably lost. My own comments seem to be lost, but I’ll try to recreate whatever my responses were with new thoughts as well. Thanks to everyone for their patience and support! I’ll slowly be adding back in the lost features, such as the rotating background.

In case you didn’t notice, All Easter Week kind of overlapped and is now two weeks. (I don’t hear any complaints!) Of course any discussion of Easter candy would be incomplete without Peeps which is why I saved them for last.

The thing is, there are lots of people who talk about Peeps and chances are you either love them or hate them already. Here’s what I think about Peeps: I think Peeps are pretty cute. The colors are great and the idea of a crusty crusted soft marshmallow is a good one. I think the name Peeps is pure genius. And the idea of a little yellow marshmallow candy shaped like a baby chicken is pretty good too. The manufacturing variations of them allows them to have their own personality. (According to the Peeps factory tour on their website their eyes are added by hand. It gives them a rather personal touch.)

But see, I don’t really like the taste of them that much. They’re sweet and all, and that’s good. And I know yesterday I said I liked plain old rock candy, so it seems odd that I wouldn’t like fluffy sugar.

If I do like Peeps, it’s when they’re stale. At least they have a little texture then. They’re tacky and lose their springiness and suddenly have a little tooth to them (well, Peeps can’t have teeth). Anyway, a slightly stale Peep is chewy and kind of a nice change of pace. A very stale Peep is almost like cookie. I’ve tried toasting them, but it’s tricky, because they catch fire quite easily. I guess the best thing to do with them is to do a mashup where you pull one apart and mash it into something else like crushed Oreos or chocolate chips.

There are several iterations of Peeps. There are different colors of the little chicks and little bunny shapes (which I don’t like as much for no good reasons I can verbalize). You can get white egg shaped ones for decorating and of course they’re not just for Easter anymore with other shapes/colors/flavors for all the major Candy Holidays.

Of course the thing I most like to do with Peeps is take photos of them (stay tuned for more of those, my new camera arrives today). There’s a whole Flickr group devoted to them, called Peep-Tastic. Then there’s Peeps Research, more Peep Research,  a PeepShow, and of course the official site. For more literary expressions in Peeps, check out Lord of the Peeps, Peeps Haiku and then the definitive resource, the Wikipedia entry. Click here for some worksafe PeepPr0n and finally, for the last word on Peeps, check out this article from Salon’s archives.

I took my photos about two weeks ago and the Peeps have been in an open plastic baggie every since, I think they’re ready to eat.

So, do you love em’ or hate em’ and how do you eat ‘em?

Related Candies

1. The Adventures of Melted Chocolate!
2. Peeps Chick & Bunny Candy
3. Peeps Monster Mash Ups
4. Peeps Mash Ups
5. Peeps Lollipop Rings
6. Peeps Spooky Cats & Cocoa Bunnies
7. 2006 Independent Food Awards
8. Candy Mash Ups - Marshmallows & Chocolate

What’s truly baffling in the whole confectionery world is that most sweets are made from the same ingredients. Yet the processes applied to them and the combinations can yield vastly different results. The Bunny Basket Eggs reviewed last week are an excellent example of sugar done wrong.

Konpeito (or Kompeito) is just sugar, and done so well. These little rocks, about the size of a pea and simply rock sugar with a little food coloring. And when you compare iit to those awful marshmallow Easter eggs, it makes no sense.

If you ever saw Spirited Away, you may have seen this candy. They’re little multi-faceted sugar crystal lumps that look like three dimensional stars.

There’s not much else to say about them except that they’re sweet and cute. If you’re looking for a special little something exotic for an Easter basket, these might fit the bill, the packaging is pink and pretty and of course the little pastel morsels of sugar are, well, rock candy. And rock candy rocks. You can even pick up a package and use it when you serve tea or coffee as a cuter version of the old sugar cubes.

See also: CandyAddict.com review, JunkFoodBlog has more on the cultural significance and limited edition versions and Wikipedia has a full entry including the references to Kompeito in media.

I would be remiss in reviewing Easter candies not to include something a little more upscale. Besides the usual drug-store fare such as Russell Stovers, I found quite a few candies at Whole Foods. I got a wonderful birthday basket of Lake Champlain a couple of months ago and have been nibbling away on it, so I thought I’d check out their seasonal items.

These little impluse buys were in a bucket by the checkout stand. At $.79 each, I was willing to give them a try (I didn’t even know what they were except that they were blue and from Lake Champlain). When I got home and bit into one (I know, brave!) I was pleasantly surprised to find a hazelnut praline. The eggs are actually “half-eggs” and about the size of an egg-shaped walnut and probably weigh a little less than a half an ounce.

In fact, if you were wondering where to get those Caffarel Guanduia chocolates in the States, look no further than these for your domestic equivalent.

The outside is rich milky chocolate and the filling is a soft hazelnut and chocolate mixture. It’s thick and clingy, nutty and buttery. Yum. I can’t eat a lot of these at once (I only bought two, so I’m safe). They’re very rich tasting and utterly filling. One with a cup of coffee is quite a treat.

The Lake Champlain Easter eggs come in a variety of flavors (caramel, raspberry & coconut) that you can order from their website and I’m sure some Whole Foods carry them as well.

There’s no way I can possibly keep up with all the Easter candies, but Joanna over at Sugar Savvy has created a roundup of a lot of dark chocolate Easter eggs.