Canadian Candy

Too many people complained about the lack of journal entries. I shall take a different tack, and instead bore you into submission with more tales of my sugary cultural explorations.

Mark is the only person at Vindigo who a) complains about American candy as much as I do and b) eats as much American candy as I do. Imagine my excitement when he sent around this message this morning, on his return from Toronto:

‘Fine Canadian chocolate bars in the kitchen. Just like American chocolate bars except has French on one side of the package and contains chocolate.’

1. Canadian Crunchies are good, but not quite as good as Irish ones. And the package description, ‘Sponge Toffee’, is just silly, both in French and English. ‘Sponge Toffee’? I never heard such nonsense. It’s obviously a Honeycomb Centre. We squabbled about this for some time.

‘There’s nothing honeycomb about it. That suggests hexagonal chambers. Do you detect any of those?’
‘Yeah? So how can toffee be spongy?’
‘I bet “honeycomb centre” wouldn’t get past EU regulations. Section 2 Subsection D Paragraph 6 Clause 2e: ‘Centre must be honeycomb-shaped to use term “honeycomb centre”‘.

2. Coffee Crisps are really very good. And I loved the genteel Canadian tagline: ‘Makes a nice light snack’. No wild TASTE SENSATION! claims up North.

3.Caramilk Apparently, their long-running ad campaign is ‘How do they get the caramel into the Caramilk?’ Which they’ve obviously ripped off from Ireland’s own ‘How do they get the figs into the Fig Rolls?’
More squabbles and national slurs followed.

‘Any idiot could stuff a fig into a Fig Roll. i don’t think it compares at all.’
‘Well, since so many products incorporate caramel with seeming ease, it’s hardly a great mystery, is it?’
‘The caramel is sealed in with no apparent seams. You’d have noticed this if you hadn’t scarfed it so fast.’
‘It’s just like the Cadbury’s one, though, isn’t it? Chocolate is ductile. You can cover seams easily.’
‘Still orders of magnitude more complex than inserting a fig into a Fig Roll, though. Only complete peasants would be mystified by that process.’

4. Smarties More or less the same, except with Junior Mint-style boxes instead of Rowntree’s* cool tubes.

5. Aero is also the same, I think. Never a favorite.

Now I feel sick. I am the Elvis of Canadian candy.

* (My favorite line from the movie Sexy Beast: the snarling Cockney gangster played by Ben Kingsley goes: ‘ ‘is name is Rowntree, like Smaww-ties, or Shawwwwwftt.’)