A Blue- and-White-Themed Candy Bar. Photo: Sarah De Heer.

With 23 days to go until Jon and I say "I do," we're still debating our favors. While we have narrowed it down, I've decided to offer an array of items instead of just one. In the meantime, Jon and I have attended two very special weddings (Jon's good friends from high school and college), and both offered candy bars on top of handing out favors.

Both sweet tables were decked out with some of the best and most color-coordinated treats. The first wedding focused on a blue-and-white theme (colors of the wedding) with sweets such as malt balls, chocolate-covered pretzels, nonpareils and shark gummies.

The second wedding offered more nostalgic options such as Dots (my favorite), gummies, rock candy and what seemed to be a total hit with the crowd -- Ring Pops! Sitting back on a couch during the afterparty, I was tickled to see our friends walking around in their Sunday best with Ring Pops on their hands.

Sometimes you feel like a candy bar nut. Sometimes you don't. Can you ID these popular (and some not so popular) candy bars by looking at a cross section?

See all our fun food quizzes and share your score in the comments below.

I think that Cybele, who writes Candy Blog, gets a lot of her candy samples from convenience stores, which are more likely to stock the limited edition varieties of bars than the average grocery store. It just so happened that, while on a little bit of a road trip, I spotted this Limited Edition Triple Chocolate Twix in such a store.

The bar had the same milky, sweet chocolate covering that most Twix bars do, but also had a layer of chocolate caramel on top of a chocolate cookie. The cookie went wonderfully in the bar. It had a good chocolate flavor and was very light and tender, especially when compared to the much firmer cookie that is usually included in the candy bar. The caramel did not seem all that chocolaty when eaten alone, but it really tied the chocolate coating in to the chocolate cookie. When taken as a whole, the bar was excellent. It was lighter and more addictive than the standard Twix, with a good balance of chocolate and sweetness. It's hard to say how long a limited edition bar will stick around once it has been released, but this flavor is clearly a winner, so let's hope it is available for more than a couple of weeks.

Joe, at Culinary in the Desert Country, usually does a great job with plating and photographing the recipes that he blogs, in addition to choosing ones that sound promising in the first place. His Snickers Fudge takes the cake, though. Not only does it look perfectly made and far better than a "real" Snickers bar could hope to, but it sounds even more decadent than the popular candy bar. The one significant twist that his recipe offers is that it has peanut butter in several of the layers, adding a distinctive richness to the chocolate layers and the nougat. (Snickers - are you listening?) Normally, making the nougat would be a challenging endeavor for even experienced cooks, but this version is made in part with marshmallow creme - hence the designation of the recipe as fudge - and has a fluffy texture. Salted peanuts are folded into the layer before it is topped of with a thick layer of chewy caramel. Joe points out that the only thing difficult about making these is that you have to wait for each layer to set up before moving on. The actual work is very simple and primarily involves melting and spreading, so this might be a fun thing to make with your kids over the holidays

This Tuesday, as the sun sets and parents sit in an annoyingly sluggish commute because everyone leaves work at the same time that night, children across the country will don costumes and 93% of them will head out to trick-or-treat. We already know that their primary goal is to collect as much candy as possible, but what kind of candy will they end up getting? The most often handed-out candy is of the bite-sized (or snack/fun/treat sized) chocolate variety, mostly miniature versions of popular candy bars. For those that are lucky enough to live in generous neighborhoods, 26% of candy-givers pass out full-sized candies, not the minis. A rare few will get king-sized bars, the most coveted of all Halloween candy. Half of all kids say that chocolates are their favorite candies to receive, followed by non-chocolate (24%) and gum (10%).

Let's not forget the parents, though. They are the other group of big Halloween candy eaters. The parents get the leftover candies that were not passed out by the end of the night, and 90% of parents "admit to sneaking goodies from their kids' Halloween trick-or-treat bags." Like the children, the adults go for the chocolates and nearly 70% of them reach for the mini candy bars, too.

So kids, let this be a lesson to you to hide or count your candy to keep track of it. And parents, buy yourself and extra bag when you're at the store so you don't have to take it from your kids.

An elderly Russian woman almost lost a tooth when she bit into her favorite candy bar last week. But it wasn't an errant bit of walnut shell that she found inside the chocolate-coated treat, it was a diamond wedding ring.

At first Elena Otpushchennikova thought she had won a prize from the local candy factory. After finding out that no such contest existed she decided to track down the owner of the gold ring. She quickly concluded that the ring must have slipped off someone's finger while the candy was being made. Rather than publicly announce that she found it she went to the factory to find the owner.

Soon after learning that one of the women there was a newlywed she was giving the ring back to Tatiana. It seems that Tatiana, who'd been married for only two weeks, brought the ring to work to show off to her co-workers. For some reason the whole incident sounds like fodder for a Russian version of I Love Lucy.

When a company changes the packaging on a product, it is usually because they are hoping to increase sales by having a more-eyecatching design, whether that means that they add color, simplify the layout or increase the size of the font they use. In the case of the Snicker's Almond, the new bar was labeled as "Now More Satisfying!" Bob tried one a while back, but couldn't find a difference. Cybele from the Candyblog was able to get a hold of both the new and old bars to see if she could determine what the difference really was.

As it turns out, the difference is that the new bar has peanuts as a main ingredient and a bit more caramel/less nougat than the previous version. Cybele says that it tastes more like the regular peanut-laden Snickers bar than anything else. It also has five more calories per ounce than the old almond bar.

It's up to your own personal tastes to say whether this makes it more satisfying than before, but going on looks alone, the old Snickers Almond, which used to promise the "maximum amount of almonds," looks more substantial.

With only a few exceptions, granola bars have steadily gotten worse over the past few years. This probably has to do with the fact that more time is being spent developing energy bars, nutrition bars, cereal bars and snack bars, all of which have been growing in popularity. I happen to like granola bars and think of them not necessarily as health food, though they certainly do have healthy aspects, but as a healthy alternative to a candy bar. I like my granola bars to be chewy, slightly soft (as opposed to dry and hard) and with a little bit of crunch.

These perfectly fit the bill.

The limited edition Kit Kats released in the UK resulted in consumer overstimulation and, in the US, too, consumers are seeing more and more limited editions on the shelves. Some of them seem to be only limited in their packaging, not the actual product.

Candybloggers Cybele, from CandyBlog, and Brian, from Candy Addict, were interviewed in a piece in the New York Times magazine that asked "what is the point of these releases?" The companies don't seem like they're asking consumers if they want to see them as part of the "regular" line-up, but there are so many limited edition candies on store shelves that they don't seem all that special anymore.

Personally, I don't mind seeing a new product every time I go into the store, but it can be annoying if a new favorite is never seen again after only a short run. There is no way for us, the consumers, to tell if this trend will continue or not - but do we want it to?

For the next three years, Baby Ruth will be the official candy bar of Major League Baseball. In addition to having a logo proclaiming it as such on the packaging, the candy will also be featured in a number of in-game and TV promotions. The candy bar is nougat, coated in peanuts and dipped in chocolate. The fact that the name is almost identical to that of one of the greatest players of all time can only help endear it to fans.

Many people believe that the candy is named after the baseball player Babe Ruth, due to the similarity in the names. A Snopes article tends to support this theory, but the company that invented the bars, before they were sold to Nestle, says that they were named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter - who was named Ruth. Unfortunately this explanation has a few flaws, as Snopes points out. Not only were the bars introduced in 1921, but Ruth Cleveland died at the age of 12 in 1904, making her an odd choice to have a candy bar named after her.

 

 

 Although not available in the US, Cadbury has recently released a chocolate bar that is a play on the Cadbury Creme egg. it's called the Dairy Milk with Creme Egg Bar - or simply the Creme Egg Bar. My first visions were of a Snickers-shaped bar with a huge amount of fondant filling, but the bars are divided up into filled squares in the same manner as other Cadbury filled bars. All reports make them sound as though they have a similar chocolate: fondant ratio as the mini Cadbury Eggs. For me, this is a good thing, since I prefer to have more chocolate to balance the intensely sugary filling, though there are many people who even want their full-sized eggs to contain more fondant.

Taste aside, I can't help by wonder if Cadbury Cremes are meant to be egg-shaped. At least half the fun of eating a Creme Egg is that it is an egg. And besides, the fondant is supposed to look like the inside of an egg, so what's the point of having a spot of orange "yolk" in the center of a chocolate bar?

[Image Chocablog]

Pregnancy can affect you in weird ways. Cravings - including the famous pickles and ice cream combination - are not uncommon, though they are frequently for ordinary things, like candy bars. Candy bar cravings aren't a problem when you can dash out to 7-11, but when you live in Namibia, it can be a lot more difficult to get a Reese's.

Angelina Jolie reportedly had a crate of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups flown to her in Namibia, straight from the Hershey's factory in Pennsylvania, when she was unable to obtain any locally. Reese's are good, but are they that good? It must have been some craving - either that or she's planning to share with Maddox, Zahara and Brad.

Columnist Tim Dowling of the Guardian undertook the challenge of making a Snickers Pie, also known as the unhealthiest recipe ever, to see how it tasted. According to the comments from our last post, many readers think that the pie should taste fantastic - an opinion based solely upon the fat and calorie content of the dessert. Mr. Dowling's article supports the fact that this is not always the case. The dessert, which baked into something of a cross between a quiche and a souffle, was not more than the sum of its parts. In fact, he said that not only did the Snickers bars not improve after 30 minutes in a hot oven, but "quite apart from anything else, it has peanuts in it." Chunks of nuts in a melting, not quite homogenous mixture just doesn't seem to work as well as the endorsers of ultra-decadent desserts would have liked to believe - even with a high fat and calorie content.

[Thanks to Mark for the tip]