Moonstruck Chocolate Co. usually focuses on making some of the most beautiful confections that you're likely to see, with creation designs and precision artistry, but for Halloween, they do something a little different. In the spirit of the season, some of their seasonal offerings look more scary than sophisticated, which we love because it seems a little more appropriate for the holiday. The Halloween Horror Pizza is milk chocolate topped with a chocolate truffle eyeball and some gummy goodies that you wouldn't expect to find on any pizza. The Ivory Skull and Wormy Jack are both filled with gummy candies to give anyone who bites into the chocolate a Halloween trick, as well as a treat.

If you can't make up your mind as to which one you want, you can order a combo pack that contains one of each.

Gummy candy shaped like non-candy is popular and fun, but this is much better than a brain or a rat. It looks like real bacon, but it's gummy candy. Unfortuantely, gummy bacon doesn't taste like bacon -- it tastes like strawberry. The candy is available as four 20 gram slices in a box for $4.25 a box from Sprout Home, which has a lot of other cute things for the home and garden.

Forbes magazine recently announced their top 10 healthiest candies. Chosen for taste and nutritional benefit, some of their picks are not really candies at all. An apple, which might be considered to be a treat by many people, is not and never will be candy.  A candy is a sweet, a confection and something that should not be confused with a piece of fruit, as the Pop'ems chosen by Forbes surely are; the combination of fruit and nuts, even if called a treat, should never be confused with candy. Taste-wise, a Larabar is a better option if you are going to count fruit as candy, because at least the spicy, complex, adult-tasting Cocoa Mole flavor has a good amount of cocoa powder in it.

Forbes is not off base on all of their choices, but candy still needs to be something at least a little special. Here are Slashfood’s 8 picks for healthiest (or least unhealthy) candies:

• Cocoa Via - Formulated to promote a healthy heart and even lower cholesterol, Cocoa Via chocolate bars are also fortified with nutrients like calcium, folic acid, B6, B12, C and E. The fruits and nuts in the bars make them a little something different, too.
• Adora – Sure, it has fifty percent of your daily recommended calcium, but that doesn’t mean that Adora tastes like it’s healthy. The smooth, rich chocolate comes in dark and milk flavors and will satisfy any sweet tooth in addition to strengthening bones.

From now until the end of August, one of my absolute favorite candies is having a contest. Jelly Belly's Taste the Mystery contest has put one of five mystery flavors into bags of Jelly Belly's and, by identifying the flavor in your bag and typing your secret code in on the contest website you have a chance to win the grand prize of $250,000 among other things. Admittedly, the odds of winning are slim, but I am mostly interested in the new flavors and not the grand prize. The question-marked jelly beans come in Apple Pie, Maple Syrup, Raisin, Ice Cream Sandwich and Papaya. This particular package of mine had the Ice Cream Sandwich beans and I can assure you that they are excellent. I hope they add at least a few of the new flavors to the famous 49-flavor mix when the contest ends.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]