Remember all the hoopla about several chocolate companies who were planning on changing the way they made their chocolate? Well, don't include Mars in all that talk.

The company (which makes Milky Way, M&Ms, Snickers, Dove Chocolate, and other chocolate candies and bars) has announced that they are going to keep making their chocolate with 100% cocoa butter. Some have been pushing for the industry to change to cheaper, healthier vegetable oils and fats. One thing I didn't realize is that the FDA says that if a company changes to those oils, they can't call it "chocolate."

The company says that even though they could have saved money by switching, that would hurt the taste of the chocolate. Thank you Mars!

I always keep an eye out for new and limited edition candies when I'm at the store. The candy companies love putting them out and, frankly, most of us know what the originals taste like. It's interesting to compare old and new to see what works and what doesn't. But even I will admit that things are getting a little out of hand when you can venture into what was once the candy aisle and see that not only has it been replaced entirely with different kinds of limited edition Hershey's Kisses, but that it has been expanded to cover four aisles, making room for all the other new varieties of old candies.

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.

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]

This particular dessert deserves a place of honor on the list of the worst foods you can eat. Snickers Pie, an ultra-rich dessert developed by Chef Antony Worrall Thompson (pictured), has over 1250 calories per slice and over 100 grams of fat. Though the chef himself has written a book advocating healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle, he insists that customers willingly and knowingly put taste before healthy in restaurants and that they deserve to "get their taste-buds tickled." He insists that the dessert is meant to be an occasional snack for children, but with over half the recommended daily amount of calories for an adult in each serving, it still seems difficult to recommend it. It's easier (and healthier) just to eat a Snickers bar alone.