"snickers" news and stories

One of the best things about Halloween is that you end up with a surplus of chocolate and candy that you can use in baking. Leading up to Halloween, it's oh-so appropriate to make things like cupcakes, cookies, and brownies with pieces of chocolate candy bars. After Halloween, you'll have so much leftover (if your kids are good at trick-or-treating, that is) that you won't know what to do with it all. Every year, I do the easiest thing: bake my favorite brownie recipe and throw a little slice of a Snickers bar on top. To be quite honest, the addition makes you look like a rockstar in the kitchen, even though you didn't do much. You can even cheat and use a mix out of a box, but if you're fancy like that, you can use a recipe from Epicurious for Candy Bar-Topped Brownies that use caramel or ganache-filled squares as toppers.

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.

How far can manufacturers and retailers go with this trend? Cotton and Sand , getting more than a little annoyed with the overload of not-so-special releases, came up with some as-yet-unrealized (thankfully!) candy bar concepts that poke fun at the overwhelming selection candy consumers now face. Kit Kat Malt Liquor sounds like the best of the bunch, but I think I'll pass on Vegetable Skittles, Seafood Gumbo Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers Bacon Bars.

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A whole day about candy and we haven't talked about a Snickers bar?!?! For shame.

Good thing they're so easy to add to baked goods, particularly brownies. I simply used my favorite brownie recipe, added a little more egg to make the brownies more "cake-like," ladled them into mini muffin tins, and tossed a half-inch-thick slice of a Snickers bar on top. I was originally going to make regular brownies, but realized that the Snickers would disintegrate away if they had to sit in the oven for as long as brownies need to bake. The mini cupcakes meant that the baking time was less than half. Even still, the Snickers melt and lose a little of their original shape, but hey, they still taste like caramel and nuts!

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.

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