Good enough to eat ~ almost ;)

I don't know why but foody themed things just really seem cute to me , like those bath bombs that look like genuine cupcakes or ear rings that look like pieces of fruit etc , it's just all so quaint ! So you can see why these little gems stood out to me whilst I was sale shopping in debenams on Sunday ! 

~The Hershey's kiss almost looks real !

Cute as these Pepsi lip balms are though , I would have felt agrieved parting with a fiver for them let alone the original sale price of £10 ! 

I also have an odd fascination with anything the wrong size . By this I don't mean I like buying things a size or two too small for my wardrobe , I mean things that have been made at a novelty size like mini chocolate bars (hence my love of celebrations and heros - mini snickers Awww :3) or giant things like Reeses big cups or giant cadburys buttons ~ the sheer fact they are the same but swollenly large editions of an old classic gives me some odd sense of satisfaction , so you can understand my delight upon stumbling across the likes of these GIANT gummy bears and colossal cola bottles !

Additionally I also found more on the Confectionary front to entertain my childish glee ...

Oh and then came the never before spotted Lindt chocolate , I must admit these sounded perfect, champagne lindor truffles and Lindt 70% coccoa with Teachers ... Mmmmmmmm <3

 

Cute confectionary discoveries !

Look at all of these bars ! There is literally every possible chocolate combo here , and they all look so pretty !

Personally I was particularly drawn to the rainbow one (pink yellow and orange), stardust or the strawberry champagne , purely for the prettiness factor ! Taste wise I spotted a cabinets Irish cream , which would totally be up my street ;) 

They even did the prettiest , girliest Christmas trees , Awww ! (Ft the cutest little Christmas pud choccies !) 

This shop also had loaaaads of other amazing sugary goodies such as lemon filled tennis balls , the good old toxic wastes , marshmallow pizza slices , gummy pizzas (throwback!) vanilla flavoured pop (mmmmmm liquid vanilla) and many maaaany more , there was thisbamerican bar I'd never even heard of called a Big Hunk ?! Anyone tried one ? It's describes as Big Hunk, a chewy, honey-sweetened nougat bar with whole roasted peanuts. 

Oh and check out the biggest box of guylians EVER . 

Harry Potter heaven

Ah welcome to the magical world of wizardry , full of spellbinding sweets , chocolatey charms and jellybean jinxs ! 

Prehaps The most famous wizarding treat is the good old chocolate frog , these come in lots of different varieties . When I was little , my dad managed to get these for me when we went on holiday to lanzarotte , and to this day I don't know how or where from , I'm assuming he brought them in England and took them over with us but I still don't know where he sourced them from ?! All I know is that they where solid chocolate (like the ones you can get from the studios but smaller) and absolutely delicious ! They came with a wizarding card too but to be honest , all I was interested in was sinking my teeth into the solid , albeit slightly melted , chocolate toads head . So , here are the different toad types available : 

Then there's the Bertie bots all flavour beans ! These have had 6 versions over the years with each adding a few new (if slightly questionable) flavours each time . The current line up are pictured below with the very brand new editors of pizza , mash potato , gravy and ketchup ! 

In the books themselves , jk Rowling also mentions a few confectionaries that often get over looked . Some are mentioned by a read old lady when asking that age old question ' anything off the trolley ?' Can you remember what rons reply was though ? ;) other slightly less appealing  goods are introduced to us by  the lovable roughed , Fred and George Weasley when opening their joke shop in diagon alley (not to be said diagonally, as poor old Harry learned in the second film the Chamber of secrets) 

Personally I think the jelly slugs look the best ;) 

SPOTTED- alcoholic choccies !!

GOD BLESS AMERICA

Does anyone else share my fascination with American candy ? Everytime I spy some in shops I get super excited - I never buy it though , it's always ridiculously priced :( spotted three flavours of the infamous TWINKIES in pound land today , vanilla , chocolate and banana ! All TWINKIES where originally banana flavoured but during the war it was easier to make the vanilla flavour so TWINKIES changes their recipients vanilla , but the banana cream is making a come back ! Not too keen on banana flavours stuff but vanilla caaaan get abit repetitive so I'm not complaining ... I must say though , chocolate all the way for me though ! 

And what is this ? American Pringles ?!

Smores , blueberry , hot fudge Sunday , cherry and chocolate chip poptarts ! Oh and I know they're Japanese but these picky sticks (I think they're abit this mikado biscuit sticks) are so cute ! And look at the filled panda biscuits! 

Any Reece's fans out there ??   

Typical American find .....they love their peanut butter too don't they ?! 

Cute candy hedgehog! 

aaaahhh giant jelly spider !! 

These look AWESOME !! I mean come one who doesn't love food that looks like another food ?! Like fried eggs or the gummy foamy hamburgers you could make when you where little , or the jelly pizzas ?! 

Not normally a savoury spotter but these look interesting ! 

Look at the 'iccle gummy pumpkins ! Plus these must be the only American candy product to contain anything 'real ' hahah ;) 

Picture does not do justice to the size of these I swear , they're literally the size of my face :0

Mini gingerbread men on a tree of mini meringues  !!

Oh my sweet lord...

 

Which selection box will YOU choose ?

So it's Christmas ! Time to crack open the selection boxes , but which is your favourite ? Quality street from nestle ? Cadburys heros ? Cadburys roses ? Celebrations from Mars ? Cadburys milk tray? There are so many other varieties of selection boxes around this year too , like Terry's orange segments , thorntons xfactor chocolates (?!?) and many more ! But let's face it , roses , quality street , milk tray and the majority of the generic chocolate selections are all of a muchness generally featuring some form of strawberry cream , orange cream/crunch , toffee , caramel , fudge , some form of chocolate / nut combo and maybe a dark chocolate or coconut sweet for good measure . 

Let's start with Cadburys roses , recently in the news for scrapping this traditional 'twist' wrapping in favour of the fresh seal packaging in order to 'prevent stronger flavours from contaminating other chocolates' or words of that effect. Cadburys roses currently include : 

• NEW this year-Almond caramel bite -chewy caramel and almond pieces Coates in milk chocolate
• Brazilian Darkness - A chewy toffee square with pieces of Brazil nuts, coated in dark chocolate (red plastic-foil twist-wrapper with gold twists).

• Golden Barrel - Milk chocolate in the shape of half a barrel, filled with caramel (was formerly wrapped in gold foil, now in gold plastic-foil twist-wrapper). Previously named Caramel Keg.

• Caramel - Hard toffee encased in Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate (wrapped in blue plastic-foil).

• Country Fudge - Rectangular fudge piece, coated in milk chocolate (wrapped in light brown plastic-foil).

• Hazel in Caramel - Crescent-shaped milk chocolate with hazelnut plant engraving on top, filled with caramel and a hazelnut (purple plastic-foil twist-wrapper). A recent market poll showed that this was the most popular variety in Ireland, by a margin of two-to-one over the next contender, the Golden Barrel (Caramel Keg).

• Hazel Whirl - Dome-shaped milk chocolate, patterned with spiral twirl, with hazelnut in centre (purple plastic-foil twist-wrapper with orange twists).

• Strawberry Dream - Square-shaped milk chocolate with strawberry seed engravings on top, filled with strawberry-flavoured cream fondant (pink plastic-foil twist-wrapper). The same poll which determined that the 'Hazel in Caramel' variety was most popular in Ireland also showed this as being rated the 'worst' variety.

• Tangy Orange Creme - Square-shaped milk chocolate with orange engraving on top, filled with orange-flavoured creme fondant (wrapped in orange plastic-foil twist-wrapper).

• Coffee Escape - New for Christmas 2013, Cadbury have re-released the soft coffee centred chocolate (wrapped in green plastic-foil twist-wrapper).

• Signature Truffle - New for Christmas 2013, this is a truffle encased in milk chocolate (wrapped in red plastic-foil twist-wrapper with blue twists).
• The dairy milk chunk is no longer present *cry* but FEAR NOT it now features in the heros selection instead ... Phew ! 

It's been yeeeeears since I had any of these but if I had to choose my favourite would probably be te signature truffle or the golden barrel ! Mmmm runny caramel ! I'm not a massive fan of hard toffee so the solid caramel would be a no from me ! I'm also a fan of strawberry cream (mmmm sugar)  and orange creams as orange and  chocolate is always a good combo (think Cadburys chocolate orange hot chocolate and of course , good old Terry's !) 

Then there's the heros selection ! The combinations of these chocolates tend to change most years, sometimes they features a mini toblerone , or bournville (dearly missed!) or crunchies .

As far as I'm aware the current line up is 

• Cadbury Eclair
• Fudge
• Dairy Milk Caramel
• Dairy Milk
• Cadbury Wispa
• Cadbury Twirl
• Creme egg twisted

The best of these would have to be the caramel or the pure solid goodness of the original dairy milk ! To be honest, they're not the same without the toblerone or bournville which were always my favourite and I've never tried the Creme egg twisted but from what I remember I quite liked the gooey middle of the generic creme egg albeit very sickly (not that thats always a bad thing !)  and believe it or not I've never tried wispa so I can't pass commet! I do know there is a gold wispa caramel bar though so I've got that on my bucket list ;) once again , unless it's proper rich sticky clotted cream toffee I'm not a fan of hard toffee so the tooth cracking relatively bland hard caramel featured in the eclair would have to be my last go to chocolate (if you can even call it that?) 

Then there's celebrations , which are basically the Mars version of heroes (just like quality street is the nestle version of roses) like heroes .

This selection box also features mini versions of well known bars , but this time featuring Mars chocolates minis such as 

• Mars
• Bounty
• Snickers
• Dove / Galaxy 
• Dove caramel / Galaxy Caramel
• Twix (replacement of the galaxy truffle, which should NEVER have left - I don't even like twix!) 
• Maltesers Teaser
• Milky Way 

Out if these is have to favour the Galaxy caramel , the teaser or the Milky Way ! I've always found Mars abit bland even if it looks yum and snickers is okay too but I have to be in the mood for nuttyness ! 

Finally we have the Quality street selection from Nestle . I wonder why nestle don't do a Mini bar selection box like Cadburys and Mars ? To be honest , I only want one so I could indulge in an array of mini aeros as there is no such creation on the market ! They could do a 

•Aero chocolate, 

•Mint Aero

• KITKAT (why has no one thought of this already ?! Oh wait , you can get Kitkat bites but still ...) 

•Caramac or Milky bar (we need something to replace the white chocolates goodness of the Dream chocolate after cadburys rudely removed it from the celebrations box and now from our lives completely)  

•Lion bar 

• Toffee crisp 

•Yorkie 

•maybe even an enlarged Munchie or a Rolo ?! Well , you couldn't expect me to the whole list without some form of caramel did you ?! 

•oooooh and a mini box of smarties ! 

Anyways, back to quality street . Their varietys include :

• The Purple One (Hazelnut With caramel) (purple wrapper)
• Chocolate Green Triangle (Noisette Pate- basically hazelnut paste) (green wrapper, triangular, foil)
• Chocolate Toffee Finger (gold wrapper, stick)
• Toffee Penny (gold wrapper, circular)
• Strawberry Delight (red wrapper, circular)
• Caramel Swirl (yellow wrapper, circular, foil)
• Milk Choc Block (green wrapper)
• Orange Crunch (orange wrapper, octagonal, foil)
• Orange Creme (orange wrapper)
• Toffee Deluxe (brown wrapper)
• Vanilla Fudge (pink wrapper)
• Coconut Eclair (blue wrapper)

To me it seems silly that there is a toffee deluxe , toffee penny , toffee finger and ca caramel chocolate AND a fudge chocolate too , I mean toffee , caramel and fudge all in the sandbox is but much but having 3. Varieties of toffee on top ? The toffee deluxe and the toffee finger are the same chocolate exact one is long and one isn't ! How silly , I mean look ! 

 

This said , I've just seen this on tescos website ?  

I guess nestle are proud of the fact that they're boring us all to death with an overdose of bland chewiness , and it doesn't even include the caramel swirl (basically a rip off of the Cadburys golden barrel!) come to think of it , both roses and quality street both feature similar chocolates 

Quality street have orange cream- roses have orange creme

Quality street have strawberry delight - roses offer strawberry creme 

Quality street have caramel swirl - roses present the golden barrel

Quality street have the purple one - roses have the hazelnut in caramel and also the hazelnut whirl 

Quality street have the fudge - so do roses 

Quality street have the toffee deluxe and the toffee finger , which is nestles answer to Cadburys hard Caramel. 

So there you have it , the full ins and outs of each big name selection boxes ! If I had to choose , I'd pick celebrations or roses and live off the golden barrels , fruity themed creams , signature truffles and Galaxy and Galaxy caramels , with a few milkyways and the occasional snickers thrown in for good measure ! 

Mmmmmmm