My Candy Five

When it comes to snacks, I'm more of a chips person than a sweets person. That isn't to say I don't I have a sweet tooth; I love ice cream and cake and any combination of the two. Even though I don't raid the candy machine all that often, I don't think I'll have any trouble coming up with a quintet for the latest edition of my fives:

1) Kit-Kat:
In my candy world, Kit Kat is king. It's a stack of crisp wafers surrounded by dark chocolate and divided into two to four bite-sized strips. I'm mostly familiar with the Hershey variety, and only now learned that Nestlé produces these awesome bars everywhere other than the United States. At my old job, my friends and I would sometimes go to an international candy shop at a local mall, that included imported Kit Kats from Great Britain. They were quite expensive, but well worth it. Something about the chocolate in those “Brit Kats” was much richer than ours. I've also enjoyed the “Big Kat” variety, which is just a double-sized version of the regular bar.

2) Smarties:
There's nothing I like better around Halloween than these little plastic rolls of sugar pills. They don't last long in any home or office where I'm around. I don't know that I've ever consumed one at a time, either, normally crunching down on a minimum of half a roll and enjoying the explosion of sweetness. (Yikes, that sounds like the sort of sentence Jerry might write; I should move on.)

3) M&Ms:
Who doesn't love these little handfuls of chocolate with bright candy shells? If I had to rank them, I'd put the dark chocolate variety at the top of the list, followed by peanut M&Ms and finally the original variety. Chocolate alone can be boring, but the inclusion of a candy shell and/or peanuts is genius, elevating it to a much more interesting and enjoyable level.

4) Starburst:
I didn't appreciate or understand Starburst fruit chews the first time I tried them. What was the concept? It wasn't gum; the whole thing dissolved pretty quickly when you chewed it. And it wasn't a hard candy, since it was chewable. But there's a certain zing to these little cubes that sparks the taste buds along the back corners of the tongue, and once you master the slow or partial chew and savor method, you understand how these put hard candy and gum to shame. Like Smarties, Starburst are more of a Halloween indulgence for me.

5) Mr. Goodbar:
This is another Halloween treat for me, specifically the Hershey's Miniatures variety. Again, while chocolate alone might bore me, with the exception of some of the finer dark chocolate bars out there, the inclusion of something crunchy like peanuts makes Mr. Goodbar the best miniature in the bag. I'm just glad I wrote about these treats after the supermarkets were closed, otherwise Kit Kats and M&Ms wouldn't be the only ones on the list I enjoyed outside of Halloween...