Last month, first time outside the country. Trinidad & Tobago. Had a candy called “Khurma,” a ginger stick with enough liquid sugar hardened on the outside that you can’t see the stick. Very crunchy. VERY sweet. I don’t remember the name of the pink sugar/coconut cookie thingie, but it was good, too. Not really candy, but all the soft drinks there have REAL SUGAR in 'em. It’s like night and day.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE start up the International Candy Exchange again! I can contribute … Maple Syrup Candy and Needhams and Buckeyes … would love to get Brit Cadbury and Japanese Pocky (in weird flavors) and the Japanese KitKats … MMMmmmm.
I like a few from Mexico but that is it.
Mango and melon Hi-Chews and Hello Panda cookies from Japan are my drug. Strawberry Pocky is good and the ice cream and mochi a friend shared with me was yummy.
I also like English hard candies, the Cavendish and Harvey ones that come in the can.
mmmmmm green tea mochi with red bean past filling! Or purple yam mochi with red bean paste. I need to ask mrAru to stop at the chinese grocery on the way home!
[URL=“http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
Candy isn’t candy until you have tasted Tablet. The homemade stuff is usually better than the kind they sell in shops though. Also, it’s not tablet unless you feel the sugar rot your teeth whilst eating it.
I think English Cadbury is the balls. Ever had a Boost bar? Twix on steroids. Wicked good.
Last time I was in Tokyo I brought back some green tea flavored Kit Kat Bars to give to folks at home. Amazing stuff.
I like the candy bars Crunchie and Coffee Crisp when I visit Canada. I’ve found them in the States on rare occasions but in Canada they can be found everywhere.
“Do you like Turkish candy?”
“Not a halavah lot.”
I’m fairly sure that gag is older than I am, and I just turned 65.
I just realized I might be a Candiest! :eek:
Japanese: I get these when I visit Little Tokyo a few times a year…
Botan Rice Candy: It’s just rice boiled until it’s glue, then infused with sugar and wrapped in rice-paper. Still, I grew up on those things and still like them. It was better when they had the little tiny toys inside, but now that’s considered a choking hazard…
Pocky: There’s all kinds of coatings/flavors, but my favorite is the dark chocolate & almond pocky and almond mini-pocky.
Meiji Almond Chocolate: Awesome stuff! They import the almonds from California, coat them in Swiss chocolate, and send them back to my Asian Groceries in Los Angeles. What a racket!
The thing is that the Japanese learned to do chocolate from the Swiss during the Meiji restoration period (thus the Meiji brand of Chocolate almonds) and American chocolates can’t compare to the smoothness and perfectly balanced bitter-and-sweet of Swiss chocolate. I don’t even think German or Dutch chocolates are as good.*
Once upon a time I looked up Hershey’s in Wikipedia and was unpleasantly unsurprised to read that the founder of the company made his break in order to sell a product that used wax filler to extend the ingredients and sell a cheaper product to more people. Yep. it’s that “I’m eating a flavorless filler” feeling that keeps me from buying Hershey products.
My mother used to get various pastries with azuki bean or azuki bean paste in them. I couldn’t stand them. And I had tried Green Tea as a toddler and found – well, it wasn’t my cup-of-tea. Then, while I was in Japan for a year, I learned the art/ritual of drinking Japanese Green Tea because the woman I was dating was taking Tea Ceremony lessons and I was willing to ‘play guest.’ Then I was given mochi-with-azuki-bean-filling during the same sessions as the tea serving. Aha! The extreme sweet of the azuki and the gag-ful bitter of the green tea cancel each other out and leave a delicious taste worth savoring! I can’t consume either one individually, but together they’re marvelous!
Then there’s this stuff my cousine brought over last Spring. They look like miniature pastel-colored spikey balls and remind me of the seed pods from an American Sweetgum tree. I figured they’d be flavorful, but it turns out they’re just sugar.
O-Senbei/O-kaki: Well, it’s not candy, but they’re snack treats: I absolutely love Japanese rice crackers in dozens of forms - particularly with the seaweed added…
Plus, while I was over there, I saw TV ads for Tongari corn snack and thought they were fun ads and went out to buy the product. Turns out they’re basically Bugles, but the company that makes them over there also has tons of flavors not sold in the USA – tuna, Japanese cheese, green tea (of course) and several others.
Indian:
My coworker brought some stuff back from a visit to her parents. One was like a cube of evaporated milk. It tasted like extremely mild caramel. Another was a cube of cashew nougat with one side coated in silver – yeah, real silver! It was okay; I think when I make cashew butter, the salt that I add brings a better flavor out of the nut.
—G!
*Go ahead! Send me samples and prove me wrong!
Oooh, that sounds good. Personally, I love Mexican Tamarind chili candy; that wonderful tamarind flavor with chili powder dusted on. It’s not very sweet, but it’s unmistakably candy.
Salt licorice is also excellent, the saltier and harder the better.
Back in the good old days on this board we did an international candy exchange; I think it might be time for another.
Nice try! 