Tag Archives: Candy

The World’s Largest Candy (That You Can Buy Right Now)

“*begins seizing from sugar overdose*”

~AFFotD’s official product taste tester

giant candy corn

America loves candy so much that we wrote a kind of annoying song about how much we want it back in 1965, and we’ve not shut up about it since.  There’s something comforting about mainlining sugar into your veins, no matter how often Japan tries to ruin the concept.

And, in the gluttonous nature of American know-how that we like to champion, America also loves giant food that doesn’t need to be quite so giant.  Naturally, these two schools of thought have collided on many occasions, because a giant candy bar is much cooler than a giant stalk of celery, mom.

In this enterprising spirit, we’re here to salute America’s giant candy confections, but we’re not going to simply stick with some Guinness book of world records bullshit.

Sure, we could spend a few thousand words telling you about the 12,000 pound chocolate bar made by Chicago’s World Finest Chocolates, or the 7,000 pound lollipop made by See’s Candies out in Burlingame, California, but what good does that do you, the reader?

It might impress you, but does it give you the opportunity to go out, find something horribly unhealthy, and devour it in one sitting in what will probably prove to be the last and greatest mistake you ever made in your sugar-shortened life?

Hell no!  So we’re going to stick with the world’s largest candy items that you, yes you, irresponsible you, can purchase this very moment.

After all, you’re an adult, you can and have eaten cake for breakfast because you make your own rules and, hey, we’re all going to die someday, and overdosing on sucrose doesn’t sound much worse than drowning.

The World’s Largest Candy (That You Can Buy Right Now)

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The American Evolution Of Seasoning and Spicy Foods

*pop*

*hssssss*

“…Gas?  GAS!  GAAASSSSSS!  MASKS ON!  MASKS ON GODDAMN IT!  OH GOD TOO LATE!!!!”

~Residents of Irwindale, CA                                         

oatmeal sriracha bear

(source)

The American Evolution Of Seasoning and Spicy Foods

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M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

“They melt in your heart, not in your OH MOTHER OF GOD SOMETHING HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG.”

~Rejected M&M slogan

M&Ms

In 1941, Forrest Mars, Sr., son of the Mars Company founder Frank C. Mars, patented a process for tempering a hard shell of chocolate around chocolate pellets in order to prevent the candies from melting.  Production immediately began under the name M&M Limited (named for Mars and Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of Hershey’s chocolate with a 20% stake in the product), with an agreement to only use Hershey chocolate.  These button-shaped candies exploded in popularity during the second World War due to their durability, and the shells were given bright colors such as yellow, green, red, and violet to go along with standard brown-colored shells.  And with that, an American institution was created.

These “m” printed candies are now sold in over 100 countries, but remain the most popular to-go chocolate snack for Americans everywhere.  The simple elegance of the coated milk chocolate delivers a burst of flavor with each individual candy, and just thinking about M&Ms while reading this article has you saying, “Goddamn it, I really want a bag of M&M’s right now.”  And you should.

Throughout the years we’ve been sampling the best of America, we’ve learned through painful, gut-wrenching trial and error, that sometimes the best American ideas are cruelly marred by our at-times overzealous imaginations.  Yes, the same good intentions and terrible execution that gave us Watermelon Oreos has befallen the perfection that is the M&M candy.  And, as is our sworn duty, we are here to let you know that these mistakes exist, because it’s only when we see those we care about at their ugliest that we can truly learn to love their beauty.  Or we just like telling you about terrifying candies.  However you want to look at it.

M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

 printed m&ms

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This Isn’t Poison: Food and Drinks With Skull Designs

“This is the tale of Captain Jack Sparrow.”

~Michael Bolton

michael bolton

Ever since first reading Treasure Island as a child or, more likely, seeing Hook, Americans spend their childhood surrounded by pirates.  While today piracy seems like an ignoble, cowardly profession, we still are drawn to the classic pirates of yore; the Blackbeards and Black Barts we heard wildly exaggerated stories about.  Hand-in-hand with this romanticized image of people who actually were often very brutal murderers is the Jolly Roger, or the skull-and-crossbones flag that they would fly to identify themselves as pirates.

Since that point, the skull-and-crossbones have become an iconic part of our history, and putting a skull on a product has become a widespread way to tell Americans that something is either badass, poisoned, or was purchased at a Hot Topic.

Today, we’re going to go into the products that Americans consume that have incorporated the skull into their packaging.  Because nothing tells you to put something inside your body better than a bleached human skull and the words “DEATH,” right?

This Isn’t Poison: Food and Drinks With Skull Designs

skull french fries

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Timmy Roosevelt, Eight-Year Old American

“I like Fire trucks.”

~Timmy Roosevelt

We’re sort of out of it today.  Weekends blur together in the American tradition, because America knows how to come up with reasons to get wasted most every night, and eventually you let weekdays blur together to in the quest to reach the weekend.  It’s America who came up with the notion of Thursdays “being the new Friday.”  And it’s a truly great American notion- you don’t expect to do much work on Friday, so why not go out on Thursday to get plastered as well?  Get more bang for your weekend buck?  And then, Wednesday becomes the new Thursday which is the new Friday, and so on and so on.

So we…we treated Monday like the Friday it is.  And if we had to rate days by how bad their hangovers are, Tuesday would be very high up on the list.  We don’t often have guest columnists, and normally they’re not eight-year old boys.

Anyway, the guy who writes our intros just puked into his garbage can, so here’s Timmy Roosevelt, the eight-year old nephew of our editor-in-chief, Johnny Roosevelt.

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