10. Green & Black’s Organic White Chocolate
So dark chocolate sucks, and this company, unfortunately, makes a lot of it. All the Green & Black’s candy I ate tasted like dirt, except for one: their white chocolate. It’s really great—smooth mouthfeel, terrific flavor. Of course, there’s really no such thing as “white chocolate,” as chocolate is made from cocoa solids, which white chocolate doesn’t contain. So it’s a little like developing a taste for unicorn piss.
9. Vosges Mo’s Bacon Bar
Bacon is the candy of meat, so this is a brilliant idea. In fact, it should have been my favorite, but it wasn’t, and here’s why: It doesn’t double the deliciousness to put bacon and chocolate together. It’s actually less good than having them separately. Bacon is so good by itself that to put it in any other food is an admission of failure. You’re basically saying, “I can’t make this other food taste good, so I’ll throw in bacon.” So bacon-wrapped scallops, for example, convey that you are unable to prepare scallops. You had to go to bacon. Chocolate has the same effect: You dip a shoe in chocolate, it’s gonna be pretty good. So putting the two of them together is totally unnecessary, because they’re both already 100 percent awesome. It’s the same reason nature makes it so that you can’t get a blow job and fuck at the same time.
8. Owyhee Old Faithful
Before I got to Owyhee’s Old Faithful, I came across their Idaho Spud, a turd-looking thing with coconut sprinkled on the outside. Fuck, I hate candy-bar coconut. My dad put a shitload of Mounds and Almond Joys in my stocking one Christmas, and I ate so many I puked my guts out. Because I’m a professional, I tried it, but I still hate it. I was about to write off the Owyhee company, but then I unwrapped the chocolaty, peanutty Old Faithful, which brought back a better Christmas memory: nice chocolate like my mom used to melt in a double boiler for her holiday peanut clusters. And then I got to this weird-ass marshmallow in the middle. What is it with the Midwest and their weird shit in the middle of their candy?
7. Lake Champlain Five Star Caramel Bar
Generally speaking, I don’t like anything in my candy but candy. Stuff like almonds, for example, just gets in the way. I believe it’s the second law of thermodynamics: If there is an almond there, then by definition candy cannot be in that space. Caramel, on the other hand, is candy. How do I know? It’s just like pornography: I know it when I taste it. And this bar is all candy. It’s modern rich-people chocolate filled with great chocolate-from-a-box-style caramel. It’s nice and fat like me, and really delicious.
6. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
OK, so I ate a bunch of fancy candy bars, and then I needed a break. I needed to get the taste of dirt out of my mouth. That’s when peanut butter cups stepped in and saved me. Man, aren’t they great? You don’t have to know jack—they just taste really good, and the mouthfeel is amazing. The best part of eating them is that we’ve convinced ourselves in America that peanut butter is real food. Really, peanut butter is basically candy, yet here you can have it for a meal. These actually feel nutritious to me.
5. Nestlé 100 Grand
I signed the biggest contract of my life in New York City, and my girlfriend at the time got me a couple of these to celebrate the deal. If I got to eat them only when I signed deals like that, I would have forgotten what they taste like, but I eat them even when I don’t get paid 100 grand for something. Caramely, crunchy…good.
4. Necco Clark Bar
Know what N-E-C-C-O stands for? New England Confectionery Company. I’m from New England, and this is my favorite company name. In fact, I’ll blow you right now for a roll of Necco wafers. But they’re not part of this article. A Clark bar is pure candy. I was trying to eat just one bite of each candy bar, but I couldn’t do it with the Clark bar. I love it. These guys have been doing business since 1847: “The oldest multi-line candy company in the United States.” Multi-line is a weasel word there, but they’re still way old, so they know what they’re doing. The brochure they sent me is like The Pilgrim’s Progress. These are candy pioneers.
3. Necco Sky Bar
Right before a high school girlfriend dumped me, she bought me a Sky Bar, and I was sentimental about it. A new girlfriend came on the scene, fed me the old sentimental Sky Bar, and then fucked me. Do I like it? What do you think? Feed me one, please. Four different sections of chocolate bar: one caramel, one fudge, one peanut, and one white cream stuff. It’s a box of chocolates in a bar. And in 1938 it was announced by skywriting all over the country. This bar has everything for me: sex and skywriting, chocolate, caramel, gunky stuff, fudge, and peanut. And the fuckers only sent me one. Every other company sent boxes. I take back all that great stuff I said about Necco. Fuck them and that old high school girlfriend.
2. Palmer Candy Co. Twin Bing
This is my trainer’s favorite (yes, I have a trainer—can you imagine what I would look like if I didn’t?). He’s from the Midwest and has the body fat of a motorcycle. He said, “I burn enough calories, so I can eat anything I want.” Fuck him and the candy bar he rode in on. Make no mistake, Twin Bing is a weird-ass candy. The peanut-and-chocolate-like stuff on the outside is cool, but what is that pink shit in the middle? You know when you buy a box of chocolates and you’re looking for the caramels and you bite into one of those pink centers and it’s awful? Well, this isn’t nearly as bad as that. But it still ain’t quite right. Then again, my trainer is a piece of ass, and I’m not, so maybe he’s right about Twin Bing. They’re awesome.
1. Cadbury Dairy Milk
Cadbury is the best chocolate and maybe the best food. I’ve been told that Hershey licenses Cadbury in the U.S. and the Cadbury candy overseas is even better than what we get here. That’s OK; we’ve got Elvis and Dylan. Let them have the better chocolate. (Just make sure if you buy one it wasn’t made in China; Cadbury recalled some Chinese-made candy last fall after discovering it contained melamine—which goes in fertilizer!)
I remember flying into England, starving, in the middle of the night. I took some of their “money,” dropped it into a machine, and had my first Dairy Milk. It was the greatest thing I’d ever eaten; and on an empty, caffeine-virgin stomach, it threw off my schedule for the whole trip. That experience was awful and should have queered me on Cadbury, but it’s just too good. And the bars are huge. Maybe in skinny countries people split them or save part for later, but here in the U.S.A. the whole bar is an individual serving. The mouthfeel is perfect, and it’s wonderfully creamy, with just the right amount of sweet. If I had to say something bad about it, I would say the name is stupid. Dairy Milk? Of course milk is dairy; that’s what dairy is…milk! But I found out why they call it that: Other candy companies put in powdered milk, and these guys use liquid milk. That’s classy and well-done—and it’s still candy. GREAT!