10. Green & Black’s Organic White ChocolateSo 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 BarBacon 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 FaithfulBefore 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 BarGenerally 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 CupsOK, 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.
