There is no candy bar more associated with movie theaters.
Used to hate them because raisins. But this moment is perfect.
Enjoy the weekend, nerds.
Breaking Off A Piece
Treat, Pray, Love
Tag Archives: Nestle
Frozen Week: Buncha (Ice Cream) Crunch
Buncha Crunch is my favorite movie candy. Eminently shareable, couples well with popcorn, easy to gobble.
I have fond memories of my mom shooting me dirty looks in the middle of Remember the Titans for how loudly I was eating them [Ed. note: They come in a loud-ass box.] and falala not caring at all.
The Nestle Dibs is essentially the ice cream bar version of the Buncha Crunch. They come in a little tin, they’re eminently shareable, easy to gobble and may or may not couple well with popcorn. I’ve never had them at a movie, but I did buy them once at a One Direction concert while receiving looks for an entirely different reason and falala didn’t care at all.
The extra surface area allows for more chocolate in the ice-cream-to-puffed-rice-to-chocolate balance (as opposed to a full-length bar, and man, is it a refreshing treat. Big fan.
Tops, Twirl and the United Arab Emirates
Full forewarning: This is going to be one of my longer posts. It’s going to end with me hunched over a public granite sittin’ place, grateful for my life, blowing on a toy and realizing there is a very attractive woman in a pantsuit observing me as though I was a science project.
If that is not your cup of ginger ale, you might as well stop reading here.
The story begins, well shoot, probably back in college, where I met two women who would end up having a profound impact on the person I’ve become today. One of those, Marin Bar, had as much to do with me sticking on the Missouri club rowing team as anyone short of my coach and my doofus partner-in-crime; that team grew me right up and taught me the meaning of dedication, camaraderie and responsibility … all things I learned through osmosis trying to follow Marin’s lead. The other, McBarsney? She only stuck her neck out and taught me the basic job functions and knowledge base to successfully attain an open position at her newspaper — a position for which I was woefully underqualified and a position upon which I was able to build a middling career.
Because the universe has a fun way of connecting talented and wonderful people, both Marin and McBarsney ended up half a world away in Abu Dhabi, UAE, dropping their brand of bop all upside the Middle Eastern media scene. True Breakers Off of Pieces [Ed. note: There has to be a better name for BOaP fans. It might just be “readers”.], the two of them were kind enough to send a first-care-package-from-Mom-freshman-year-of-college-sized parcel of regional Gift Bars my way featuring a number of the fun sweets they come across on a daily basis in the UAE.
Thank you, gals, for everything. Here are my thoughts on the sweets you encounter on a daily basis:
Twirl
Sometimes you just gotta twirl. A Cadbury product, the Twirl is very similar to a Flake, only instead of having its thin, rippled chocolate exposed to the dangers of the world, it’s encased in another layer of chocolate, which lends to a less-messy eating experience. Thumbs up on that one.
Also, somehow, the entire bar tasted very similar to a Little Debbie Swiss Cake Roll. Obviously without the cake and the creme and the little white cardboard tray underneath, but a Swiss Cake Roll nonetheless. Top marks. Continue reading
A salve for your Girl Scout Cookie withdrawal
Girl Scout Cookies are a thing that everybody forgets about loving until the day they go on sale again. [Ed. note: Think I’m kidding? Tell me what day they go on sale. You can’t, can you? It’s the most ambiguous time of year.] After that? Look out. Frenzy time.
People buy boxes and boxes; they freeze them, they share them, they talk about them and they write about them. When the supplies dwindle, there’s a little bit of lament, then we go back to jammin’ on Oreos, E.L. Fudges and Girl Scout Cookie facsimiles, until the next season comes around again. Rinse, repeat.
I typically avoid them.
*ducks*
I know enough about my levels of self-control to know what will happen when I bring them into the house: a sleeve becomes a serving size.
A single bar, though? Not a bad way to get your fix, be it on account of withdrawal or abstinence. Nestle offers Girl Scout Cookie-themed Crunch Bars typically in the May-August months, though they’re less like Crunch Bars and closer to a Reese Stick or a Kit Kat in their wafer-based nature.
They have three offerings based on three cookies. My thoughts:
Peanut Butter Creme (based on Tagalongs or Peanut Butter Patties, depending on your regional nomenclature) (pictured above)
This bar tastes like if there were a romantic comedy where a Little Debbie Nutty Bar stars as a clumsy-but-lovable man boy who accidentally conceives a child with the uptight Reese’s Sticks after a boozy post-kickball happy hour — even though they couldn’t be more different — then end up falling in love and raising the child candy bar, only if that bar was played by the same kid who played Anakin Skywalker in Episode I: The Phantom Menace and only did a serviceable job, so you really were left wishing that you had just reached for one of his parents.
A Reese’s Sticks or a Nutty Bar would both have been better, but I have to say that if that pod racing part is on, I watch it every time.
Caramel & Coconut (Samoas or Caramel DeLites)
Caramel DeLites were always my favorite growing up, and I think that the Caramel & Coconut is my favorite of the Girl Scout Cookie Crunches.
Look at my kitchen table
Happy weekend, friends. I’ve got a mega Passage From A Novel Without Context planned for tomorrow that will cover all the candy I’ve been eating for the past two weeks.
Before that publishes, though, I would like to formally appreciate all of who have been sending Gift Bars my way from all of the corners of the world. I’ve received packages from no fewer than six of you, from places as far as Abu Dhabi, Thailand, South Dakota, England and Hershey, Pa.
Thank you, very genuinely. I can’t wait to dive into all of this sweet, weird candy.
And also clear some of this off of my kitchen table because goodness if I people didn’t already think I was crazy …
Tasting Notes
– The Nestle Coffee Crisp was just splendid. Very wafery, with a hint of coffee and just the right amount of CDM-style chocolate.
– It was a very light bar. I felt like a skinny cow.
Toy Toy: Making the Nestle Wonder Ball Choking Hazards Look Like … Something You Wouldn’t Choke On
When I was a kid, I would get up early so that I could watch Pokemon sitting in a blue microfiber recliner I called “The ComfortZone” every day before I left to go to school.
I’m assuming because of how ad space is sold for children’s programming [Ed. note: Any intel, Sara Bar?], there were only seven or eight total commercials that ever played; of course, in fast order, my siblings and I memorized every single one of them.
This prompted some pretty strange, automatic reactions from us each time one of these ads came on, as we would quickly repeat jingles and ad copy, and hold jerky re-enactments of the clip of “Don’t You … Forget About Me” by Simple Minds featured in the compilation CD commercial.
One of those strange reactions was in response to the jingle for the Nestle Magic Ball, where we would shout outlandish replacement suggestions* as to what was inside the many layers of the Magic Ball. Because the jingle would get stuck in your head so easily, we got the opportunity often, which was always very funny**.
*[Ed. note: Most common suggestions: “poop”, “pee”, “puke”]
**[Ed. note 2: Most hilarious suggestions: “poop”, “pee”, “puke”]
I never got a chance to ever eat a Nestle Magic ball, though. They were quickly pulled off the market because the toys they contained in their chocolate-encased Balls That Pop were almost all very definitely choking hazards. Continue reading
It’s Bunny Season: The Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg Drops A Little Bop Upside All The Other Candy Eggs
We’ve rounded into Late Lent, folks; Easter is everywhere. [Ed. note: Though it’d be great to see more Palm Sunday. Some serious entertainment value in those palms when you’re sitting in church with your siblings.]
This means all sorts of things. Lots of pastels. Horrifying rabbits. Saran wrapped baskets.
That grass. That gets everywhere and steals all of your jellybeans and is the worst thing why can’t we just put our candy in plastic baggies inside of the basket because everyone would be happier and their candy consumption would be less tedious and all-around a better experience.
But it especially means eggs. All of the eggs, from the terrible hard-boiled and dyed ones to the plastic ones that if you were lucky were filled with a dollar. [Ed. note: That has to be one of the weirdest false ranges ever.] Egg-shaped things are given increased attention, and the candy companies have taken notice.
We’ll be talking about many of these eggs in the next week and a half, but I had to kick off my Easter candy commentary by throwing some dap in the direction of the champion of candy eggs: the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg. Continue reading
Brit Week: A Minty Cheerio (Not the cereal. That would be gross.)
Brit Week came to a lovely little conclusion yesterday evening as I noshed on a Nestle Mint Aero as I watched How To Train Your Dragon 2 get jobbed at the Oscars. [Ed. note: You got the Oscar in my book, Hiccup.]
The Aero was a lot like Hershey’s Air Delights, only the addition of CDM-style chocolate enhanced not only the candy bar’s flavour, but also its consistency: The bubbles were bigger and more pleasant in my mouth. [Ed. note: That sentence felt dirty when I typed it.]
I can’t, however, say that I enjoyed it: The mint side of the Mint Aero was not a mint that I enjoyed, different than that of a candy cane or Andes candy (though, it may be the exact same as an Andes, just with a greater proportion of mint). I was fine with a few breaks, but a whole bar would have been overkill.
…
So, after a week of British sweets, my thoughts:
– That’s some good-ass chocolate.
– It’s better when it’s simple. You start throwing too much crap in it, and you lose the appreciation of the more nuanced flavor.
– Give me US chocolate when you’re getting wacky with the ingredients. Give me CDM chocolate when it’s just chocolate.
– In the future, I won’t do theme weeks back-to-back. It was certainly a fun two weeks, but I don’t know if either you nor I appreciated this as much as we could have. Let me know if I’m wrong.
– I do not, in any way, understand why they decided to stop this stuff from being imported. Petty stuff.
…
Google Search That Brought Traffic to BOaP of the Day
“what happens when you melt a hershey air bar”
NEWS: Nestle to Remove Artificial Ingredients By End Of Year
Big announcement in the candy bar world today: Nestle’s goin’ natural.
According to the Wall Street Journal, you can probably expect others to follow in their footsteps.
The move makes Nestlé USA, a unit of Switzerland-based Nestlé with about $10 billion in sales, the first major U.S. candy manufacturer to remove such artificial ingredients—though others are working on similar moves.
Burgeoning demand for food made with simpler ingredients has put pressure on the packaged-food industry in recent years to develop natural substitutes that have reliable, cost-effective supplies.
Now, call me maybe, but I’m not getting particularly stirred up about this. If the only “artificial” things being removed from the candy bars are artificial flavorings and food dyes, then this isn’t going to change a whole lot — the lactic acid esters and soy lecithins of the world will still be included, and I’m still going to be not sure what the hell they are.
I’ll be OK with that, of course. But this move really seems to be mostly one done for PR purposes.
Breaking Off A Piece 
