But now…I’ve just looked over at my her eating a Tunnock’s Dark Chocolate Caramel Coated Wafer and lo and behold she’s nibbling at the chocolate covering like a pro!
Which now leads me to believe that a tendency towards professional sweet eating may be genetic. Further scientific investigation will follow!
We’ve all been there, assembled our tools, got our white gloves on and popped open that eggy vestibule that is the inner contents of a Kinder Egg, only to find…a solid toy! WTF? It’s all about the assembly right? So that got me thinking, is there a way that you weed out the solid ones from the ‘constructors’ just by giving the egg a good shaking?
My friend Rosie and I made our first foray into this the other night at a Co-Op in Brighton. The video above shows how we got on. Next step is to video both the shaking of the eggy weg and then filming the hatching to see what’s in there.
Maybe, just maybe, you could film yourself doing the same and share a link with us from Youtube or summin?
One day there will be a ‘Kinder contents sound register’ and we can start to sleep a bit easier at night. Make it so Kinder! (They won’t, they’re too busy spoiling ambassadors with their Rochers, the b’stards!)
I’m combining a pink Smartie with a pink Tooty Frootie. It’s not a bad combo.
Now the Tezza (just made that up, humour me) is a complex beast. Firstly, once you extract it from its little cardboard casing, you’re confronted by a brilliantly coloured, weird flimsy wrapping paper. The best bit about the wrapping is the way that it resurrects the ye olde days fashion of wrapping oranges in intricately pleated tissue paper and sealing the pleats at both ends with a branded sticker. It’s beautiful, intricate and, I suspect, something only nuns could do.
So you’ve disrobed it from its pleated cloak and what are you confronted with? A shiny brown, dimply orange (smaller than they used to be no?)…apparently a very simple structure on initial appraisal, it’s a genuinely satisfying thing to hold the Tezza, but the problem is…it knows it. Go on, have an inspect, savour this moment as you realise that the Terry’s Chocolate Orange is possibly the smarmiest chocolate in existence! If it were a person it would be Michael McIntyre: a perfectly groomed man of the people, a cynical money magnet (and secret S&M er). Think about it, it’s all happy and fun, Grandma’s love it and kids love it too but all the while the jokes on you love … because you can’t get into it!
Many a tear has been shed trying to extract individual segments from this orb. It’s got the better of many a knife and teaspoon combo. You know that bent cake fork at the back of mummy’s cutlery drawer? A Tezza did that. Thankfully, the makers realised that infuriating post Christmas diners across the land wasn’t that great a marketing strategy and started to print the secret magic instructions on the packet, which are…to give it a whack!
Yes, basically you bash it and it gives up all its secrets like it’s had a week long stay at Abugraib. I know what you’re thinking: “easy, anyone can do that!” and you’d be right, any old spoonbill can tap a Tezza and lap up the spoils, but can you break it open leaving every segment unbruised, detatched separately and the grand prize – the chocolate core – in one piece? Not so flirty now flirty boy!
So…this is how to eat a Terry’s Chocolate Orange
Difficulty rating: 5/10
1. Carefully peel the little label away from the top of the wrapper, then insert your whole hand into the newly created wrapper pouch and extract the globe (place on table).
2. Now…here’s where you get a bit Michaelangelo, have a good look at it, have an examine, feel its weakest point.
3. Once you’ve chosen the target point, pick it up with your thumb and 1st, 2nd, 3rd fingers and give it a hard tap against the table.
4. Now, after lots of practice, you will have produced lots of segments and an intact inner chunk of chok.
5. Mr inner chunk is really easy, set him aside and scoff him like a hamster would once you’ve dealt with the segments.
6. Now, segment handling is a controversial business. I like to eat them as slowly and precariously as possible (obviously) so I hold each one width ways between my lips and dissolve the chocolate from the thin end outwards with the help of some tongue action. This will look like you are trying to pretend you have a one large solid chocolate tooth about 3cms across. (Remember to take it out of your mouth when you laugh in the face of anyone who suggests anything so ridiculous).
Method: heat it up in your hands while it’s still in its wrapper till the outside gooey bit gets really gooey. Then take your time removing bits of limey goo nibble by nibble WITHOUT breaking the shell. Once that’s done you’ll be on a real knife edge of shell weakness so get it in your mouth right away. You’ll need to crunch down quick to released the chocolatey antidote to your now shrivelled up limey tongue. (Then start writing letters to the appropriate people in Paris demanding that they make a perfume that smells like this sweet.)
The biggest Creme Egg ever?
Bloody hell! This Cadbury’s Creme Egg is a) not of the right consistency and b) not of the right temperature to yield optimum results! There is you see a holy grail of Creme Eggs, rarer than the gold notes at the end of the Crystal Maze if you will – the Grainy One. Finding a Grainy One basically means a day off work and a bottle of wine to celebrate. Get your special spoon out Gerald, you’re in for a treat, etc.
Now, I have to just tell you something, this post would have got to you a lot quicker if it wasn’t for the box of chocolates I was greeted with on returning home from a restaurant tonight. And I’m pleased to report that the Hotel Chocolate ‘H-Box’ really is a sterling showing of milk chocolates with an array of ingenious flavour combinations: butterscotch ganache with shortbread biscuit, praline with crispy pancake (yeah, that’s right) and best of all Amarena Cherry suspended (suspended no less!) in Amaretto buttercream.
Well, that blatantly led me to Googling ‘Amarena cherries’ which I very much doubted the existence of. Would you believe it they not only exist but also are very much a delicacy in Southern Italy, especially at the bottom of brulees. Lush. Anyway, back to the eggy weggies. Well, needless to say that the Grainy One is a pretty rare thing. I can think of maybe only two occasions when one’s tipped up but what a total joy it was.
You see, the difference between ol’ Grainy and the normal Creme Egg is that it’s more of a fondant paste than a runny, gooey consistency and subsequently lends itself to much more complex eating procedures. I like to approach my Grainy One with a spoon, but not just any spoon, a pointy one! I think I probably get the same job satisfaction from prizing out the layers of a Grainy One than a vet gets from prizing out a tumour. Because ultimately, the whole reason that people like you and me eat Creme Eggs is for the mind blowingly mental joy of eating the yolk separately from the white bit.
You know it! But seriously, that can only be done effectively with a spoon. The tongue is a very fine instrument, where would we be without it? Ahem, but it can’t do the job of some expertly placed Sheffield Steel in this instance. You need a teaspoon with a long, Womble shaped nose (preferably with a nice long shaft) which you will use very much like a surgeon’s blade. It’s that spoon at the bottom of the spoon compartment in the cutlery draw. You know the one, yeah…my Mum did…and she threw it out!!!! I never got over it. Right…onwards!
How to eat a Creme Egg Difficulty Rating 3/5
1.Carefully peel off the wrapper so it comes away whole. Ripping a Creme Egg wrapper basically rips a hole in the space-time continuum, consider yourself warned.
2. Imagine you’re a rabbit and use your front teeth to ‘rabbit’ off the pointy end of the Creme Egg until you get a thin flat surface. Be very aware of the tension of the chocolate layer at this stage: you could easily induce a vertical break which is very difficult to recover from. (You should support the egg firmly with thumb, forefinger and middle but don’t be too bashful to hold it in both hands like a squirrel)
3. Ok, now ideally you would use your tongue as a battering ram to poke the flat surface chocolate down into the cream and then hoover it up super quickly and swallow it without taking too much of the cream too.
4. Well done! You’ve opened your egg! Now it’s time to make a bigger, spoon sized, hole by licking away some of the cream and nibbling down the edge of the egg. WARNING! Stop immediately if you hit yolk! Move straight onto the next stage, possibly introducing a very tiny spoon or even an ice cream stick to get that yolk out as separately as possible from the white.
5. Now, let’s assume that you’ve chanced upon a Grainy One, your yolk hasn’t appeared yet and you got a consistently thick shell which won’t crack (buy a lottery ticket, seriously…this never happens). Take the spoon and start to carefully excavate the white, eating the excess until you discover yolk.
6. There’s no trick to this part really, it’s just a case of getting the most yolk on your spoon with the least amount of white and eating it in one go. I swear to you it tastes deliciously different from the white. In fact – it tastes of ‘yellow’ I will find out why.
7. Now have a great time cleaning out the remaining white with your spoon and then eating the hollow chocky shell in one whole mouthful – absolutely compulsory! You have the option of introducing hot tea at this point to create a tea/chocolate soup in your mouth.
Enjoy!
Yummy Crunchie!
It was only a matter of time before we got on to the Crunchie. Pretty much chocolate bar royalty and a staple part of my diet since I was wee. Crunchies are a basic, dependable foodstuff that are almost certainly on the ‘essential foods’ list of nuclear bunker suppliers everywhere. And what a satisfying nuclear winter you’d have munching away on stick after stick of golden cinder toffee coated in creamy milk chocolate.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure what the deal is with the chocolate component of the Crunchie. It’s ‘snappy’ hard most of the time and in most temperatures but it gets to a certain point – mostly thumb/finger temperature - and it just rolls over all pathetic like and goes melty. It’s this quality though that expert chocolate eaters like ourselves find so attractive and consequently use to our advantage. However, it’s not the chocolate part of the Crunchie but rather its triple textured cinder toffee contents that are the expert sweet eater’s most useful component. This is because, and let’s get down to brass tacks here, all three bits react to spit differently.
Once you get the chocolate off (and don’t be fooled into thinking that’s going to be easy) you’ll see a bar consisting of a hard, eggshell finished (and highly spit resistant) outer wall, tiny, closely packed bubbly inner wall with a open bubbled, more honeycomb textured (and utterly wimpy in the face of saliva) central seam. So, we’ll assume that your newsagent shop is temperate rather than Siberian or tropical and you have an evenly temperatured Crunchie. Let us begin…(a gong sounds in the distance) How to eat a Crunchie: Difficulty Rating 5/5
- Firstly, break the Crunchie in half with a quick snapping motion to leave you with two sticks. Put one aside. (Don’t hold onto stick two or the chocolate will go gooey in your hand and render the next stages impossible)
- Using your upper and lower front teeth, lever off the remaining square chocolate end piece and give the bar a quarter turn so that one of the long side sections is facing your mouth.
- (Advanced move alert!) by this time, the chocolate along the sides should be soft enough to be slid upwards and off the bar by the lower front teeth in two tooth-width sections. Be extremely careful here or you’ll get little chips along the bar which will naturally upset a perfectionist like you.
- Now it’s the turn of the thicker top part which is slightly easier to click off all the way along the bar.
- Saving the hardest part till last, the thinnest layer of chocolate lurks along the underside of the Crunchie and presents you with possibly your most difficult sweet eating challenge of all…the licker! Duh duh derrrrrrrr! Be afraid, be very afraid. Your goal to maintain the integrity of the bar must be foremost in your mind throughout this final stage of chocolate removal.
- Using your upper front teeth (with the underside now uppermost to receive the teeth accordingly) give the first couple of centimeters a test scrape, pulling the chocolate back and away from the bar and into your mouth. Assess the texture and ‘give’; will that work all the way along or will you need to resort to a highly specific bit of licking to dampen the chocolate and make it slide away from it’s honeycombed home?
- Nine times out of ten, in the averagely heated home, you are looking at having to soak that choc off. Be very careful; you want to retain as much of the open textured honeycomb part as possible.
- Well done you! It’s stressful isn’t it? That’s living life on the edge right there my friend. Now, proceed to saliva up and disintegrate the open textured central seam leaving you with two separate sticks of close textured comb and shiny outer wall.
- Have a gay old time sticking the close-combed bit to your tongue, obliterating it as you go and trying to manufacture a thinnest possible wall part without breaking the stick.
- Broke it? GAME OVER! Insert £2! (or just try again with the second bar)
Note: Any hardened professional will note my obvious error at stage 1. - of instructing the reader to break the bar into two pieces. This contravenes basic sweet eating strategy to keep the whole bar as one. However, maintaining a whole Crunchie is THE HOLY GRAIL of the professional sweet eating sports person and I don’t want to put off any adventurous beginners. Indeed there are only three people in the world who can lay claim to the ‘Crunchie Master’ title. Two are said to reside in the very same mysterious Sweet Yogi dojo in an undisclosed mountain range in Nepal where I received my training and the third… well, I couldn’t possibly say.
I was asked to write something for the wedding book of my close friends so naturally I decided to give them some sage sweet wisdom…
Wedding Dragees
Dear Happy Couple Over the years that I have known you, especially you Marc, I couldn’t fail to notice that you have a particularly avid passion for sweet eating, bordering, if I may be so bold, on the semi professional standard. As both your friend and the editor of www.howtoeatsweets.com I feel it only appropriate that my marital advice to you should be along sweet-based lines. Let’s take a stroll through the Wonka chocolate factory garden that is married life and see what sweets you might encounter along the way.
First stop after the nuptuals…the honeymoon! I’m not sure where you’re driving off to but perhaps with your passion for fresh air you maybe off for a break to the Lake District in lovely Cumbria, home of the tiny town of Kendal, birthplace, as you know, of the fabulous Mint Cake, crown prince of rambler’s snacks and forerunner of the ‘energy bar’. My advice here would be to invest in the brownish, unrefined kind as it’s more intensely flavoured. It’s also got a much better, rougher texture than the white kind. Don’t be tempted to throw the wrapper over your shoulder, you’ll need it; no one could eat a whole mint cake in one go – don’t try! Make sure to break chunks off down the helpful score marks and let it dissolve on your tongue to rejuicify into an excellent lump of minty goo that can then be used to ‘butter’ the tongue before swallowing.
Perhaps it won’t be long though before you’ve had your first argument. Gah! What to do? You’re driving around in the car in a rage, she’s storming around the house trying to make the dog poo on your clothes. There’s only one thing to do…buy her some cream filled liquorice cables! The fun that a lady with manicured nails can have razoring down the length of the liquorice, flattening it out and rolling up the paste inside will soon distract her from her fury.
Liquorice Cables
Now, we all know how brilliant you are at throwing a dinner party. But don’t be fooled, no one is really there for the first or second courses or even the groaning tray of aperitifs that Marc produces at the end. No, they are all there in the hope that he will produce one of the Frau-Fabri-secret-recipe-baked-cheesecakes and that all the other guests suddenly die murder mystery style leaving the remaining guest/murderer to eat the entire thing to themselves.
But…what if the cat got at it? Don’t worry, just whip up a ‘sweet trifle’ from your stash under the bed! It’s really easy…start by lining a glass bowl with giant flump cables, then create a base layer with flying saucers (possibly in jelly if you’re feeling a bit mental), adding on top of that a layer of Tootie Frooties/Nerds/white mice mixture and crown it off with a topping of candy floss (in a tub from Poundland – don’t knock it till you’ve tried it) and a sprinkle of Millions. People will talk of it for YEARS after!
Tooty Frooties
So there you are, a few sweet-wise tips for your life together. Congratulations and keep it sweet! D x (P.S. if there is ever a patter of tiny Fabri feet in the household we suggest creating a walk in ‘sweet safe’ to keep the goodies out of their sticky confectionery grabbing mits. Real sweets are for the people who appreciate them most - grown ups!) THE END
The Toffifee nestles in his box
Before you start reading this, getting into it, lining up your Fifee’s ready to try the techniques I’m about to lay down for ya’ll…get yourself over to the Toffifee website…go on! You can get to it here. Because, after the BORING zzzzzzzzz intro screen, a magical thing happens…a lil’ Toffifee attaches itself to your mouse and follows you everywhere! It’s brilliant. (Why oh why can’t I download the app for that?) And, you get the added bonus of being swiftly brainwashed into thinking that Toffifees grow in woods under bushes of sheer joy and babies giggles nourished by memories of vigorous walking holidays in the Alps. Basically, it’s a great website and there’s animals and nuts on it. And quite right too because nothing, I mean nothing, is too good for such a magnificent sweet.
The Toffifee has so much going for it. You don’t think so? Well, just handle one for a minute. The first thing that hits you is the general weightiness of the Toffifee. You are really getting bang for your buck with this baby. The Toffifee weighs in at an imposing eight grams. It demands attention. It’s nails. It’s the sweet equivalent of the posturing young urban teenager. Toffifees are basically your Grime confectionery.
That weight is due to an unusually dense core of a single hazelnut surrounded by a toffee/choco/nutty praline that is, frankly, outrageously tasty sweet ‘crack’. There’s no other way to describe its effect on you. I would actually have to be wrestled away from a 48 piece box. (It’s probably what that Glutony man died of in Seven. Actually, you should have someone at hand to take the box away from you.)
However, they didn’t stop at perfecting a delicious soft core, oh no. Showing considerable commitment to the sweet connoisseur, Stork, the makers, decided to support it in a texturally audacious, super-thin, pliable toffee cup. And then, then, then……crowned it all with a stunning, over sized, chocolate disk! (It’s not the greatest chocolate but it’s not the bad kind) I’m mean srsly? The disk as well? You bad, bad old lady sweet inventor! (I like to think that there is a room full of cheeky grandmas exchanging congratulatory winks for inventing such a fabulous sweet. It’s indulgent, ridiculous and a guaranteed way for grandmas to sicken small children before handing them back to their parents for long car journeys.)
Obviously we have to talk about the actual flavour of the Toffifee as it’s so unique. On eating a composite of the nut/cup/paste/choco disk parts you are greeted with a fabulously buttery back note, the nutty fudgy vapours go straight up the olfactory organs and then the slightly grainy nutty/malty chocolate paste coats the whole of the tongue. Naturally you’re compelled to chew away to dispose of the soft toffee cup and the nut but the effect of this is that the whole lot just intensifies into a kind of super-maxed-out soft toffee ball. It’s in the process of this separation and subsequent amalgamation of the main composites of ‘toffee’ that the Toffifee preceded molecular gastronomic techniques of ‘deconstructing’ foods by about 20 years.
It’s true! Ultimate sweet connoseurs, the Belgians, caught on to this very quickly and now the whole nation is addicted to them*. (*source: the Toffifee website) Of course you and I would never eat them like that! How utterly ridiculous we would say! So let’s get down to the tricky business of how to eat them. Where does one start? There are tonnes of ways to approach a Toffifee. The nature of the component parts, coupled with their contrasting textures and favours can lead you along many different paths. I’m going to go with a couple of my favourites.
A) The Inverted Balancer Difficulty rating: 2 1.
Take the Toffifee between the thumb and index finger. Use your upper and lower front teeth to ‘click’ off the chocolate disk. Eat the disk.
2. Then, holding the Toffifee with both hands, place your thumbs on the base of the toffee cup and your index finger on the edge.
3. Peel down the toffee to reveal the inner paste round nut bit.
4. Scoff the paste round nut bit. 5. Fold up the toffee cup, post in, chew and swallow! How nice was that? Ha ha! Yeah.
B) The Venus Fly Trap Difficulty rating: 3 1.
Hold the Toffifee round the middle with the thumb and middle finger and the far edge with the index.
2. Introduce half of the Toffifee into the mouth.
3. Using the top teeth more forcefully than the lower ones, bite downwards through half of the disk, paste and nut.
4. Bring this back up out of the still cup shaped cup and eat it.
5. Now, you should be left with a half filled cup which you can fold edge to edge to hold the remaining contents like a little ravioli.
6. Eat it. This way you get to double the toffee hit. That cup really is the key to maxing out the flavour of the Toffifee, make the most of it.
The Malteser: miracle of science
Yes! The lil’ Malteser! A miracle of modern industrially applied science really. How do they get the round ball of honeycomb malt all covered with chocolate without there being a nipple or a foot? It’s amazing when you think about it.
These people at the Guardian chat room were as amazed as me about the mystery of the Malteser’s manufacture: http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0„-6315,00.html I particularly liked Simon Mackie from Birmingham’s, ‘you ain’t seen me’ assertion that “it is no coincidence that the Horlicks factory is just up the road from the Mars factory where they make Maltesers”. Oh yeah? Is it now? Wait, where’s he gone….?
I’m not gonna take up all your time with this one. It’s quite simple really. The aim of the game is to get the honeycomb out without eating the chocolate, which you may have at the end as your reward for being exceedingly clever.
Method 1 (difficulty rating 3/5)
1. Holding the Maltester lightly between your thumb and forefinger, bite a tinsy 2mm x 2mm hole in the ‘top’
2. Inject a good quantity of spit into the hole to thoroughly mush up the contents and extract with a well aimed suck - not too hard or the chocolate sphere will collapse
3. You won the prize! Now go eat your tiny, hollow, chocolate football!
Method 2 (difficulty rating 2/5)
1. Using front or side teeth, carefully crack the Malteser into two hemispheres
2. Hold one in each thumb and forefinger and take it in turns to wet and extract the honeycomb filling as before
3. Eat the (slightly crappy tasting) mini chocolate bowl that you have fashioned!
There you have it, how to eat a Malteser.
