Candy variety and brands

So I was at the pharmacy the other day when a flashy sale sign in the candy section caught my eye. I don't usually indulge in junk food, so I have never took the time to study the kinds of candies found in the aisles of my new adopted province. This time however, my eyes stopped long enough to take in the products and read the labels to realize that quite a few of the sweets on the racks are in fact new to me. The lady-pink Ganong sweets were the first items to catch my eyes. I have seen Ganong truffles and chocolates in Ontario and Quebec, but I have never seen their chicken bones, a candy which I have never even heard of before. This led me to a candy shopping spree to discover all the candies yet unknown to me.

So according to the Ganong website, Ganong was founded in 1873, and is Canada's "oldest" candy company. Their chocolate makes up the largest volume of their sales, so this is probably why I am likely to be more familiar with their chocolate than their other products. Their head office is in St Stephen, New Brunswick.

Ganong chicken bones.

The chicken bones are apparently a favourite of Newfoundlanders. It has a glassy pink candy cinnamon exterior, and a hint of chocolate on the inside. For those who like cinnamon hearts, they will not need to wait until the Valentine's day period for their dose of cinnamon if they can get their hands on chicken bones.

I quite enjoyed the chicken bone bark - a dark chocolate with tiny crunchy pieces of cinnamon chicken bones.

  

Top left to right: Caramel log, Caramel, Tea Cake, Snowball.

Next, I discovered the Tunnock sweets. Tunnock is a Scottish company established in 1890. Their candy products are apparently really popular in the United Kingdom according to wiki, and has equally made a big hit in Newfoundland.

When I asked to buy a Snowball the other day at a bus rest stop, the shop owner regretted that they do not have any more snowballs with the tourist season just wrapping up, because Snowball has become one of the more popular "Newfoundland" souvenirs to buy and try.

The snowball consists of a marshmallow, and is covered in chocolate and coco nut flakes. However, the marshmallow does not have the dense and springy texture of the typical North American marshmallow. In fact it is a kind of Italian marshmallow which is moist all over, fluffy, and when you bite it lightly, your teeth slice through the fluff right away with no resistance.  

Tea cakes are similar to snowballs, except it is not covered in coconut flakes, and it has a thin bottom layer of shortbread.

As you can see from the photo, tea cakes require careful handling, or else the chocolate shell will crack into multiple pieces and leak out the soft marshmallow.

The Tunnock Caramel is a candy bar of wafer flakes   with a thin layer of caramel sandwiched in between the flakes, and then entirely covered in chocolate. I personally prefer Nestlé's Kit Kat with thin layers of chocolate in between the wafer flakes, because I find the caramel in the Tunnock bars eliminate the crispy texture of the wafer flakes, and I prefer the crispy crunch to the candy bar.

The caramel logs are almost a replicate of the caramel bars, except for its layer of coconut flakes on the exterior. Do you see a pattern here? A whole candy bar niche can be exploited by changing just one ingredient to create a  new candy bar.



The photo shoot for this post was very gratifying.