Favorite Day Milk Chocolate Bars with Popping Candy

When I was in high school, my friends and I "outgrew" trick or treating for a few years. But we still liked to wear costumes and take part in the festivities in one way or another, so one year, at the suggestion of my neighbor's mom, we decided to dress up with some old clothes and monster masks and hand out candy on his porch.

My neighbor friend was a bit of a prankster, so with a gleam in his eye, he climbed up onto his kitchen counter and reached into a cupboard all the way at the top. He shuffled a few things around, cleared away some cobwebs and produced a mixed bag of miniature chocolate bars. He gleefully announced that the candy he'd produced was at least five or six years old and that he'd been hiding it for such an occasion. We opened one of the bars to inspect it. It was nearly stark white. It tasted funny, too. Apparently, when left to sit long enough, chocolate starts turning back to pure sugar...or something like that.

Anyway, we filled an old plastic jack-o-lantern with the candy bars and wrote a note that said "Take candy at your own risk." We set up a graveyard scene and we pretended to be dead until kids would come along and reach into the candy bowl.

It was raining that Halloween, so we didn't get a ton of trick-or-treaters, but the ones that did come were about our age, and we knew most of them at least in passing from high school. About an hour after the first bunch of kids had grabbed our outdated chocolate, they returned shouting obscenities and began throwing the candy bars at us. "WHAT IS THIS $#!t!?" they screamed, pelting us with the unused portions of their fun-sized treats. My friend and I were too busy laughing our butts off to care that we were being bombarded with candy bars. Eventually we ran inside and they ran out of ammo.

Ah, good times.

But it would seem I have some bad karma to deal with when it comes to old mini chocolate bars. Looks like Target played a similar joke on me. These little pop rocks candy bars are all melted and discolored. They taste sorta okay, I guess.

The pop rocks things are the best part about this product. They do indeed crackle and snap in your mouth. I've had snapping chocolate bars before, and most of them were better than this offering. This product has a witch on the cover, and there's a caption that reads: "popping potion." But apparently the official name of the product is just "milk chocolate bars with popping candy." Lame.

For four bucks, it's a good amount of chocolate, and it's optimized for handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, assuming that's still a thing. Each bar is individually wrapped so it's harder to slip razor blades, rat poison, and AIDS into the candy without it being super obvious.

Anyway, it's not terrible for a Halloween treat bag, either for you and your family or for the neighborhood kids. I still wouldn't buy again. I'd try to find something a little tastier and more unique for next year.

I give this candy 6 out of 10 stars.

Favorite Day Monster Drizzle Caramel Corn

At least part of food blogging is aesthetics. To some degree, we have to worry about nice colors, layouts, and pretty pictures. So when target.com ships a chocolate-covered caramel corn mix in 90°F+ heat and it melts all over the see-through window on the packaging, it's kind of a bummer. It looks ugly.

But I just think of it as a healthy dose of veritas baked into the art form. It's not like I'm going to clean the chocolate off the little window and I'm certainly not going to drive to Target to get a refund or anything like that. It is what it is. This product came with grungy packaging and you get to see it in all its glory.

How's the food within the packaging, you ask? Meh. It's edible. The best part of Monster Trail Mix is all the various ingredients. It's supposed to have peanuts, M&M's, raisins, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, pretzel balls, and/or peanut butter cups, depending upon which version you've got. 

We tried the Monster Granola Bars a while back, and they had peanuts, raisins, M&M's, chocolate chips, and peanut butter chips, all in a convenient bar format. This stuff is just caramel corn with chocolate and pretzels...and there are barely any pretzels! So it's essentially just run-of-the-mill caramel corn with a bit of chocolate, most of which melted in our bag and stuck to the sides of the packaging.

It's part of Target's "Supernatural Sweets" line which, I guess, is seasonal...and imbued with the same demonic powers that inhabit the souls of Target's executives. Figures.

$4.00 for the resealable 7 oz bag. I wouldn't buy again. Maybe I can pawn this stuff off on the wifey...

I give this snack 5 out of 10 stars.