My gawd man, did someone high on coffee and beer beat you with chocolate when you were young?
When I was working as a software developer, I had a Godiva chocolate store in a local mall. After every holiday I’d go to the store and buy several boxes of their assorted truffles for 25 to 50% off. These boxes were normally like $40-$50. I’d then eat delicious truffles for a while. Unfortunately they didn’t last that long because I don’t know how to pace myself! (like games)
Newman’s Own Dark Chocolate Cups. Imagine Reeses’, with high-quality dark chocolate (but not bitter, only like 50% cocoa, so you could eat a ton of em) and smooth creamy peanut butter rather than the grainy sweet crap Reeses’ uses. Sugar, not high-fructose cane syrup, too.
These are dangerous. Try to buy less than 16 packages at a time, the amazon link was just the first that came up.
I don’t know! Her little sister doesn’t seem to have the same affliction though.
Milky Way is good; better when frozen.
But apparently I’m the only person in the world who likes Baby Ruth. I guess they manufacture it just for me. And since I almost never buy it, I regard the whole enterprise as a tremendous tribute to me from Nestle USA. Which is not, come to think of it, actually an honor at all…
For chocolatier-style chocolate, by the way, the stuff from L. A. Burdick in Cambridge is very good. Expensive, but worth it. Pavé Glacé are especially good if you like rich dark chocolate.
Oooh! Me too!
If I had a pile of Halloween candy and there was a mini Baby Ruth in there, I would most likely grab that first.
So good! I remember in high school, my parents used to put one of those 36 pack of full MW bars in the freezer and my sisters & I would sneak a bar out pretty regularly.
Thanks for the lack of conversion. Particularly with beer, I’ve had more tallboys, pints, 12oz bottles, etc. than I can count foist upon me by well-meaning friends and acquaintances. At best, Left Hand Milk Stout on tap is something I can tolerate enough to swig down a pint of over the course of 30+ minutes. Even then, I’m still grimacing with every sip, though, and it’s probably one of the least bitter beers I’m familiar with.
My true loathing for coffee developed in college. The office job I worked at the time had me brew 3 triple-huge carafes of the stuff each morning and then clean out and sanitize said carafes in the afternoon. I’d go home/to class each day reeking of Dunkin Donuts original blend. I probably still have clothes from college with the stains on them.
I like them. They probably fall outside my top 5, but hover on the edges of top 10. I shamelessly ensured all Baby Ruths and Almond Joys from my sons trick or treating bag were diverted my way.
I do also like dark chocolate though, but am not a purist like Ron is. I will take any kind of dark chocolate, and have had some very good ones. Given half a chance I will take most dark chocolate over other candy bars. But when talking about chocolate bars I was more considering from the things you can buy in most any store.
Baby Ruths are ok.
I put them in my 3 Musketeers, Mounds/Almond Joy, and Mars bars category.
It’s a bit of something for a change of taste kind of thing.
Charleston Chews are pretty good.
I can never find them here in Colorado.
Your’re not alone Armando. I hate coffee AND beer. Actually soda too (the carbonation). I make up for the lack of drink calories with desserts!
I got addicted to Tim Tams when I was traveling to Australia on and off a few years back. I’m glad they’re not as common here in the States, it keeps my chocolate-covered cookie (excuse me, biscuit) intake down.
This reminds me of my second-favorite candybar, the Peanut Butter Twix.
Generally speaking, I’m not super big on caramel (Milky Ways are probably a top-10 for me, just barely, and the only caramel-heavy candybar that highly placed), so original Twix and I aren’t really on speaking terms.
And not the hellish Twix “PB” abominations they replaced real Peanut Butter Twix with for a few years in the early 2010s, either. Shit had dark chocolate-flavored cookies and totally overloaded the peanut butter and milk chocolate coating with their acrid flavor (only thing worse than dark chocolate is fake dark chocolate–yeugh!).
But man, classic Peanut Butter Twix? Crisp vanilla cookie, thick, fairly creamy peanut butter, and the lightly crinkled milk chocolate coating, spread over two sticks per normal sized bag to let you really savor the whole experience that much longer. Fuckin’ classic, man.
“The Chocolate Thread, in which Armando Penblade waxes rhapsodic about candybars.”
P.S. - robc04, the only sodas I can drink are Diet; it’s what dad raised me on (the regular ones give him headaches), so it was the only soda taste I really had up until I started visiting friends houses in mid-grade school. To this day the regular stuff just overwhelms me. But I’ve mostly switched to iced tea sweetened with sugar-free stuff like Stevia at home these days. Like you, I get all my unnecessary sugar-calories from dessert :-D
This reminds me of my second-favorite candybar, the Peanut Butter Twix.
Generally speaking, I’m not super big on caramel (Milky Ways are probably a top-10 for me, just barely, and the only caramel-heavy candybar that highly placed), so original Twix and I aren’t really on speaking terms.
And not the hellish Twix “PB” abominations they replaced real Peanut Butter Twix with for a few years in the early 2010s, either. Shit had dark chocolate-flavored cookies and totally overloaded the peanut butter and milk chocolate coating with their acrid flavor (only thing worse than dark chocolate is fake dark chocolate–yeugh!).
But man, classic Peanut Butter Twix? Crisp vanilla cookie, thick, fairly creamy peanut butter, and the lightly crinkled milk chocolate coating, spread over two sticks per normal sized bag to let you really savor the whole experience that much longer. Fuckin’ classic, man.
“The Chocolate Thread, in which Armando Penblade waxes rhapsodic about candybars.”
P.S. - robc04, the only sodas I can drink are Diet; it’s what dad raised me on (the regular ones give him headaches), so it was the only soda taste I really had up until I started visiting friends houses in mid-grade school. To this day the regular stuff just overwhelms me. But I’ve mostly switched to iced tea sweetened with sugar-free stuff like Stevia at home these days. Like you, I get all my unnecessary sugar-calories from dessert :-D
Huh. I can’t imagine looking at a Crunchie or a Daim and thinking “What this needs is less Crunchie/Daim”. That said, these were amazing:
But… but… college is the time to develop your coffee addiction! That or the navy. Two stories:
At the end of my Freshman year of college, my dad drove down to pick me up. We packed up the trailer and spent the night in my now-empty dorm room so that we could drive back first thing the next morning. The new day dawned, and dad went down the street to pick us up some breakfast as I crammed the last of the stuff into the vehicle.
Now, like many 18-year-olds, I didn’t really get along with my father and the day before had been something of a strain on our already-tense relationship.
Dad gets back with some fast food breakfast and two large (like 32-oz) coffees. He says, “Sorry, I didn’t know how you took your coffee, so it’s just black.”
The fact of the matter was that I didn’t take my coffee any way at all. I had never actually drank any in my life. But damned if I was going to admit that to the old man. Fuck him and his mind-games! Like I didn’t see right through him getting me food and treating me like an adult! So over the course of several hours I sipped that foul, terrible fast-food swill until it was all gone. Moreover, I resolved to develop a taste for coffee. To spite the bastard.
That summer, I was working as a surveyor’s aide for the laziest surveyor in northern Virginia. As the workday started, we would pull into a little greasy spoon and spend almost 90 minutes eating breakfast. Every day I would order a coffee and drink it and the refill down. Black. It wasn’t until months later that I would come to understand that I was drinking what was perhaps the Worst Coffee on the East Coast. But by the end of the summer I was sipping it down and actually enjoying the taste of it. When I returned to school and drank the (still awful) coffee that the dining hall served, it was like sipping ambrosia. And of course now there is no way I could possibly start the day without my freshly ground brew.
And by the by, I got past my rebellious not-quite-an-adult stage quickly thereafter. Dad and I are quite close nowadays.
Second story:
My eldest daughter is a Freshman at college. As part of her meal plan, she gets a small amount of “food bucks” that she can spend at the on-campus convenience stores and the on-campus Starbucks.
After just three weeks at school, she complained that she was out of “food bucks” and that I needed to bump her meal plan up to a plan that had more of them. I did the math and basically told her “no”. The meal plan that she was on was actually a middle-of-the-road plan… and the $150 “food bucks” was supposed to last a full semester, not just three weeks. Upping her to the highest tier plan would only add another $100 to that total, which by my math would only last until the end of the month.
But daaadeeee! I need more money so I can get coffee! That’s all I buy with it!
Wait, what? How do you send $50 a week on coffee? And when did you start drinking coffee anyway?
I’m a college student now! I need that coffee to wake up!
Yeah… I’m pretty sure that the dining hall (to which you have an all-you-can-eat plan) serves coffee. It might not be as good as Starbucks, but it’s caffeine.
Daadeeee! They don’t have mocha frappuccinos!
Mocha frappa… what? That’s not coffee, that’s a coffee-flavored milkshake.
It’s got caffeine! I need it to wake up!
After I stopped laughing derisively, I spoke at some length about the importance of learning how to budget her money, how I wasn’t paying for four years of coffee-flavored milkshakes, and how back in MY DAY all I had was brown-stained water made by sadistic corps-of-cadets cooks masquerading as coffee to get me through exams. I’m sure she tuned me out after the first 15 seconds, but the end result was the same: she has no “food bucks” for the rest of the semester and her days of spending $10 every day on a coffee-shake came to an end. I spoke to her the other day and she darkly mentioned how she had been forced to drink (shudder) dining hall coffee every morning. And so the wheel turns.
I worked nights for many years as I was going through college. For a few months in the fall I would end up on a 6am-2:30 shift. That would kill me. But the coffee in those days was so bad I just could never drink it. It was years later before I developed a taste for coffee. Had I learned to drink it earlier I probably would still be at that job…no I would probably have retired from it already. Damn.
How in the hell did we go from tiny morsels of heaven, to acrid black cleaning solution known as coffee?
If I’m going to drink my caffeine, it will come from tea leaves, thankyouverymuch.
Tell her to take dining room coffee, toss in a packet of swiss miss hot chocolate, then blend it up with ice. Same thing. Basically.