Sugar Savvy

I can never pass up a battle of the sexes challenge. Maybe it comes from being the younger sister of two adventurous brothers, but when I saw the Yorkie bar proclaiming ‘It’s not for girls’, I had to buy it. I guess that is part of their marketing scheme, and it worked on this suffragette. […]

While mentally cataloging my favorite sweet treats I realized that many of them come from small stores that survive on local business. Here are three of my favorite chocolate places in Sydney. They are all specialty shops, selling chocolate by weight. The busiest times for chocolate stores are from Christmas up until Mother’s Day. […]

Pods. If I were to create a chocolate named Pods I would make chocolate eggs, which when you cracked them open a white chocolate alien would fall out, amidst a sea of M&Ms, like an alien explosion. A wasted opportunity unfortunately, Pods are actually chocolate wafer bowls filled with milk chocolate with a center of […]

Of all the types of sugar around, one of my favorites is icing sugar, or confectioner’s sugar. In a city where white Christmases (or white Julys) are impossible, for a lot of my life sifted icing sugar was the closest I came to snow. When making cakes my mother used to sit me at the […]

Perusing the varied chocolate selection of my local grocer, I spy a bar that will continue this chocolate orange kick of mine. While I have encountered much opposition from folk who claim that chocolate and fruit do not belong together, and while the combination may not tempt the taste buds of a chocolate purist, I […]

An Ayers Rock snow globe? No thanks. An Eiffel Tower keyring? Pass. A Mount Rushmore T-shirt? I’ll never wear it.

If you want to bring me something from your travels, I’ll take some food. Indulging in foreign sweet treats almost makes up for not going on a trip of my own, while new tastes allow a […]

While I like to believe I am a strong, independent person, make me wait at a checkout and I cannot support this theory, I find it hard to resist those impulse buys. At the local greengrocer, which stocks many imported products, my eyes glaze while staring at the rows of pastilles and while the lady […]

Fifteen years ago, the appearance of dark chocolate in the Australian supermarket was limited to the cooking aisle, or to Nestlé Club dark chocolate, languishing amongst the multiple varieties of milk and white chocolate in the confectionary section. These days Club dark chocolate is not only available in plain, but in fruit and nut, mint […]

Few sweets can match those had in our childhood. As adults there are no barriers to the world of sweets, yet as children we are denied this freedom. Therefore, any treats that we manage to get our little hands on are savoured and worshiped . . . for who knows when the next sweet may […]