Sugar Savvy

It’s all in the name: Endangered Species Chocolate.  I had to buy the chocolate… to support a good cause!  And, how could I resist the otter? One of the big selling points of this chocolate is that the cocoa that is 100% ethically traded.  “Endangered Species Chocolate (ESC) was founded in 1993 in effort to spread […]

Charles (Chuck) Siegel is probably the sweetest man in the chocolate business.  He seems happiest when he can share his love of the product of the cacao pod with others, encouraging them to literally get their hands dirty with the confection.
Siegel is the creator and owner of Charles Chocolates, an Emeryville CA, manufacturer of quality, “super-premium” […]

The folks at Hershey have just unveiled their newest contribution to the world of sweets … a new website, dubbed “the ultimate resource for all things chocolate,” http://www.allchocolate.com/.
The site is sponsored by The Hershey Company and is filled with history, and health benefits, uses and resources for chocolate. Divided into six different areas, it […]

Chocolate is growing up. In its youth, it presented itself to cooks and candymakers in three simple notes: milk, dark, and white. But now, with the advent of epicurean refinement (or snobbery) and the growing foodie obsession with variety (or perfection), chocolate has matured into a veritable Crayola box of choices.
For a baker, the choices […]

Did you know that the third Saturday in October is officially “The Sweetest Day”? I didn’t until I walked into a See’s Candies shop in California and saw a small black and white sign gently reminding patrons that Sweetest Day was on October 21 this year and that candy would be an appropriate way to […]

A lifelong fan of candy corn, I was both excited and skeptical about conducting this pre-Halloween candy corn roundup. I thought I might have trouble coming up with ample subject matter. I mean, as much as I love the stuff, how much is there, really, to say about candy corn? Well, a whole bushel, as […]

Halloween knows how to sell candy. Last year alone America spent an estimated $2.1 Billion stocking up for the door-to-door holiday. The origins of trick-or-treating can be traced back to a 9th century custom where beggers would go from village to village asking for cakes made of bread and currants. Fast forward […]

“When we modern Westerners think of chocolate, we think of it in its solid, sweetened form…. Yet during nine tenths of its long history, chocolate was drunk, not eaten.”
-Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate
Hot chocolate deserves a lot of attention. For thousands of years, it has been […]

What, after all, is the difference between a Heath Bar and a Skor Bar?
I decided to look into the matter.
I supposed this is no big secret, but since I had never bothered to look at the fine print, I had not realized that Heath and Skor are made in the same factory: […]

Andes Mints. Coffee Nips. Almond Roca. Three candies with not much in common, really, other than the fact that my grandma ALWAYS had them. And I always ate them when I visited her. (AND, as it turns out, they were all born not long after she was.) So, in […]