Sugar Savvy

Just in time for Halloween I spotted these adorable and festive Hershey’s Kisses. Available through the Hershey’s Gifts website and catalogue, are the Halloween Costume KISSES. Each order comes as a set of two costumed 7 oz Giant milk chocolate Kisses. The Halloween Kisses are each handcrafted and decorated to look like […]

Recchiuti Chocolates seems to be one of those ubiquitous chocolatiers that have sprung up with wild flavors that incorporate herbs and other non-traditional flavors and varietals. My visit to their location in the Ferry Terminal Building in San Francisco yielded three chocolates and a slightly edgy brochure entitled Confessions 2006.
Out of the 24 interesting […]

Visit Half Moon Bay, California right now and you’ll be greeted by a Halloween Horse. And for all you animal lovers, don’t worry, it’s not a real horse, but a life-size statue. You can find the Halloween Horse at Lemos Farms. Owner Bob Lemos is working hard to turn the statue into […]

Planning a bake sale?
If so you’ve probably been thinking long and hard, searching for fun and creative ideas. Well, the folks at Reynolds FunShapes are running a contest perfect for you! If you win the “Shape Up Your Bake Sale” contest, not only will you win great products from Reynolds to […]

See’s Candies is also known as See’s Famous Old Time Candies, and to be truthful there is something old-fashioned about the company’s candies. When old-fashioned refers to See’s emphasis on quality, natural ingredients and production techniques, it’s a good thing. When old-fashioned refers to flavors and tastes that my grandmother would have rejected […]

Perhaps it is San Francisco’s association with E.Guittard, Scharffen Berger and Ghirardelli, or that the super-sized, dipped chocolate truffle was pretty much popularized by the Bay area’s Joseph Schmidt and the now-defunct Chocolat operations, but whatever the reason, the number of quality chocolate candy producers in the Bay area is booming and last week’s San […]

For several years now we’ve been hearing about new deep-fried creations. First it was the Snickers, then the pickle and it seems to have spiraled slowly out of control because now beverages are being deep-friend. As if we didn’t need one more artery-clogging temptation.
Abel Gonzales, Jr has developed a way to deep-fry Coca-Cola […]

Catalogs for Halloween tricks and treats have begun arriving at my household. My favorite for the most creative (and probably least gourmet) is the Oriental Trading Company’s. Its merchandise ranges from the sensible (small packs of pretzels) to the wonderfully grotesque (eyeball gum balls with cherry centers) to the downright disgusting (gummy bugs, brains, barf […]

Southern California may have Disneyland, but Northern California has its own version of kid-swamped chaos: the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield, just east of the Napa Valley.
Faith Kramer did an excellent article about the tour, so I decided to take it since I was staying just a few miles down the road. However, […]

If you’re ever in the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory tour. As much as I love European (and especially French) chocolate, I can’t complain about the stuff they make here, as they specialize in dark chocolate.
I took the tour last Thursday morning. Be sure to make […]