In the ongoing interests of reinforcing the idea to my 8 year old that he’s got it good living here, I have a short work trip to the States and I think it’s a good opportunity to bring back some sweets.
Personally I can’t bear American chocolate, so some Hershey’s should do the trick there in the grass is greener stakes, but in the interests of balance, what are the sweets that are nice?
I used to like those nuclear fish, Swedish fish is it? The colour on them alone… phew. Still really moreish though.
Anything else (maybe Boston specific as that’s where I’m off to) that could be recommended as a nice treat?
Whenever I’ve bought any sweets back from the US they’ve basically gone straight in the bin. Foul isn’t the word.
Having said that, if you are going in the next couple of weeks and expect kids at your door for Halloween (or just for your son), they have quite cool Halloween candy which you could bring back.
Indeed, that’s exactly my experience except with that one exception. Hence the question really.
For Halloween, we have a nearby Aldi over the French border that has enough cheap sweets to cause a spike of diabetes in our village…
As an aside, I like the Halloween following the US way over here, I hated it in the UK. Perhaps here, with the effort made in costumes, and the similarity with the French Day of the dead it seems a bit more appropriate and even, yes, wholesome (even if gorging of sweets isn’t necessarily a wonderful thing).
Agree about the Hershey’s chocolate but I recall from when I worked in the UK we had a US regional sales guy that would bring in a mammoth bag of Hershey’s Peanut Butter Cups whenever he came back from a trip over there, and they’d be gobbled up by the gannets in the office within an afternoon.
Yes, I’m surprised that the old peanut butter chocolate combo hasn’t been replicated over this way.
Also, office life being what it is, almost anything even vaguely edible is like a crack to bored office workers.
A dutch guy in our old place used to bring in those superb waffle fellows, as well as tonnes of sour liquorice candies. Even as an aquired taste, the ‘black death’ always used to be consumed rapidly.
I watched a story the other day about an American sweet shop in London that was raided for selling illegal confectionary (under British and European food safety standards). Makes you think
Ugh…Girardelli is mediocre, even if it is from my hometown of SF. Try to find some Scharffen Berger chocolate. I can’t vouch for it since its acquisition by Hershey in 2005, but it was made by a winemaker in California, and it was the best in the US. Just make sure it doesn’t contain butyric acid. Jelly Belly beans come in some interesting flavours, and you can sometimes create your own mixtures. Boston Baked Beans, 5th Avenue bars, but the best is a real New Orleans pecan praline!! Sugar attack! Ooooh…just remembered maple sugar candy–that’s a must.
Obviously something wrong with the British border control.
“We are continuing to make the lives of unscrupulous traders a nightmare through regular enforcement action.” Is that cheaper or easier than make the customs officers (already paid by the government=taxes=people) do their job properly?
Who knows? I guess in the grand scheme of things, a few sweets with the wrong additives smuggled is not as bad as other smuggling:
The Swiss city of Basel and its ports on the River Rhine are one of the access points for the vast amounts of cocaine arriving through the major Northern European seaports. SWI swissinfo.ch watches a customs control team in action.
Customs just cannot check every container, irrespective of whether it contains mis-labelled candy or cocaine:
The customs and border security officers’ job is rather like looking for a needle in a haystack. There is no way they can inspect all the containers that pass through the Basel ports, which handled between five and six million tonnes of goods in 2023.
“Only a small part of the imports can actually be checked,” Ioannis admits. “The inspections are carried out in a targeted manner based on the information we have.”
Saltwater Taffy is what I remember from our time in Boston. We often used to buy it in Rockport I think. The root beer flavour was pretty disgusting in my opinion but the rest of them were decent.
Is that cheaper or easier than make the customs officers (already paid by the government=taxes=people) do their job properly?
