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Six British Candies: Which Tastes Best?

by Chris Stokel-Walker

Willy Wonka was British, you know. It makes sense: we Brits have a sweet tooth, but it’s been refined over the years. Not for us the sugary punch in the mouth of a Three Musketeers. Oh no. British snacks of the sweet kind are much more sedate. We’re all about texture. If American candy and cookies are like a Corvette roaring down a freeway at 100 miles per hour, British sweets are like a wonderful and infinitely varied fleet of bicycles. It’s a complicated and convoluted world, British candy and cookies, but let’s approach it in the form of a good old-fashioned taste test so you know, when you next get the chance, which to covet. Here are six to consider.

THE PENGUIN

Perhaps the king of British chocolate snacks. It’s two thin chocolate biscuits, sandwiched with chocolate cream, and coated in a thin (cheap tasting) chocolate cover. For years it’s been advertised with the slogan “p-p-pick up a Penguin”, and children have in droves. They’re also wooed by the perennial presence of a joke on the bar’s wrapper. They’re never good, and invariably involve penguins (the animals). Such as this doozy:

Why do penguins carry fish in their beaks?
Because they haven’t got any pockets. (I know! I know!)

Sometimes they’re not actually jokes, but trivia. But there’s an unwritten rule, passed down through generations: if you’re in the presence of others while eating your Penguin, you must offer up the feeder line for the joke, and see if anyone knows the punchline. It’s as British as the royal family, bad teeth and good comedy.

Taste factor: 6/10
Nostalgia: 10/10
Combined: 16

THE BLUE RIBAND

Launched in 1937, the Blue Riband is a quintessentially British snack. It’s almost like a souped-up KitKat. But instead of two dense wafers wrapped in chocolate, you have a single chunky, airy and ganache-filled finger coated in chocolate. It’s the bar you’ll be served when you visit your grandparents, presented neatly on a tea plate with a selection of other options.

Boasting just 99 calories per bar (“hey look! Chocolate can be sorta healthy!”), the Blue Riband is named after an unofficial prize given to the fastest cruise liner to cross the Atlantic. That’s meant to associate it with high-class luxury travel — the bar’s heyday was the 1950s — but like many products, the association is mostly aspirational. The Blue Riband is and always has been a bar enjoyed by those on a tight budget. Sadly, the British obsession with class means that the Nestle-produced bar has always been put down in comparison to its peers, but it’s delicious (if a little dry).

Taste factor: 8/10
Nostalgia: 8/10
Combined: 16

WAGON WHEELS

For all that the Wagon Wheel is a British biscuit, it was originally invented in the 1940s to answer the mania then enveloping our country for all things American. It was a time where school kids played Cowboys and Indians on the playground, and western miniseries were broadcast over wireless radio every night.

When they first came out, Wagon Wheels were known for their heft. At 36g per biscuit, they were enormous at a time when wartime rationing was still looming large over UK households. They’ve shrunk a bit, and they’re great in concept (like a chocolate-covered s’more, they couch marshmallow between two chocolate cookies), but they taste synthetic as hell. They’re a guilty pleasure for a day when you want to taste artificiality more than something that actually tastes good.

Taste factor: 3/10
Nostalgia: 9/10
Combined: 12

TERRY’S CHOCOLATE ORANGE BAR

Simply one of the best candy bars available in the UK. It does pretty much what it says on the label. It’s delicious milk chocolate with a taste of orange that melts in your mouth and generally perks up your day. Chocolate and orange go together like coffee and cigarettes, or cookies and cream. They were born to be together, and most people who buy a Terry’s chocolate orange bar snarf it down within seconds. It’s that good.

Taste factor: 10/10
Nostalgia: 6/10
Combined: 16

THE AINSLEY HARRIOTT CHOCOLATE HEAVEN BAR

Chef Ainsley Harriott is one of those uniquely British characters: In his 50s, campy, makes frequent reference to his friends Suzie Salt and Percy Pepper. You guys have Emeril and Guy Fieri: we have Ainsley, who you may know from his forays across the Atlantic. The guy’s so cool that he’s even referenced in an Obie Trice song (“I cook up the hot shit like Ainsley Harriott/That’s why I’m so miraculous”).

But despite being a national treasure, Ainsley’s career was on the wane after the cancellation of his TV show “Ready Steady Cook” in 2010. But never fear! Ainsley had a fallback. He had signed a deal with Rivington Foods Limited and released the Ainsley Harriott Chocolate Heaven Bar in the mid-2000s.

And let me tell you, this is no false advertising. Wafers generously filled with a hazelnutty ganache and covered in a super thick layer of luxury chocolate make this bar well worth its name. It may be a young pretender, but it’s getting close to holding the mantle of best chocolate bar in Britain.

Taste factor: 10/10
Nostalgia: 4/10
Combined: 14

THE TUNNOCK’S CARAMEL WAFER

There’s not a lot that most British people will credit the Scots for, but Tunnock’s is one of them. This company has been rolling out biscuits and snacks since 1890, and they’re gold-and-red-wrapped products (and there are plenty of them) are considered the Rolls Royce of snacking.

One of the best is the Caramel Wafer. More than 5 million wafers are made and sold every week by Tunnock’s, which shows just how popular they are. Imagine five layers of wafer, each brought together in harmony with a layer of caramel. Then encase the whole thing in chocolate made from sweet, sticky condensed milk. Now you’re realising why these things are so beloved. The bar has even had an appreciation society formed in its honour at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

Taste factor: 9/10
Nostalgia: 10/10
Combined: 19

So if you are ever in England, or have British relatives with voluminous suitcases, or you happen to come across a great selection of import candy (such as can be found here), which of these should you stock up on? The one that you just have to try is the Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer, followed closely by the Terry’s Chocolate Orange Bar. If you can get your hands on an Ainsley Harriott Chocolate Heaven Bar, then enjoy it for all you’re worth: those things are rare, even over here. And if you’re looking for a conversational topic with a Brit visitor, talk of Penguins — and their terrible jokes — are a common bond, much like chatter about the weather, so you can’t go wrong there either.

Chris Stokel-Walker is a 23-year old freelance writer from the UK. Photo of Terry’s Orange Chocolate Bar by Evan-Amos.

It really has been The Year of Channing Tatum, hasn’t it? Remember when he did that interview with the hungover guy? Also, this is where I might as well confess that at least 50% of the time I refer to him as Tatum Channing — not that I refer to him a lot, but when I do I am likely to get his name reversed, mostly because I am finally, irrevocably old and I don’t retain things anymore. Like, the guy who played Bane in the Batman movie? Couldn’t tell you his name without looking him up, although I hear he is hot behind the mask and somehow everyone already knows who he is and has opinions about his previous credits. Where was I when all this was happening? While I was watching football the other night I kept seeing ads for shows that were going to be “back” soon that I didn’t know already had a season on air. How many TV programs are the networks running about fairy tales anyway? Are The xx any good? Is there any reason I need to watch the video of that Korean guy dancing? Is Honey Boo Boo some kind of a bear? These are all things that I would have known in the past, but no longer. I’m like the guy in Memento, except not only can’t I make new memories, I also don’t give a shit about it. Enjoy your crazy new apps or whatever. I’m gonna go lie down. [Delicately places microphone on the floor.]

I love a bargain as much as the next guy, but “oysters for a dollar” seems like an open invitation to hepatitis to set up shop in your liver. [Via]

★ Dim, sloppy pastiche. Clouds were thick and thickening on a chilly walk to the library. In the time it took to pay off an overdue book, the sun came on bright and strong, till the jacket that had been a necessity felt like an error. A subway ride downtown led into more tempered sunlight and a springlike humidity. Off in the middle distance over Lower Manhattan, yet another separate microclimate appeared to be piling up layers of gray. It was the gray and darkness that would come closest to prevailing — though that would break half-apart to spill out a bit of sunset. Up at the schoolyard, I was told, there had even been fleeting raindrops. The kindergartener was outraged. The morning Times hadn’t mentioned anything about rain in the weather report. But really, how could it have? This barely qualified as weather at all.

My Attempt To Make The Fritters I Loved As A Kid

by Kate Christensen

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

In elementary school, back in the 70s in Tempe, Arizona, one of my favorite meals was something called Farmers Fritters. On Friday nights, our mother whipped up a batch of the thin, crisp, tangy-sweet cottage-cheese pancakes, which were actually more like little crepes. She used to put her huge rectangular electric skillet in the middle of the table, and my sisters and I sat around it while she made fritters in batches, sliding them around onto everyone’s plates.

While we ate these fritters with homemade applesauce and huge puddles of Aunt Jemima syrup, we sometimes told stories, with the sliding-glass door open to the patio and a warm desert breeze making the candles flicker. Someone started, and then we took turns continuing the story, going around the table until it was finished. (I remember my baby sister Emily’s dramatic climax to one creepy ghost story: “And then the toaster popped up.” She was about 5 at the time. We all fell off our chairs, laughing.)

Now in her mid-40s, Emily lives in New Zealand with her husband and four kids. She has the old egg-spattered recipe card — she copied it down and emailed it to me last spring. The original recipe was written in our aunt’s handwriting, our mother’s deaf and mentally handicapped older sister, Aillinn, with parenthetical additions by our mother.

Farmers Fritters
1 cup Blossom Time cottage cheese
1 egg (2 are better)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 (is that really an 8?!?!) cup milk
(or a very little cream)
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
2 tablespoon melted butter
1/4 cup flour (+ a little wheatgerm)

Place first six ingredients in bowl and beat well with rotary beater. Stir in flour, drop by tablespoons on greased griddle. Serve with butter and hot syrup. Serves 4.

I never got around to making a batch until the end of this past summer, when I woke up one morning with a sudden nostalgic hankering so strong I could almost taste that particular tangy sweetness again on my tongue.
We had everything in the house to make them except the cottage cheese. No one ever has cottage cheese in the house anymore. Back then, we always kept a plastic tub of white, cold curds in the fridge. Whenever we ran out, we immediately put it on the shopping list. It was a staple, like margarine (another thing no one has anymore). I used to eat bowlfuls of the stuff with salt and pepper. But now, it’s gone out of style, along with Triscuits, Vienna sausages (those pinky-finger-sized wieners in a can with a pop-top), and Graham crackers — my favorite childhood after-school snacks.

In our local supermarket, after scouting for a while, my boyfriend Brendan finally located a very narrow, very small cottage cheese selection in the dairy case, wedged between the much larger kefir and sour cream sections. He bought a 16-oz. tub, and home it came.

And so the next morning, with a certain sense of defeat in advance, convinced I couldn’t replicate my mother’s version, I got down to it. Because I can’t eat gluten, I had to use Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free flour mix. I interpreted “Milk (or a very little cream)” as a “blump,” as my mother always called it, of half-and-half. I nuked the butter to melt it, and then I grated the lemon peel.

As I was mixing the batter, I noticed weird threads of something in the mix. I pulled one out — it looked like a shard of paper with something printed on it. I found another one, and another. After a few minutes of sleuthing, I realized that I’d grated the oval plastic bar-code sticker on the lemon peel right into the batter. I debated for a moment. Did I care if I ate some plastic with ink on it? Not really, but what if it contained gluten? I’d be screwed for the next 24 hours. In the end, it was a simple decision: I threw out the first batch and started over. Farmers Fritters batter is so easy to make, the ingredients so minimal and cheap, it was definitely worth the waste not to risk being depressed, bloated, and foggy-brained for the next 24 hours.

Once the second batch was mixed, I fired up the stove burner under a skillet and added some peanut oil. When it was hot, I turned down the flame and spooned the batter into the pan in tablespoonfuls, just as my aunt and mother had instructed all those years ago. Our dog, Dingo, helped by licking the beaters, just as I had done as a kid, before we knew about salmonella in raw eggs; those were the days.

As I watched the fritters cook, I wondered: who were these farmers? And how did my aunt get hold of their recipe? I Googled “Fanny Farmer,” thinking maybe it had come from one of her cookbooks, but nothing turned up. I returned to the stove and tried flipping the fritters, but they stuck, so I waited a while longer. Finally, they formed a crust underneath, and then they flipped easily. When they were brown and crisp on the other side, I slid them onto two plates.

I had laid in a couple of apples, which I had intended to cut up and boil into a mush with cinnamon, but I happened to have on hand most of a jar of excellent, organic applesauce, so I got that out instead. In the pantry was a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup, my authentic childhood brand, but the expiration date on it said May 2006, and the first ingredient was “high-fructose corn syrup,” which, as we all know now, is deadly. Back in the 70s, when I was 8, I didn’t know or care, I could glug gallons of the stuff. Now, I poured pure maple syrup onto the hot, fresh fritters, and we dug in.

I hadn’t really expected them to taste the same, I realized as I chewed my first bite. Somehow, childishly and superstitiously, I hadn’t believed the recipe would really work. But it did. The recipe, magically, really and truly made exactly the same fritters I’d loved all those decades ago.

Also, “serves 4,” my ass. Maybe if those four are a young mother and three small kids, it does. All I know is, two gluttonous adults gobbled up the entire batch.

Previously: My Doomed Attempt To Make Jjajangmyeon At Home

Kate Christensen is the author of six novels, including “The Great Man,” which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner award, and, most recently, “The Astral.” She blogs about food here. She lives in Portland, Maine.

You know that Rubik’s Pyramid you lost in 1983? The one that Chris Pack could solve in like 30 seconds but that you could never solve without taking all the little trianguler pieces apart and reassembling them with all the colors in the right places? You thought it got lost in the closet, right? In one of the plastic bins behind your D&D; manuals and the full-size Millenium Falcon that you could never bring yourself to give to your younger cousin like your mom wanted you to, even though you hadn’t played with it in like three years. Nope. Turns out, it was on Mars.

The Mars Curiosity Rover just beamed back a picture of it. It’s covered in dirt, and scientists think it’s just a rock. They’re going to have the robot zap it with it’s ChemCam laser. (It’s going to have a hell of time reassembling it afterwards, isn’t it? Remember how hard it was to snap all those little pieces back into place? They were kind of sharp, sometimes you thought it might be easier just to read the book and master the thing like Chris Pack. But you were never that smart.) Then preparations begin to investigate it up close with its “hand lens” and its X-ray spectrometer.

“It’s a cool looking rock with almost pure pyramidal geometry,” said NASA’s John Grotzinger, maintaining that the uncanny shape was common for Mars rocks and likely caused by wind erosion and definitely not a sign that magic aliens visited Earth thousands of years ago and built the pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica and left a message for the Masons or the Illuminati or whoever’s really in charge to put the very same image on the dollar bill with that creepy, single, all-knowing eye peeking out the top.

“Our general consensus view is that these are pieces of impact ejecta from an impact somewhere else, maybe outside of Gale Crater, that throws a rock on to the plains, and it just goes on to sit here for a long period of time. It weathers more slowly than the stuff that’s around it. So, that means it’s probably a harder rock.”

Yes, I’m sure, just a regular piece of impact ejecta. I would imagine the wind on Mars blows at a precise 51.5 degree angle, at a perfectly consistant velocity for exactly one third of the year, then switches directions to another precise 51.5 degree angle for the next four months (wait, years are probably longer on Mars aren’t they? It’s farther away from the sun than we are, right? Anyway for the next third of the however long its year is) and then again for the next — always maintaining that perfectly consistant velocity so as to gently wear down a whole bunch of Rubik’s Pyramid-sized rocks into almost purely geometric Rubik’s Pyramid shapes. Sure! Just a normal thing to find up her on Mars! And I’m sure that when the ChemCam laser blasts this thing to pieces, it’s not going open whatever heretofore undiscovered dimension, whatever dark-matter warp in the time-space continuum through which it traveled, 29 years ago, from your closet in New Jersey to the surface of fucking Mars, about halfway between the Gale Crater and those “interesting” rocks at Gleneig. YEAH, I’LL BET THOSE ROCKS ARE PRETTY INTERESTING!!!

And surely, surely, the shape of this “rock” has nothing to do with Frank Ocean’s new “Pyramids” video, wherein John Mayer just happens to play his mid-song guitar solo standing in front of a blue neon PYRAMID with some crazy geometric design in orange lights that looks an awful lot like the Scarab spaceship Journey blasted off in on Escape. Or how Cat Power and her boyfriend have to shoot laser guns that fire beams of the VERY SHAME SHAPE into the chests of post-apocalyptic desert zombies in her new video for “Cherokee.” Or the fact that Gucci Mane and Big Sean, in their new video, rap (and rather enjoyably, especially Gucci!) in front of an entire wall of these mysterious pyramid shapes — all lit up and glowing bright, with the same little cornerstone triangle on top, separated, so that it looks like it might twist with the turn of a twelve-year-old’s wrist, that we know from our currency and Roger Dean’s awesome Asia album covers.

These three videos all just came out this week. The SAME week. Just a simple matter of coincidence, though. Easily explainable by NASA and Vevo.

How long do you think before the ChemCam shoots? The Curiosity Rover has traveled 950 feet since touching down on Mars six weeks ago. I’m guessing the calibrations and programming will take NASA a while to compute and transmit, and that we’ll have our answer exactly three months from today. December 21st, 2012. If time doesn’t stop then and the world doesn’t end, go back home to your mom’s house, go upstairs to your old room. Open your closet, look in the bins behind all your old D&D; books and Star Wars stuff. Your Rubik’s Pyramid will be there.

“This is what a collapsed criminal justice system looks like.”

by Megan L. Wood

7 Unusual Surf Spots

Growing up in the Midwest, I was a little obsessed with exotic surfer culture: the bikinis, seemingly endless sunny days, and the idea of putting a surfboard in the backseat of a Jeep. At night, as I hoped school would be cancelled due to a blizzard, I imagined surfers swapping wipeout stories around a campfire on the beach. I listened to The Beach Boys without irony. I watched Gidget and Surfer, Dude and took them both seriously. Wrongly, I assumed surfing was only done in California or Central America. Surfing is done around the world, on all seven continents, even without Jeeps and very rarely in just a bikini. What follows are seven surf spots that one wouldn’t conjure up while taking a surf lesson on vacation in Hawaii.

Liberia
Child soldiers and civil wars don’t really coincide with laid-back surfing. But Liberia has been war free for almost a decade and is steadily rebuilding itself as a tourist destination focusing on the country’s 350 miles of Atlantic shoreline. According to the New York Times, aid workers were among the first to take advantage of 20 foot high waves that peeled along the shore for a sweet ride of 200 yards. Since then, Liberians and world-class surfers are scoping waves and setting up surf shacks.

Russia
According to Lindsay Fincher’s blog, “At Home in the Wasteland,” surfing in Russia can be done on the Kamchatka Peninsula. She advises, “a surf trip to Russia will require cold water wax, a thick wetsuit with booties and hood, helicopter, six wheel drive vehicle, and an AK-47 to ward off the occasional bear. On the plus side, you’ll be the only person in the water…”

Wisconsin
As I write this I blame my parents for encouraging figure skating as a childhood sport when I could have been shredding waves 100 miles from our house. Sheboygan is nearly 1,000 miles from either of America’s coasts but has been billed as the “Malibu of the Midwest.” Don’t scoff, bro: from August to early April Lake Michigan can produce swells of 12 feet or more. From August to early April, Wisconsin can also produce temperatures of twenty below zero with windchill factor, so keep frostbite in mind. Seasoned surfers who don’t want to deal with sharks and think avoiding moving ice flows is an adventure will find some unforgettable surfing in the Great Lakes. Labor Day brings the annual Dairyland Surf Classic where freshwater surfers gather from around the world to compete.

Dubai
Dubai is located in the Arabian desert but it’s also on the southwestern shores of the Persian Gulf, which provides plenty of rideable surf and warm water. Waves are at their best from October to May. The sun is also usually at its desert worst, so heat stroke is a real threat. In 2005, Surf Dubai opened up a surfing school and surfboard repair shop. They also organize surf trips to Oman and Sri Lanka if you really want to show go on a surfing spree.

Japan
There is a place in Japan where a volcano spews every hour. 13,500 tons of heated salt water wash over 600 tons of polished marble. There are no sunburns. Every hour a wave machine pumps out perfect surfing conditions. Yes, the fish are artificial. Yes, you’re in Miyazaki at one of the world’s only indoor beaches. Admission is around US $50. The scary feeling that indoor beaches will become commonplace as the world deteriorates, is free.

Antarctica
In 2000, the digital sports entertainment company, Quokka Sports, announced they’d be filming the first people to surf the waters of Antarctica. You can read the surfer’s log and get all the specifics (including a few lengthy paragraphs about seal sex), but it took the explorers almost a week before they found rideable surf in water one degree above freezing. Now that it’s been done, let’s all agree it never needs to be done again.

North Korea
Ben Weiland’s “Surf Guide to North Korea” reads like something a surfer turned scientist turned conspiracy theorist wrote. He uses satellite images, tourist photos, and general curiousity to investigate unexplored surfing frontiers. Though small parts of coastal North Korea are open to visitors, there’s no evidence of any surfing communities. Ben argues that satellite images show “triangle and finger reefs, point breaks, and miles of groomed sand bar beach break,” that would make for world class surfing. Further, abandoned harbor constructions and break walls have created unusually surfable waves. Maybe Kim Jong-un could be convinced to set up a Korean Malibu? He’s probably seen “Gidget,” too.

Photo by Justin Ornellas, via Flickr

This content series is produced in partnership with smartwater. smartwater, good taste travels well. click here to learn more.

At least Mitt Romney hasn’t done something like this. Yet.