Spooky and Delicious

We’ve covered salty snacks, and sour snacks (really, a lot of sour snacks), but let’s turn to look at a slightly different grouping of fun: spooky snacks. It’s the Halloween season coming upon us, when all of your favorite items get ghosts and bats and skulls on them. And that isn’t just limited to decorations as food makers love to follow suit with seasonally-themed items. So let’s take a look at a few of these spooky treats to fill your stomach in the bewitching hours.

Count Chocula

Okay, so maybe this is a little bit of a cheat since I’m sure just about everyone that is interested has tried Count Chocula or one of the other Monster Cereals that have come out year after year. I chose the Count because he’s one of the easiest ones to find, and has a flavor I wouldn’t mind eating again and again. Generally the stores near me only carry Count Chocula and Frankenberry, while the other misfits of the sweet grain piece collection – Boo Berry, Fruity Yummy Mummy, Frute Brute, and newest addition Camella Creeper, along with the mash-up cereal Monsters’ Frightful Friends – tend not to appear anywhere near me. So I settle and go with the classic.

And, yes, it still holds up. Count Chocula is my favorite for a reason (and not just because it has a vampire on the box). The chocolate flavor is solid without feeling sickening or cloyingly sweet. This is important because too many chocolate cereals (like Cocoa Pebbles) go too hard on the sweetness, making it pretty clear that what I’m eating isn’t part of a balanced breakfast; it’s candy. Chocula has a better balance to its flavors, tasting sweet without being so sweet that I feel like I have to brush my teeth immediately afterwards.

It’s funny that I find this cereal to be less of a “candy confection” than something like Cocoa Pebbles because Chocula has marshmallows in it. This is clearly not a healthy alternative to eating, like, toast or something. And yet, flavorwise, it’s far more subtle and tasty. Chocolate forward, yes, but not in a bad way that makes you regret buying it. And the marshmallows pair nicely with the puffed pieces of grain in the shape of little ghosts (at least I think they’re supposed to be little ghosts). The texture of the cereal is great, serving as a nice compliment to the flavor.

Honestly, this cereal is fantastic and I love getting at least one box of it every Halloween just to celebrate the season. It’s a must have in my house.

Werther’s Original Harvest Caramels: Caramel Apple Soft Caramels

Look, I knew going in that these caramels would either be amazing or awful. I’ve never had a Werther’s before, I will admit, only knowing of these soft caramels from commercials I saw growing up, with an old man giving a young kid some candy from his pocket. “Here, ya little rascal,” I imagine him saying, “have this soft bit of warm candy I’ve been carrying in my pocket for weeks.” Like, outwardly it sounds awful, but the soft light of the film stock, and the Rockwellean narration makes it seem like old men giving young kids pocket candy is the nicest thing in the world.

Honestly, I’d rather have a Reisen instead. Chocolate and caramel instead? Yes please.

Regardless, I saw two versions of these Harvest Caramels at the store, in either Caramel Apple or Pumpkin Spice. I hate pumpkin spice. I hate the flavor, I hate the smell, I hate pumpkin pie, and I really just don’t even like pumpkin in general. Everything about pumpkin spice is wrong to me. Thus, instead of gravitating to the thing I knew I’d hate, I went for a variety I thought might be good. Who doesn’t like the flavor of caramel apples, right? Well, as it turns out, when applied to a soft caramel, everyone should hate this flavor.

I legitimately don’t know how a normal Werther’s tastes, so I should note that going in, but if it tastes anything like these caramel apple candies, I want nothing to do with them. The flavor is very dairy forward, like you’d expect from a caramel, but it’s not a good kind of dairy flavor. It’s a little pungent, a bit off. The caramels are very sweet, sure, but they also taste like manufactured sweetness, and not a natural caramel flavor from something you made on a stovetop. This is not helped by the subtle apple flavor applied, which tastes fake and wrong. There is no actual apple flavor in these candies; it’s all artificially applied.

About the only good thing I have to say about these is that the caramel is, indeed, very soft. It’s sticky, as you want from a caramel, but not firm enough that you feel like they’re going to pull out a filling. They would be delectable if their flavor wasn’t so god awful.

Overall, these candies taste bad. Just straight up bad. Not only do I not want to eat anymore of these specific apple-flavored confections, but I don’t even want to touch a normal Werther’s after this experiment. If these were meant to bring in new buyers of the candies well, long term, they absolutely failed.

Peeps Skulls

A Peep is a Peep is a Peep. If you’ve had one of the standard (not Sour) Peeps then you know how every basic peep works. It’s a solid bit of marshmallow, wrapped in a coating of sugar granules, along with some minimal decoration. Whether you’re getting the Santas and Snowmen for Christmas or the Chicks and Bunnies for Easter, you surely know what a Peep tastes like. And now we can add Halloween to the list as the company has out Skulls for the season.

Like any standard Peep, these Skulls stick to the same basic composition. It’s a single slab of marshmallow, covered in white sugar and then decorated in a style I thought of as Día de Muertos (aka, if you’re referencing Community, Mexican Halloween). They’re fun looking and seem perfect for a basket of halloween treats, especially if you’re like me and you buy the candy to eat, not to share.

That, specifically, seems a bit off to me. Halloween candy is designed so you can take individually wrapped pieces of it and hand it out to little beggars when they come up to your door. But these Peeps are packed in the standard package, six Peeps in a box, all touching each other. These are Peeps for misanthropes, those who don’t want to give out goodies to entertain the ankle-biters. These are not meant to hand out, not unless you’re that rich family giving out full packages of Peeps to each kid.

Other than that, they’re good. If you like Peeps, you’ll like these. If you don’t like Peeps, these won’t change your mind at all. They’re Peeps, through and through.