Ah, late October. There's a briskness to the air, the ground is covered with fallen leaves in a myriad of colors, and America is given not one, but TWO holiday fueled excuses to get even fatter. Our favorite, Halloween, gives women an excuse to dress in outrageously slutty outfits and call them "costumes," and the rest of us an excuse to consume massive amounts of candy. In particular, we look to the most perfect form of candy, the candy bar, which combines chocolate with some other things. Sometimes, it's delicious. Sometimes it isn't. But one thing remains constant: it will probably cause you to get type-2 diabetes. Here are the best and worst things to wrap chocolate around in order to send your body into a glorious state of insulin shock.
CARAMELOh, shit yes. Let us enumerate some indisputable reasons as to why caramel is the best thing that ever went with chocolate, ever. 1) It is subtle, yet delicious. 2) It has this awesome, sticky consistency that differentiates it from the chocolate, serving as a contrast rather than a simple echo of the flavor. 3) It's so good that they didn't even have to come up with a creative name for the candy bar that's just caramel and chocolate -- Caramello. That's quite possibly the worst name for a candy bar ever (and an even worse name for an NBA player), but it doesn't even matter. That's how good it is. The only conceivable problem we can think of with caramel doesn't have to do with the stuff itself. It's simply the fact that lots of mouth-breathers pronounce the word "car-mull" instead of the preferable "care-uh-mell." "Car-mull" sounds like a hybrid between a Toyota and a camel.
But no matter how you say it, caramel gets four out of five Richard Nixon masks.
PEANUTSThis is going to come off as kind of strange, because we really don't have anything against peanuts, per se, outside of the candy bar realm. In fact, they're pretty tasty if they're drenched in enough salt and honey roasting oil and other heart-stopping additions. But for some reason, we just can't stand for them to be in our candy bars. "Sacrilege!" you say. To which we respond, "You seem to be really passionate about these candy bars." To which, of course, you say, "If I had had a candy bar that day, my dad would still be alive." Which is just really confusing, so we're just going to let that go. Anyway, the main thing is that peanuts have a tendency to be pointy in spots, and hidden under all that chocolate there's a distinct possibility that one could just jab right into the roof of one's mouth. And that won't fly. If they used peanut butter instead, then there wouldn't be any problem at all. Take heed, Snickers.
The possibility of pain only warrants one Tricky Dick Nixon mask.NOUGATNougat may just be the strangest substance on the planet. What's it made of? No one knows. Who invented it? Historians now believe that it was not actually invented, but discovered deep within a mine in southern France in 1868. What's it taste like? It's indescribable without using at least four modifications preceding what you're comparing it with -- sort of a milder, fluffier, less sticky, lighter caramel, for instance. Science has been unable to find any occurrence of the substance outside of candy bars in the last 35 years. And its physical state-Solid? Liquid? Some kind of cooled plasma?-remains a mystery. The only thing people seem to be able to agree on is that it tastes pretty good and that "nougat" is a funny word. Seriously, just say the phrase "creamy nougat" out loud in a public place and see if people don't laugh. That's the beauty of the edible mystery known as nougat.