Top Ten Tuesday: My 10 Favourite Candies

Moritz Icy Squares. I loved these melt-in-your-mouth chocolate squares. You use to be able to buy them individually for 5-cents. There was no caramel or peanuts or nugget to detract from the pure joy of placing a square on your tongue and just letting is slowly melt away. It was the best 5-cents every spent. You can still buy these now.
Last Tuesday I talked about the Top 10 Things I Learned from my Daughter’s (and my) First Sleepover. Writing the post and reading the comments had me thinking back to my own sleepover days (and I’m sure I was older than eight). Perhaps it’s just me, but when thinking about fond childhood memories I can’t help but think about candy. I remember walking to school and passing a small store that sold penny candy (though I don’t remember any of it costing a penny). So this Tuesday for Oh Amanda’s Top 10 Tuesday meme I thought I’d share with you my Top 10 Favourite Childhood Candies.

1. Moritz Icy Squares. I loved these melt-in-your-mouth chocolate squares. You use to be able to buy them individually for 5-cents. There was no caramel or peanuts or nugget to detract from the pure joy of placing a square on your tongue and just letting is slowly melt away. It was the best 5-cents every spent. You can still buy these now.
2. Pop Rocks. These were great to give an unsuspecting friend. The candies were small and came in a small envelop but you sure got a good bang from them. These little candies would start to explode in your mouth. The more you had, the bigger the explosion. We use to stand around, mouth open, with these things popping; they sounded like fizzy pop. I guess in those days it was cool to eat with your mouth open.
3. Gold Mine Gum. Even at a little tyke I was a sucker for packaging. I loved that this gum came in a little canvas sack which eventually switched to a thicker paper, but still a drawstring bag. The pieces were varied and small and yellow, suppose to be like gold. And who doesn’t like chewing on gold.
4. Licorice Pipes. Nothing was off-limit to us as kids. Remember Popeye cigarettes (which eventually changed to candy sticks instead of cigarettes), but my tobacco candy of choice were those black licorice pipes with the red candy sprinkles in the pipe part, for that realistic appeal. I’m still a huge fan of black licorice.
5. FunDip. This was the ultimate sugar candy. You had a bag of flavoured sugar powder that you ate with a stick – a stick of solid sugar candy. Yum! If this didn’t keep you bouncing for the rest of the day, nothing would. I remember getting those double bags where one side had one flavour and the other side had a different flavour. This was great for sharing too as friends would just put a licked finger into the bag. Yah, the whole germ thing didn’t seem to faze us then.
6. Bottlecaps. One of the few hard candies I really enjoyed. Similar consistency as those candy bracelets and necklaces you can still buy now (and the ones they sell now are probably leftover ones that didn’t sell when we were kids). I remember these pressed circular candies coming in a bag. You would get a variety of flavours (and they were colour coated that way too). Root Beer was my favourite and actually the only flavour that really stands out in my memory.
7. Zotz (or later Lotsa Fizz). If you liked Pop Rocks, you probably also liked these. They were sold in strips with each candy wrapped individually. The candies would be hard on the outside and fruit flavoured but when you got to the inside it was full of fizzy powder (which I later found out was baking soda). I would love to suck on these candies to the point of the outside coating getting weak enough to let the fizzy fun powder seep through. The fizzy sensation with the fruit flavour of the hard candy was a kid’s candy dream.
8. Lucky Elephant Pink Candy Popcorn. Okay, this maybe doesn’t qualify as a real candy but it certainly was a treat I remember. I loved the boxes it came it. It was almost like Cracker Jacks but not as sugary or hard coasted. It didn’t get stuck in your teeth. Instead is was just pure sweet pink popcorn goodness.
9. Cherry Blossoms. Chocolate and cherries. Is there no better combination? I loved these. When you bite into the little mound of chocolate a sweet cherry syrup would drip out (and down your chin and on your clothing usually) and buried in the middle a wonderful cherry. This was so much better than just eating a cherry flavour filled chocolate. I loved the mix of consistencies from the hard chocolate to the liquid cherry sauce to the soft chewy cherry itself. Thank goodness you can still buy these.
10. Country Store Old Fashioned Taffy. I’m not a big fan of taffy, it sticks to your teeth, but the Country Store Old Fashioned 3 flavoured taffy (it had a strip of chocolate, a strip of strawberry and a strip of vanilla) was more of a softer chew candy. It came in a long strip. Sometimes we’d all buy one and tear a piece off then you would let it sit in your mouth and eventually it would melt away.

These are just a few of my favourites, in no particular order. I’m sure I ingested lots of others. And there are certainly popular candies on my ‘Yuck’ list, like Thrills Gum. I never understood someone who wanted to chew on soap.

What are your favourite childhood candies?

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