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Every weekday until Halloween, I’ll be offering up trivia treats about sweets you’re likely to encounter on October 31st. Today it’s caramel & candy apples.
1) Caramel apples are almost exclusive to the United States. Other countries are more familiar with toffee apples or candy apples.
2) Candy apples are commonly served in the U.K. on Guy Fawkes night.
3) The world’s largest candy apple was made in 2006 in, surprise, the Big Apple (==>). The apple was created in Bryant Park by pastry chef Bill Yosses to help promote Splenda sweetner. Ten thousand apples, 100 gallons of candy coating and 800 pounds of Splenda were used. You could eat the whole thing for only 1,228,800 calories.
4) Want to make your own? Here’s a recipe.
We’ll end today with a question: When you were a kid, what was the best thing you got in your trick-or-treat bag? And what was the worst?
Yesterday: Tootsie Rolls. Wednedsay: Snickers. Monday: M&M’s.
Comments (32)
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The worst thing I got in my trick or treat bag was two unwrapped saltine crackers.
posted by Dani on 10-26-2007 at 1:07 pm
I loved the people who gave out full-sized candy bars. There were always a handful of philanthropic souls in my neighborhood who did that. However, I despised the stale Starbursts/Tootsie rolls that were so hard that you nearly broke your teeth upon attempting to eat them. Yuck.
posted by Sandy on 10-26-2007 at 1:15 pm
Best: Silly String (that family must have hated their neighbors)
Worst: Pennies.
posted by Diane on 10-26-2007 at 1:18 pm
best: $1 bill
worst: those nasty orange and black generic candies. I never even opened them up so I dont know what they are
posted by David on 10-26-2007 at 1:20 pm
Best – Full sized candy bar.
worst – nasty orange homemade popcorn ball.
posted by Scott on 10-26-2007 at 1:23 pm
Best, Home made fudge
Worst, Rockets. I freakin hate Rockets and there were always dozens upon dozens of the chalky nasty little buggers in my loot bag.
posted by Lisa on 10-26-2007 at 1:28 pm
best: full size candy bars
worst: pennies or those orange marshmallow things shaped like a peanut, who thinks this crap up anyway?
posted by gussie on 10-26-2007 at 1:42 pm
Best – oddly enough, toothbrushes. One house was a dentist and he always gave out a little halloween themed thing of toothpaste + toothbrush. Sure, everybody always joked about getting a toothbrush there, but nobody ever skipped the dentist’s house. It was novel. And at this point, it’s the only thing I distinctly remember getting.
Worst – The hippie weirdos that handed out apples, even though all of us kids were convinced that they were stuffed with razor blades and that we should immediately call the police.
posted by Jim T on 10-26-2007 at 1:45 pm
Best Trick-or-Treat: Large sized Snickers bar and $1 bill given to me by my frazzled neighbor (he was young so & he appeared to not know what to do).
Worst Trick-or-Treat: Getting yeld at by a crazy elderly woman who didn’t appreciate the holiday. Oh, and unwrapped candy corn. Ick!
posted by Sweet Pea on 10-26-2007 at 1:52 pm
Just adding that I have a friend who grew up in near Warren Buffett’s house in Omaha. She says he was famous for giving out those huge pound (maybe it was half pound) Hershey candy bars. If you didn’t know that was coming, wouldn’t it be like hitting the jackpot?!
posted by Stacy on 10-26-2007 at 2:01 pm
Best:I always loved getting the orange rice crispy treats.
Worst: There was a teacher in the neighbor hood that always gave out a 5 inch plastic ruler and a single crayon.
posted by jenny on 10-26-2007 at 2:04 pm
We had some neighbors down the street who adored my sister and I. So they always made something special for our halloween loot. One year, we got pencil boxes from them. The top compartment was full of colored pencils (cool in it’s own right), but there was a secret compartment, full to overflowing with m&ms. They were also our only neighbor to give out full sized candy bars. And one year, we got tissue paper flowers with dollar bills as stems. I loved them.
The worst was a balloon blown up with some pennies inside. so lame. and the balloon took up your whole pillowcase. all for like, $0.04!
posted by jen on 10-26-2007 at 2:13 pm
Loose, unwrapped candies were always icky, but nothing was quite as unwelcome as mini boxes of raisins. The raisins were always stale and hard to the point of being near fossils. Yuck.
posted by Rose on 10-26-2007 at 2:21 pm
Best: little Halloween-themed goodie bags with M&M’s, gum, fun size bars, and Jujubes.
Worst: Apples or baggies of greasy popcorn
posted by Cyndi on 10-26-2007 at 2:29 pm
My mother used to tell stories of Halloween when she was little. She grew up on a farm in NE Ohio in the 20s. The neighbors were few and far between.
She would light up and tell of how you would go to someone’s house, they would invite you in, give you cookies and milk, or some other hand made sweet, and try to “figure out” who you were.
Such a simpler time. Of course you only go to a few houses, and it was not for the older kids. I can not imagine anything like that today, but those memories were very important to her.
posted by Jeff on 10-26-2007 at 2:37 pm
Worst: Those disgusting peanut butter taffy things in the orange and black wrappers. And yes, I pick them out of my daughter’s bag and throw them away!
Best: Snickers. Or maybe M&M’s. No, Snickers.
Best of all: Being the adult and getting to decide what kind of candy to buy.
posted by Deb on 10-26-2007 at 2:47 pm
Testing.
posted by Maz2331 on 10-26-2007 at 3:00 pm
One more test…
posted by Maz2331 on 10-26-2007 at 3:01 pm
Best: best of all were the huge pound size (or whatever they are) hershey bars my grandma always gave her grandkids…. From the neighbors, best was the fun size candybars and m&m’s…
Worst: those nasty black and orange “peanut butter kisses”. Hated those!
posted by Carol on 10-26-2007 at 3:03 pm
Best = full size candy bars
Worst = those black and orange wrapped “Mary Jane” peanut butter things, pennies, a tiny amount of candy corn in a baggy, or one of those weird popcorn balls.
posted by Susan on 10-26-2007 at 3:06 pm
Best:
Ms Loving’s house. She gave out small bags with candy to the regular kids, but if you were one of the ones that was nice to her during the year, you got to go to her halloween cafe in the back yard. She would have hamburgers, hotdogs, fries, drinks and bigger bags of candy. This was when no one was suspicious. You could rack up at her house alone.
Worst
The family that always gave out Chick Tracts about how trick or treating was demonic and by doing it you were going to burn in hell. Even as a devout Christian, I though these people were nuts.
posted by Patrick Barden on 10-26-2007 at 3:32 pm
Worst: An apple and a standard yellow #2 pencil (which was given to my by a teacher who also happened to be a relative, so when I got home, my mother made me eat the apple before I could start in on my candy).
Best: Other than the one time I got a children’s book (which was really little kiddy story about a rabbit that was afraid of the dark, and I think I gave it to my baby second cousin, but the fact that was something that wasn’t candy and not completely lame was pretty remarkable), the best thing I ever got in my Trick or Treat bag were those weird toffee sort of things in the plain black and orange wrapper that only creepy old guys seemed to give out (which always made me think twice about eating them, but I ate them anyway). Those things were the shiznik.
posted by Sara on 10-26-2007 at 8:13 pm
Best: Pizza and soda, that house was so awesome!
Worst: People who hand out raisins and those black and orange candies
posted by Rachel* on 10-26-2007 at 10:11 pm
Best: When I was a kid, lots of little old ladies would invite kids in and let them pick from a buffet of caramel apples, homemade fudge, cupcakes, and such. This was before the razor blade scare.
Worst: Licorice. With my kids now, I hate to see Nerds brought home. They taste awful, and always spill.
posted by Miss Cellania on 10-26-2007 at 11:00 pm
In my Trick or Treat exhibition of 2004 I was wore a Marilyn Monroe costume near a Navy base and made eleven hundred dollars.
Last year I spent Halloween on a C5 flying over the Atlantic when I held out one of those wax paper vomit bags for my friend to trick or treat into…
posted by Father Torque on 10-27-2007 at 8:44 am
i have a best:
i grew up in south carolina where sometimes halloween night was hot and muggy. once when i was a kid we were trick-or-treating on such a nite and i had of course been eating candy along the way. it gets you very thirsty–one house was giving out cold canned sodas. it was amazing! at the time i thought they were the richest people in the world haha
posted by rob on 10-29-2007 at 12:26 pm
I lived in a suburb with a grid of houses so I think my best memory was planning out how to go so I maximized my number of houses and didn’t go any place twice.
I agree with most people on the problem with getting pennies as well as those circus peanut things. Yuck. By the way, is it merely a coincidence that the nasty candy Mary Jane is the same as the nickname for marijuana?
posted by Scott from Cincy on 10-29-2007 at 1:45 pm
My best and worst was from the same house. They always had novelties – chocolate covered insects, rattlesnake meat, etc. The worst year was when I was a gullible 7 year old and my older sister convinced me that all my chocolate had ants in it. She was quite willing to take it all off my hands. I think she gave me those little suckers on a stick in exchange for all my Hershey bars, Snickers and Milky Ways.
posted by Stina on 10-30-2007 at 7:02 pm
the best thing I got was were apples. I know it sounds strange, but what’s more fun than accepting the apple then firing it back at them when you’re halfway down the walkway? Halloween is about candy, cavities, and obese children.
The worst thing I ever got was a homemade Reeses cup. It was awful.
posted by Brian M on 11-1-2007 at 12:12 pm
Two gripes related to caramel…
One, it’s pronounced CAR-uh-mel–car-mel is a mountain in the middle east.
Two, butterscotch is NOT caramel–I have sent items back that claimed to be caramel, but were nasty butterscoth (tasting like the bagged butterscotch morsels that made me vomit as a child). I like butterscotch hard candy, though.
posted by Yucko on 10-31-2008 at 10:20 am
Worst: Those chocolate oranges. It’s a shame because i don’t think that they’re sold in big bags so it must have cost a pretty penny to pass out dozens of them to the neighborhood.
Best: A girl I hung out with at the bus stop in elementary school had her parents set aside candy apples for my sister and i went we came to her door. Awesome surprise and we became good friends after that. :)
posted by caryn on 10-31-2008 at 11:24 am
The best was Hershey’s or Snickers. The worst was either the peach colored, marshmallowed circus peanuts, homemade cookies, and apples that were usually mushy.
posted by kat621 on 10-31-2008 at 12:45 pm