Sugar Rush (Top Ten Sweets)

Member Name: skittle

Product:	Top Ten Sweets
Date:	31/10/07 (178 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Yum!

Disadvantages: Tum and Bum

I’m a real sucker for sweets (ho, ho, ho).

Sorry about the bad pun, but it is true to say that my life would not be complete without the odd sweet or three, or ‘goodies’ as we call them around my neck of the woods. Here are some of my favourites, and I can assure you that it was sheer hell limiting this list to only ten:

Sherbet Lemons. Crunchy outside, fizzy inside with the all-pervading flavour of lemons, who could resist? Well, certainly not me. These little rugby balls are the perfect treat in my opinion, from their nobbly outsides to their tooth-breaking crunch (coz you know you’ve gotta crunch) and the final fizz in the middle. Quite simply, I love them.

Kola Kubes. Well, whilst we’re talking about sweeties that you’ve just gotta crunch, heres another one. You wouldn’t think that the taste of flat cola in a boiled sweet could be so delicious, but these so are. Like sherbet lemons, kola kubes are a favourite from my youth and bring back many a memory of running down to the local goodie shop, my 10p a week pocket money clutched tightly in my sweaty little palm to buy my 2oz packet of sweets. Then spending long moments trying to decide between the row upon row of boiled sweets behind the newsagent’s head. Kola Kubes were frequently my choice, and would be now too if anywhere still sold them around here. They’re yum.

Pineapple Kubes. Well, you can’t really have one without the other, can you? Like Kola Kubes, Pineapple Kubes are crunchable little cubes of hard-boiled goodness that are a pure delight to eat. They’re small enough for a youngster to suck, but big enough to satisfy even my adult sweet cravings (for a bit, anyway). It’s fair to say that they’re not the most sophisticated sweet on the block, but the power of the Pineapple Kube should not be underestimated. They’re a subtle little sweetie that surprisingly, actually taste more of pineapple than unadulterated chemicals, well, that’s if you can taste anything whilst you’re buzzing from the sugar overdose…

Acid Drops. Wicked little pale green sweets that look so innocent but pack such a punch; I’ve always absolutely adored acid drops. Not just for their ability to fool my mum into accepting one every single time she was offered (and how I loved to watch her lip curl in horror when she realised, again, what she was eating) but because they’re sweets with a really sour edge, and that’s something I absolutely adore.

Rosy Apples. Lovely little balls of red and green fruitiness, these are another favourite from my youth (that I still love today). The Rosy Apple, for those of you who’ve never sampled this delicacy, is a ball shaped apple flavour boiled sweet, about the size of a reasonably large Malteser, but much longer lasting and quite probably much more more calorific too. This one is pure, unadulterated sweetness though with no acidy edge, sherbet or even a hint of sourness.

Kop Kopps. For some reason at my school we were all convinced that Kop Kopps were the perfect remedy when you had a cough. I have absolutely no idea why. Maybe it’s their (large enough to choke a horse) tablet shape, or their faintly medicinal flavour. Hey, maybe it’s just the fact that they’re coated in sugar and we all know that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Whatever the reason, and whether I have a cough or not, I still love Kop Kopps.

Sweet Peanuts. As a child I was always completely convinced that sweet peanuts were not, in fact, a peanut flavoured boiled sweet in the shape of a monkey nut, but actual real monkey nuts (get your minds out of the gutter) magically transformed into a sugary snack. I was a pretty odd kid…

Peanut Brittle. Whilst we’re on the subject of peanuts anyway, there was no way I could leave out Peanut Brittle. This one was my dad’s particular favourite, and it was him who encouraged me to develop a taste for this particular sweet. Lets be honest, peanuts in a brittle toffee aren’t quite what you’d expect a little girl with an exceptionally sweet tooth to reach for, but I’m glad I learnt to love this stuff. The smell of peanut brittle, along with Liquorice Allsorts and Thorntons toffee are all I need to transport me back to childhood – usually my dads birthday when he’s hoarding all of his oh-so-chewable prezzies and refusing to share!

Chewing Nuts. Bizarrely, not actually a nut at all, rather an incredibly hard nugget of toffee coated in chocolate that, once it warms up, you can chew for days at a time without it ever getting any smaller, or that was how it seemed to the young me, anyway. The toffee was always incredibly sticky, too. I often finished up sticking my teeth together with it, and a favourite stunt as a little ‘un was to chew on a chewing nut until it was nicely sticky, then feed it to one of my mums Chihuahuas. Watching them chewing and chewing and chewing on a chewing nut gave my sisters and I endless hours of entertainment. Yes, we were a truly evil family.

Wham Bar. They used to be bigger, I swear! A Wham Bar was my usual treat in the café at the local leisure centre after a swimming session, and how I looked forward to it. The bar itself is very thin and flat and made of a raspberry flavoured, erm, stuff that is incredibly hard to bite into, but quickly becomes soft and chewy and almost as sticky as a Chewing Nut. Not content with just hard raspberry chewyness, the Wham Bar also offers the occasional, random nugget of fizzy stuff that goes off like a mini-explosion in your mouth when you find one.

So, that’s my favourite ten – all of them retro sweets, every one a taste sensation to rival garlic bread (Garlic… and… Bread?) and all (as far as I’m aware) available from www.aquarterof.co.uk

Hope you enjoyed reading about them as much as I’ve always enjoyed eating them.

Summary: A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips... Ah, who cares, pass the lemon bonbons