Haul II: Easter Candy

This is over a week late, but I still had to share my amazing candy haul from Easter. Since this post is late, two items that have been consumed: a Wonderbar Egg (for my American readers who live in a country devoid of one of the best bad chocolate bars ever, think Cadbury's Cream Egg, but with peanut butter and caramel inside) and a packet of Cadbury's Mini-Eggs. The other stuff collected on my egg hunt is more exotic.

The four individual chocolates are all from JS Bonbons, which is the next installment of our hunt for decent non-chain chocolate in Toronto. Please, please, please let them be good.

The wrapped hard candies are Japanese cinnamon candy. I've already consumed most of these and will be heading out to Sanko to purchase some more.

The little boxes of Meiji candy are an assortment of odd things from Japan. I ate all of these this weekend. The candies that look like M&Ms taste like chocolate-flavored Skittles. The Choco Baby box held little nuggets of chocolatey goodness, and the Coffee Beat tasted and looked like chocolate-covered coffee beans, only more chocolatey. The box on the very bottom with pink-capped mountains contained chocolate that tasted identical to the M&M/Skittles hybrid.

Last, but not least, is the black box of Amedei chocolate from Tuscany. The packaging is gorgeous and the label promises bitter chocolate that tastes of flowers and tobacco. Supposedly Amedei treats their chocolate much like wine. Each batch is a vintage and uses the cocoa harvested from a single harvest of a single region. K. and I split one of the pieces on Easter morning and the chocolate was everything the package promised: bitter without a hint of sweetness, winy, and with a note of tobacco. I'm saving these bad boys.

As I eat my way through my Easter candy, I'll post the results. I have high hopes for JS Bonbons, but I am subconsciously prepared for them to be overrated, as is most stuff in Toronto.

Back to marking and reading. I have actual deadlines to meet now. I promise to post about the Pavel Juráček Retrospective this weekend. Thursday, the Cinematheque Ontario will be screening the last of the two and a half films he directed. I will make one comment now, though. Watching The Key for Determining Dwarfs, or The Last Travel of Lemuel Gulliver and listening to Juráček discuss the work and fates of his colleagues Jan Nemec and Evald Schorm, I realized that all the Anglo-American world really knows about Czech cinema is Forman, Menzel, and Svěrak. That is the type of shame that I would normally describe with the adjectival form of a four-letter word. Goddamn Soviets. -Zh.