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Allow Us to Explain
It's getting awfully close to Halloween, and of course there's nothing better on the holiday than tons of candy. There are some delectables, however, that we will never be able to enjoy.
Now, granted, there's a lot of fictional candy out there that we're happy is staying fictional. Most of the stuff from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, for example. I'm fine with not having to defend myself against Canary Creams, Skiving Snackboxes, and Ton-Tongue Toffees. Lord Downey 's possibly-not-laced-with-arsenic peppermints are also probably left safely fictional.
But there's also a ton of stuff that we've been waiting most of our lives to eat, and no, I'm not just talking about Bertie Bots Every Flavor Beans. I could take those or leave them. (Although the drawstring bags they come in are a great way to store dice.)
(This Power Grid is a rerun from Geekosystem last year. We had something of a busy week and weekend .)
Turkish Delight
I know, I know that Turkish Delight is a real candy. But if you grew up with this stuff in your life by default, you need to understand one thing: No American kid has any idea what Turkish Delight is.
This makes reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe somewhat interesting. Pretty much everyone I know made something up in their heads to represent Turkish Delight; something so delicious that we would betray our families and the forces of good just to keep scarfing it down, and the answers were varied and wild. My turkish delight was a specific brand of delicious, moist, sugar glazed donut holes. Even a brief office survey turns up answers like pastry, chocolate, and gummies (the closest to the real thing , I suppose).
All hail to Turkish Delight, the candy Platonic ideal!
Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs
Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs are not a real cereal, and are not technically candy, but on both counts they might as well be.
CFSBs was the favorite breakfast cereal of a certain red shirted, towheaded kid you may be familiar with, containing (as you may have noticed) 100% daily value of caffeine and absolutely no natural ingredients. Calvin usually poured on even more sugar, and would occasionally eat it with chocolate milk. Not that it mattered, since the cereal turns regular milk brown anyway.
For what it's worth, Calvin's mom draws the line at buying him the kind with marshmallows.
And, just in case you think this reference is too obscure, Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs have appeared as an homage in Runaways , Buffy the Vampire Slayer , Fallout 3 , Deadpool and The King of Queens , for chrissake.
Half-Baked Ideas
The Phantom Tollbooth makes edible a variety of things that would not normally be edible. Letters of the alphabet, for example, which taste better the more commonly they are used. Words, also, may be eaten, making a clear correlation between a bad speech and a bad dinner. And then there are seemingly normal foods that do unexpected things, like subtraction soup, the eating of which only makes you hungrier than you were before, and division dumplings, which, no matter how many you eat, there are always more than when you started.
But for this list of candy, we'd like to highlight Half-Baked Ideas , a dessert that is likely to cause indigestion if you consume too many. Examples given in the book are "The Earth is Flat," and "Night Air Is Bad Air," while the main character Milo tucks "Everything Happens For The Best" away for later.
Rare Candy
For those living under a rock that resides under a bigger , sensory deprivation rock, the Pokémon universe is about capturing, training, and pitting generally adorable creatures against each other in battle. The bulk of the game focuses on training the creatures through battle, gaining experience for them and making them stronger. The rare candy is an item which, when fed to a Pokémon, will gain said Pokémon one level, free of effort.
Throughout most of the Pokémon games, the rare candies, true to their name, only exist in a finite amount to prevent super speedy leveling; however, as with most things digital, that didn't stop players from figuring out other, less reputable methods to obtain an infinite amount of rare candies, such as cloning. Though free levels would otherwise be highly desirable, Pokémon is set up in such a way where the player can level a large group of Pokémon with each creature getting to a maximum level of 100. So, even if the average player has an absurdly small amount of Pokémon in their collection (we'll say five), that's 500 levels until their group achieves all of their level gains--a number dwarfing the amount of rare candies available, making the amount of legitimately-obtained rare candy less helpful than it'd initially seem.
The Gingerbread House
You know those cheerful, if structurally unsound, gingerbread houses that you see cropping up in shop windows or maybe even your own kitchen every year?
Well this isn't like those. This one is inhabited by cannibalistic sorceress, as ugly as she is cruel, destined to be roasted alive in an oven by adorable children.
Humans are food for her, and food is building materials, so… we're guessing she was raised by drywall.
The original Brothers Grimm story has the house made out of cake, but it probably became gingerbread cookie material after somebody with actual culinary experience had a word with them.
Chocolate Frogs
Chocolate frogs (not to be confused with this Monty Python sketch ) are a quite tricky candy of the Harry Potter series. Animated by a transmutation spell, when you open up the box your intended treat may try to get away.
But even if it does, you've still got your wizard trading card, likely featuring a small, seemingly unimportant bit of information that will not be brought up again until it later becomes vitally relevant to the plot, allowing you to figure out what the audience has known for chapters because it's in the title of the darn book.
Berte Bots Every Flavor Beans
Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Beans are one of the more famous of the various and sundry candies and sweets that appear in the Harry Potter series. Canonically, they were made by the eponymous sweetmaker when he accidentally created sweatsock flavored jelly beans out of thin air.
The gimmick, if you are not aware, is that unlike regular jelly bean assortments, Botts' beans come in literally every flavor, even disgusting ones.
They only come in random assortments. There is no color guide. You're on your own against horseradish, liver, earthworm, and vomit. Godspeed.
In reality, Jelly Belly makes suitably awful assortments that come in very handy drawstring bags (Bonus Geekosystem Writer Trivia! - Susana keeps her dice in a couple of them).
Candied Chestnuts
We are aware that candied chestnuts are, in fact, a real confection. However, they may as well be fictional, because we're not sure if we know anyone who actually has eaten them or knows where to get them. We're familiar with them primarily through Brian Jaques ' Redwall series, where candied chestnuts are the major sweet of the largely vegan (although they eat fish), medieval society featured in it.
I guess they eat honey, too, so maybe they're not vegan? Do these distinctions still apply when all the characters are different species of sentient anthropomorphic animals, domesticated animals don't appear to exist, and fish scale (har har) with the other characters, but insects remain tiny?
Where did they get the cane sugar to candy the chestnuts with anyway? Do they make beet sugar?
Are we over thinking this? Isn't that our job anyway?
Everlasting Gobstoppers
First appearing in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Everlasting Gobstoppers were created by maniacal chocolatier Willy Wonka for children that have "very little pocket-money," as they're supposed to last forever. A gobstopper (derived from British slang for mouth, gob) is what Americans would know as a jawbreaker: a large round hard candy that takes a very long time to dissolve.
The Everlasting Gobstopper has appeared in reality as a small, round candy with a chewy center that last about fifteen minutes, maybe, produced by Nestlé. So... that's authentic. But probably less likely to jab you with a bunch of weird nubs. At least they come by the boxful!
Tricky Treats
In World of Warcraft , Tricky Treats rain from the sky after you defeat the Headless Horseman, the seasonally appearing boss of the Hallows End celebrations. They're sugar frosted taffy with a liquid syrup center, made in the shape of little pumpkins, and you can rack up a couple dozen of them for each kill. Which is great, because this year they're being used as currency to buy holiday prizes.
But this isn't just food. It's food in an MMO . So here's what it does to you if you eat it: it gives you a stacking 4% speed increase called Sugar Rush , that can boost you up to 20% quicker than normal. But there's also a chance that it will cause you to vomit, lose the speed buff, and be unable to eat any more until your debuff (Upset Tummy ) wears off.
What? Oh.
Yes, there is an achievement for it . ಠ_ಠ
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