Today we conclude our glorious examination of some Canadian candy, courtesy of a generous friend of mine. To read part 1, put your eyeballs over here. As with the previous post, this won’t be a review, but it will have some fun stuff that will bore Canadians but might interest Americans. This post has lots of pictures, so for those of you who don’t like words, enjoy!

Nestle Kit Kat Creamier Chocolate

 

Look at that pretty packaging! So much more shiny and attractive than the United States’ packaging. It almost looks like it’s designed for Valentine’s Day. “Here baby, I got you a Kit Kat!” Romance is different in Canada.

Beyond the package difference, there’s not much more to say here. It’s a Kit Kat bar. Break me off a piece of that.

 

Bars of crispy wafer stuff with chocolate. If you’re looking for freaky Kit Kats, you’re going to have to look at Japan, not Canada.

Nestle Coffee Crisp Crispy Wafer Bar

Coffee Crisp!  According to Wikipedia, this is a truly Canadian candy. You won’t be finding it anywhere else, minus a few specialty stores in Australia. Apparently, Canadian ex-pats love this candy bar so much that there was a petition on coffeecrisp.org to market it in all US cities. Flying in the face of all that we know about Internet petitions, this one apparently succeeded. However, it gets a little murky after that – long story short, citations needed, and you’re still going to have to get past the Mounties to get yourself a Coffee Crisp.

Doesn’t look like much, I’ll admit. But Coffee Crisp is the shit.

Large layers of crispy wafer goodness lovingly surround a thick middle layer of smooth coffee cream, all wrapped in the embrace of a thin chocolate coating. The coffee flavor is subtle; it doesn’t really hit you until after you’ve swallowed, and even then, it’s mild but still delicious. Even if you don’t like coffee (you heathen bastard), you might still like this candy bar, because the coffee flavor comes with the sweetness of the cream and the chocolate, so it’s like eating a crunchy sissy mocha latte whatever drink, which may sound gross but is totally awesome.

The textures are executed perfectly. Crunchy wafer with smooth cream and chocolate? I couldn’t ask for much more out of a candy bar. The ratios are also perfectly balanced. The coffee flavor is just icing on the cake. In retrospect, I’m lucky this candy bar is restricted to Canada only, because I might switch from salt vampire to sweet tooth, and I don’t think my metabolism or my dental insurance could handle that.

Coffee Crisp – possibly the best candy bar you’ll never taste. Unless you’re Canadian.

Kinder Surprise

I’ve saved the best for last. And by that I mean, I spent an inordinate amount of time taking pictures of tiny toys, so you better fucking appreciate it.

Kinder Surprise has a long and storied history in pretty much everywhere but the United States. I could read the entire Wikipedia article and sum it up for you, but I seriously spent a really long time with these eggs, so go educate yourself here. I’ll break down the most salient points: they are egg-shaped chocolates with toys inside.

Over 80 jouets! I just learned another French word!

You get three of these per box. When you shake them, you can hear the toy rattling around inside. I’m technically an adult, but even I got excited after hearing that rattling. What would be inside my eggs?! I officially declare Kinder Surprise to be the best stocking stuffer ever.

Presenting: the egg.

The chocolate shell that encloses the toys is very thin. Let’s face it; kids love chocolate, but they’re really after what’s inside the egg. Of course, this means Kinder Surprise could use the shittiest chocolate possible, but I actually found it rather tasty. It seems that the outside is milk chocolate and the inside is white chocolate. It melts quickly in your mouth and is pleasantly smooth.  The milk and white chocolate work well together. I could be totally wrong about the white chocolate, but who cares? TOYS!

I bit into my first Kinder Surprise egg to get it open, but it turns out the seam breaks apart easily, leaving you with two intact pieces. I was surprised that the toy wasn’t just sitting there waiting for me; instead, I was greeted with a little pod with an unpleasant yellow hue. My friend sent me two boxes, which, to the math-impaired, equals six eggs, and all the pods were this sickly yellow color. I could think of about 80 different colors that would be more appealing to children. That’s the same number of jouets possible!

Kinder Surprise uses some sort of dark magic to squish all this shit into that little pod. The toys don’t come assembled; depending on what you get, they can range from 2-4 pieces, going off of my own Kinder eggs.

Included with each disassembled toy is a strip of paper listing all the warnings and dangers in every single goddamn language in the world. Seriously, I think I saw Ugandan on there. I don’t even know if that’s a language.

There’s also an insert that shows what…playset, I guess you could say, that the toy comes from. Eh, you’ll get the idea from the pictures.

Before I get to the toys, I’d like to address my earlier statement that Kinder Surprise is not allowed in the United States. There’s a very good reason for this, and I will let Wikipedia explain:

“In 1993 the Ferrero Group (the maker of Kinder eggs) applied to have the eggs sold in the USA, but was turned down because of a prohibition against having an inedible item inside an edible object. More recently, the US Consumer Products Safety Commission determined in 2008 that the product did not meet the small-parts requirement for toys for children under the age of three, creating a choking and asphyxiation hazard in young children. Since 1991, at least 7 children worldwide have died of choking after swallowing the toy inside the Kinder egg.”

This is no fucking joke. Each Kinder toy, even assembled, is no bigger than the size of a half dollar. Some of the components are smaller than an Advil tablet. Furthermore, you’re encasing these tiny toy components inside a chocolate egg. Put yourself inside the mind of a four-year-old: “This tiny, tiny piece of plastic smells like chocolate! I should definitely put it in my mouth!” I’m usually a proponent of natural selection in cases like this, but even my cynical ass can look at these things and say, “This is a very bad idea.”

Apparently, the rest of the world disagrees.

Eh, fuck it. Americans are pussies. Who cares. Let’s look at the toys!

Despite having a selection of over 80 jouets, I managed to get a duplicate toy amongst my six eggs. This was the duplicate. Here, you can also see what I mean by the insert showing the set that the toy belongs to. I got a…fire…hoverboat? With a giant fireman’s helmet on top? Is the rest of the world utilizing some sort of hoverboat technology to put out fires? The US really needs to get on that.

My firehoverboat came in three pieces. I could have swallowed any one of them with a glass of milk.

Here we have a different, yet similar, fire department scene. I guess this one is all about the tiny fire midgets who bravely fight the tiny Kinder fires. This toy only had two pieces, but here we see one of Kinder Surprise’s failings: the tiny nub on the fire midget that should have connected the fire pole to the base was too big for the hole in the base. Tiny fire midget is doomed to slide down a pole that never ends. He is also doomed to never stand upright.

Tiny fire midget is one of the bigger pieces I got in my Kinder Surprises. I would probably need something pretty viscous to swallow him. Maybe some V8.

Here we have Hockey Duck, who is a part of the Hockey Guy set. Hockey. Canada! Kinder Surprise likes to perpetuate stereotypes.

They all appear to be different animals, although I would question whether or not some of the animals are real. I had to screw on his legs and then attach them to the base. It took me a second to realize that the other piece was a hockey puck on ice. I thought it should connect to the figurine, but try as I might, I could not find a way to fit the swirlies on the base to the swirlies on the ice. Maybe the ice connects with the ice pieces of the other toys pictured? I do not know. It will forever be a mystery, because I live in the United States.

I probably couldn’t choke down assembled Hockey Duck, but I could swallow his legs with a bit of water.

Now we’re getting to one of my two favorites: Crazy Ears Bunny. That’s his mobster name.

I haven’t addressed this yet, but each insert is two-sided: one side is a picture of the group that the toy belongs to, and the other side varies between just a boring picture of the toy enlarged (firehoverboat) or instructions on how to assemble the toy (Hockey Duck and this guy).

I’d been playing around with Kinder toys for a while at this point, and Crazy Ears Bunny frustrated the hell out of me. Perhaps all the assembling and picture-taking had fried my brain, but these instructions made about as much sense as the instructions to building an Ikea desk. The nose has a component that fits inside the two halves of the toy, and it took me a few tries to figure out how to fit it in there.

The ears were all folded up inside the pod, and they refused to straighten out, no matter how much I ran them across the edge of my fridge like someone trying to smooth out a dollar bill on the side of a vending machine. I also didn’t figure out for a while that you had to fold the base and then fold the- you know what, I’m still not really sure how that was supposed to work. I kinda like how they turned out, though. They look…jaunty.

Here we see Crazy Ear Bunny’s Crazy Ear friends.

…Wait, I just realized something. That’s not a bunny! It’s Crazy Ear Rhino! That is ten times more awesome and I am really unobservant. There’s even an actual bunny in the picture and I missed it.

Anyways, the entire Crazy Ear crew is awesome. There seems to be some indication that their ears work like helicopters and they can all fly. Considering I could barely keep the ears upright on my rhino long enough to take a picture, I have doubts about it flying, but they are still the coolest kids in Kinder school. I love that Crazy Ear Giraffe has no neck but super long ears. Now he can fly up to the trees to eat the leaves, and his neck will never be tired again.

I could probably swallow Crazy Ear Rhino’s horns after working up a mouthful of saliva.

And here’s my favorite: Dino Hatchling! I’m not sure what kind of dinosaur he is, but that’s okay, because none of them in the picture look very specific. If Dino Hatchling looks fuzzy in the picture, that’s because he is! He feels sort of like the felt on a pool table, and I love it. He also appears to be hatching from his egg in a very awkward way. Actually, looking at the illustration, it looks more like he’s already hatched, and has decided to hang out in his shell, rocking a casual paw-resting-on-tail pose.

Dino Hatchling only has two pieces, the Hatchling itself and a little purple flower looking thing that attaches to his back. I have no idea what it is supposed to be, but it is small enough that I could probably swallow it without even noticing. Seven children dead.

Dino Hatchling comes with a different kind of insert. You can color him! The picture obviously demands that you use a periwinkle colored pencil or else you’re doing it wrong. There’s also a bunch of dots, which would seem to suggest there’s also a connect-the-dots game involved, but they don’t seem to really connect…anything. Kinder Surprise, sometimes I don’t understand you at all.

Kinder Surprise has a real Pokemon “collect ’em all” vibe going, which is good for them but bad for parents and their wallets. I don’t know how much a box costs, but I know if I were a kid living in Canada, I would demand that they be bought until I had the entire fuzzy dinosaur collection. Complete with fully choke-able accessories. You’re a sly dog, Kinder Surprise.

And thus ends our tour through the wonderful world of Canadian candy. Today, we learned that Canada has more savvy Kit Kat packaging, Coffee Crisp bars are awesome and I will probably never have one again, and Kinder Surprise wants to kill your children unless you live in the US. They also have inscrutable assembly instructions.

Well, it’s been fun, but I guess it’s back to American junk food for me. I hope you enjoyed all the pictures and the mental image of a grown woman fumbling with tiny toy parts. A special thanks again to my Canadian friend for sending me all these lovely gifts. Poutine Alex Trebek Clearly Canadian.