Candy Dish Blog

I love this simple candy cane centerpiece idea from Better Homes and Gardens magazine (courtesy of their You Tube page) for a number of reasons.

1. While I have a tendency to not be overly excited about red roses during the rest of the year, there’s something wonderful about a deep red rose at the holidays.
2. You can make it with a pickle jar and a rubber band.
3. It’s a great use way to use traditional candy canes in a non-traditional way.

See, I told you it was simple.

How about some fun chocolate cupcakes for Thanksgiving? Seems like a nice dessert for the kids, as well as a craft to keep those little hands busy when they want to help in the kitchen. Take a look:

Let’s see. You got your chocolate cupcakes, you got your candy corn, and you got your little candy-based googly eye things. I know you have a whole mess of candy corn leftover from Halloween. That’s the only bit of this that might be hard to do. Also the eyes, I guess, but you can find some candy discs in the baking aisle or else just use icing.

Looks like a fun thing for the young ones to do.

Turkey Cupcake by Bisayan lady.

Oh my goodness. Check out some of these great chocolate decorations! These folks have a lot more talent than I do. Amazing work! What’s going to decorate your table?

1. It looks like a half football with fins on top. What’s not to love?

2. Chocolate Miniature Village or Chocolate Birdhouses or Chocolate Something Else. I am guessing that chocolate birds, like last year’s suggestion of chocolate turkey, don’t really live here, as they would have to peck their way through the chocolate yumminess that is blocking the windows.

3. I am not sure what this is but it’s beautiful and graceful and mouth-watering.

4. Chocolate Buddha. Mmm – sacrelicious!

5. And finally – the masterpiece. It looks like a hot mess but really it’s very intricately done. If I ever make something like this, the kitchen will be in such tatters that I will just move instead of cleaning up.

With Thanksgiving coming up any moment now and winter holidays close on its heels, it’s time to start planning now for your decorations, not to mention the menus. The menus are almost easy, for many people anchored in traditional food items. The decorations are the really tough part.

Imagine having these place settings for your holiday dinner. You know you need them because Great Aunt Maude won’t sit next to Uncle Howard since the incident nobody speaks of but is only known as The Incident and you have been curious about since you were nine. And then there’s your cousin Susie, who is bringing her ne’er-do-well boyfriend again, who is a nice enough chap but you know Susie’s father doesn’t approve of him because he has had seven jobs in the two years they have been together. And in the end, all you want is for everyone to get along and share a nice meal. Can’t we all just get along for one day out of the year?

Anyway, these place settings are attractive and amazingly simple to make. Get some nice, ripe bosc pears, dip them in melted dark chocolate and let them dry on waxed paper. Then put a hand-written name tag on each and place them on the plates where you have decided each guest should sit. The best part? It’s also a dessert.

To melt chocolate for dipping, use a double boiler. In the bottom part, heat water almost to boiling, then turn off the heat. Insert the top part and put chocolate in it. Stir until the chocolate is melted, then dip until your heart’s content.

Chocolate Place Setting by Marco Arment.

In keeping with the theme of this week, here we have a photo of candy corn. Yep. One of my newest favorite photographers in Frances Civello, a fellow photographer based in Hershey, PA. As you might guess, she take lots of photos of candy and chocolate, since she lives in the town where sweetness was invented. We have featured her work before and everyone here loves her sense of composition.

Speaking of composition, Frances does a great job in this photo centering the subject. Note that this photo does not follow the rule of thirds, to which I have made previous reference. However, the perfect centering makes it an appealing and interesting photo to behold. The lines are all regular and offer a defined structure, wherein the individual kernels of candy corn, plucked fresh from the candy cob, arranged in a natural, yet somewhat chaotic manner, reside.

Do you want your candy photos featured here? Submit them to the Candy Dish Blog Flickr group. We want to see your candy photos and so does the rest of the world!

As Susan mentioned last week, we recently hosted an event in our office to tell media folks about some of the latest trends in chocolate and candy.  We took Real Simple’s idea one step further with our floral and candy centerpiece: 

This picture was taken by Carl. I caught him trying to sneak some of the jelly beans out of the vase moments later.

 Here’s how to create your own.

1. Get two glass containers, one must fit fully inside of the other
2. Fill the smaller of the two containers with water, place a bouquet of flowers inside and loosely cover the top  of the glass with plastic wrap (as best you can with the flowers already in the vase)
3. Carefully place the smaller vase inside the larger vase
4. Fill the space between the larger and smaller vases with candy of your choice (we used jelly beans).  Be sure to completely cover the smaller vase (hence the plastic wrap – you don’t want stray candies in your water-filled vase). 

There also is a variation I love that works well if you have multiple tables to decorate.  Fill a vase with pink bubble gum and use only pink flowers in the display (like pink gerbera daisies), fill another vase with starlight mints and red carnations, a third with butterscotch candies and orange daylilies, and so forth.

Have you used candy to make your table more attractive?  We’d love to see pictures of your best uses of candy on a tablescape.  Upload them to our Flickr photo pool and maybe you’ll even see your pretty picture on our blog!

I don’t know where they came from or how they got here but we started out with one M&Ms critter in our old office and it got lonely so we got it a friend and now they are popping up all over the place in our new office. Honestly, I am not sure how to handle this. They are cute and friendly enough but every time you turn around in the office there’s another one. These are anthropomorphized candy characters, for crying out loud, not tribbles. How can this be happening?

What if they just keep multiplying? What if they develop a pack mentality and take over or, even worse, kick us out of our fancy Georgetown office? Okay, so maybe they are just friendly. And maybe, just maybe, they aren’t really alive. If they were, I am sure all would be fine, judging from their TV personalities. Docile, friendly creatures. They might even purr.

But look what I found in the file room. It appears that they are nesting and making more of themselves. This one is still in his coccoon. Could it be? In all seriousness, I keep finding new ones in the office and I seriously do not know where they are coming from, although I strongly suspect our friends at Mars.

Have you ever seen these things around? Where do you even go to buy them?