CandyCandyCandyCandy....

I decided to make my first real vegan food alternative post to be VERY exciting, so what more exciting than CANDY?

If you didn't already know, certain candies are naturally vegan such as airheads, sour patch kids, now and laters, blow pop, dots, etc. The full list can be found here. Some of you might be wondering what they could possibly put in candy to make them non-vegan. Those ingredients are usually egg albumen or gelatin. Gelatin is what gives that soft, squishy texture to gummi bears/worms, starbursts, skittles, etc. They use pectin in sour patch kids and other squishy, non-gelatinous candies. Pectin comes from vegetable or fruit sources. Gelatin, however, comes from pig and horse bones. Yes, that fun colorful jiggly stuff called jello you used to eat as a child contains boiled pig bones. Scrumptious! FYI, there are vegan jello mixes.

Back to candy...

How about when you're craving a chocolate candy bar though? Before veganism I took the drugstore and grocery store candy shelves for granted. I miss the days I would drool over kit kats, snickers, 3 musketeers and know I could buy one whenever I wanted. So accessible, sigh. Of course those days are gone since all of these chocolate candy bars contain some form of milk (milk, whey, casein).

I attended a holiday fundraiser for Compassion Over Killing and participated in a silent auction where I won 3 vegan chocolate candy bars among a few other things. I tried it with an open mind and MUCH to my pleasure, they were DELICIOUS! The candy bars are made by Go Max Go and it uses rice milk instead of regular milk. They make 4 candy bars of which you'll notice have synonymous titles as the candy bars they are copying (jokerz = snickers, twilight = milky way, I'll let you guess the other 2, although mahalo?). The mahalo is actually DIVINE but the fat content is not, which is of course due to there being coconut in it. The joker could do with a little more peanuts but is otherwise delicious. Bucaneer is perfection and twilight is a teensy bit grainy-ish but otherwise still very delicious. The rice milk chocolate can be slightly more crumbly than the real milk chocolate so take ease when eating them (i.e. avoid eating in the car while driving unless you're prepared to have smushed caked on chocolate bits on your clothes).

You can buy these candy bars at most Whole Foods, some Wegmans although I didn't find it there a few months ago, and at Ellwood Thompsons in Richmond. Speaking of Ellwood Thompsons, that grocery store is a vegan treasure that I will be discussing in a future post.

These candy bars are NOT cheap. Each one costs about $2.50 per bar. A small price to pay though in my opinion. Besides, too much sugar isn't good for you ;)