sugar

Today’s guest blogger is Anna Sahlén, who likes carbohydrates, text, music, movies and details. Her top two candies of all time are the AKO mint toffee and salt liquorice pacifiers. She’s been running the Candy Blog for nearly four years.

Show me your candy bag and I'll tell you who you are. Because what you put in your bag of sweets is an expression as personal as a signature or a fingerprint.

I can compose a bag for someone I know well, like my sister or a really good friend, and I can manage pretty well to guess to their favorites. But it is still just an interpretation of what my close ones would arrange by themselves.

Reasonably, you yourself should be able to pick the best candy bag for yourself, but I do not think that is the case.

With candy ladle in hand, it is too easy to fall in to the old routine and just pick your favorites. And to choose based too much on how it feels in the present. The problem is similar to grocery shopping hungry. It becomes difficult to cook a meal with the ingredients purchased impulsively.

Of course we all think that we have the best taste when it comes to candy. I know what I like and what I want. And you must think the same?

But works in the same way as so much else. It’s more comfortable when someone else strokes your hair than when you do it yourself and a song sounds better when someone else has chosen it, even if it came from your own record collection.

I always thought it was so nice when my mom bought us children candy at Easter, for example. Like seeing the world from new eyes. Better eyes.

As with much else, I think we have to step out of ourselves and our usual ways in order to experience the world in a more complete way.

So get together, choose the ultimate candy mix and give it to someone you love. Give someone an experience he or she can’t give themselves.

And remember: Make an effort. Do not use one single variety. And not too many of each. A maximum of two or three. Take your favorites and someone else's favorite candy that seems exciting. Small and large. Take the salty, the sour and the sweet. Licorice, mint and chocolate, soft and hard. Challenge yourself. Make it hard for yourself. Think outside the box. Outside of yourself.

In order to get enough color on the palette, so to speak, it is not good enough to go to the nearest supermarket. I think you need to visit three different places and I think two of them should be pure candy stores of which one must be really, really good.

You should not be content only with wholesalers like Karamellkungen or Godisprinsen or such providers that use the same concept in all stores. And you should not take more than a hectogram per place.

Follow this advice to be sure to get a bag of candy that melts the hearts of your family member / friend / sweetheart. And they’ll most certainly give you a taste.