Taste the rich, chocolate bounty

Straight from Tatooine’s Tasty Treats

Looks like Han Solo trapped in carbonite

Made from delicious dark chocolate

Product Features

Gourmet Dark chocolate molded to look like Han Solo frozen in carbonite

Trust us, chocolate tastes much better than carbonite

Comes in a box suitable for gifting to your favorite Star Wars fan

Officially licensed Star Wars edible delight

Exclusive product designed and manufactured by ThinkGeek

Each bar is 4.5 oz of premium dark chocolate and measures 6 inches in length Read more at www.thinkgeek.com

See more at www.blaircandy.com

Trick-or-treating dilemma: What to do with the Halloween candy?

“You walk around and they get a giant bag of candy,” says the mother of four, who lives in St. Paul, Minn. “Then what do you do? Just let them have at it, or what?”

This question will be on the minds of millions of parents Monday night after their kids collect candy bars, lollipops, peanut butter cups and other goodies from well-meaning neighbors: The National Confectioners Assn. estimates that 93% of children younger than 13 will go door-to-door this Halloween, asking for treats.

Parents can start by making sure their little pirates and princesses don’t try to eat all of their loot right when they get home. The key, says Dr. Elizabeth Prout Parks, a nutrition specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is to dole it out in limited quantities over the course of several days or weeks.

An appropriate amount is “not more than the size of the palm of their hand, which should not be more than about two or three pieces,” depending on the type of candy, she says. Too much candy in a short period of time can not only make kids feel sick to their stomach, it can cause blood sugar to spike, leading to a crash later on.

If parents are willing to count calories — which can be a challenging proposition, since nutrition information is usually printed on bags of Halloween-sized candy rather than on individual pieces — a reasonable target would be to give kids no more than 100 calories of sweets a day, Parks says. Ideally, those calories would be offset by cutbacks elsewhere: skipping the bag of chips at lunch, for instance, or the extra roll with dinner. Read more at www.latimes.com

“I totally consider candy corn an actual vegetable during the fall season,” Nicole Stokesberry DePalma wrote on Facebook.

“I can’t get enough candy corn. I eat it all year long. It’s an addiction for me. Sometimes I make myself quit eating it for a while, but I always fall off the wagon at Halloween,” Nancy Sonnichsen Storrs wrote on KCBD’s Facebook page.

Clearly not everyone hates candy corn. According to the National Confectioners Association (NCA), more than 35 million pounds will be produced this year.

“That equates to nearly 9 billion pieces – enough to circle the moon nearly 21 times if laid end-to-end,” reads the NCA website.

George Renniger, an employee at the Wunderlee Candy Company in the 1880s, invented candy corn, according to the NCA. In 1900, the Goelitz Candy Company (now known as Jelly Belly Candy Company) started producing the confection, and still produces the candy today.

The NCA website says that candy corn was popular among farmers when it was first sold “because of its agrarian look.” Read more at www.wtol.com

Throwing out gum isn’t much better for the environment than swallowing it is for your stomach. That’s because conventional gum doesn’t biodegrade. At all. And Americans chew around 100 million pounds of the stuff every year.

But now there’s a new kind of gum on the market, so you can freshen your breath without sullying the planet- Rev7, the degradable gum that dissolves into a fine powder in a matter of months.

A big part of the problem is that many chewers don’t bother to dispose of their gum properly, throwing it on sidewalks or the undersides of furniture instead. Cleaning gum off of sidewalks is a major headache because it’s so sticky, and became such a problem in Singapore that its importation has been banned.

But Rev7 is designed not only to degrade, but to be easily cleaned. Normal gum is hydrophobic (does not mix with water), and things that dissolve immediately are hyrdophilic (mix well with water). But Rev7 is amphiphilic, a combination of both. So you can chew it, but it allows enough water to penetrate it that it will slowly break down, and can be removed from a sidewalk with normal cleaning techniques (a hose and a broom). Read more at www.treehugger.com

—For the second year in a row, candy maker Just Born has won the non-chocolate candy category of CSN’s (Convenience Store News) Best New Products Award – this year for its new MIKE AND IKE RedRageous!. MIKE AND IKE Lemonade Blends won in 2010.

Donald Houston received the award on behalf of Just Born at the NACS Show (National Association of Convenience Stores) in Chicago on October 3rd. Read more at mobile.packagingdigest.com

Washington, DC — On average, consumers will spend about $21.05 each on Halloween candy this year, up slightly from an estimated $20.29 in 2010, according to research from the National Retail Federation.

Consumers will spend $72.31 each on Halloween candy, decorations and costumes this October, compared with $66.28 in 2010. Of the 9,374 consumers surveyed, 73.5 percent said they will hand out candy this year, and 32.9 percent will take kids trick-or-treating. Read more at www.candyandsnacktoday.com

See more at www.cracked.com

This salmon was cooked with cocoa nibs, served on a bed of sauteed onions and leeks and dusted lightly with cocoa powder.

The dish was artfully made by legendary chef Jacques Torres. He does wonders with chocolate. Jacques and his food were a lot of fun to photograph. Read more at www.carlweaver.com

Chicago-based World’s Finest Chocolate on Tuesday made a chocolate bar that weighs 12,000 pounds and measures 3-feet high and 21-feet long. The big bar is actually meant to be an example of “portion distortion” for school children. The chocolate company will feature the candy bar on a tour of schools called “Think Big. Eat Smart.”

The recipe for the chocolate bar includes 1,200 pounds of almonds, 5,500 pounds of sugar, 2,000 pounds of milk powder, 1,700 pounds of cocoa butter and 1,400 pounds of chocolate liquor. Read more at www.chicagotribune.com