Candy Tangent: Blow Pop Minis

You know I'm an open-minded man. An appreciator of novelties. A neophile. A dude who loves candy, despite the annoying insistence of his diabetes. But even with all those things being as they are, I found a product -- a candy product, no less, and one that I'm naturally disposed to liking -- in the bottom-floor food vendor in my building recently. And contrary to my every nature, this is a candy product that makes me uncomfortable.

They're called Blow Pop Minis.

Now, I used to love Blow Pops. I liked the gum, and I liked penetrating the protective hard candy shell. It was the right formula of fruit and sugar and tartness... a personal favorite, though I realize I'm no qualified critic. But surely you see the issue with these mini Blow-Pop things.

Once you get through the outer shell, whether by chewing or dissolution, what the hell do you do with the gum?

Maybe if you haven't seen the things, and haven't thought through this process, you'll jump to the most obvious answer: you chew it, like you do with gum. But this isn't a monolithic comestible perched atop a stick... it's a single entry in a bag of hard candy. You're supposed to keep eating them. And when you've got gum in your mouth, it's very inconvenient to chew and swallow something else... especially something sticky, that requires some attention to deconstruct.

And though you may call me impatient, I assure you: it makes no sense to just wait until you're done the first bit of gum before you start on a second piece of candy. First of all, the gum inside is barely the size of half a Chicklet. It's so small, it can practically disappear between your teeth. And besides, when was the last time you opened a bag of Mike & Ike's, or even Milk Duds, and just spend a whole 15 minutes on each one? It's a total breach of protocol.

I even considered swallowing the gum each time, but couldn't bring myself to do it. The aversion to swallowing chewing gum, conditioned into me when I was a child, is still too strong for me to openly defy it.

So what these dangerous little objects prompted me to do was to hold some sort of gymnastics yoga session inside my mouth. Here's how it goes: when you get through the first candy shell and end up with a wad of chewing gum, you shift it off to the side, under your lip or in your cheek, and if you're agile, you can free up enough of your mouth to get a second one in there. When you get through that one, you can add another tiny bit of gum to the first little piece, and you have something a little bigger... it's like eating Big League Chew, but only adding one strand at a time, and with a good deal of effort between them.

Keep working, like you're grinding away in an RPG, picking up experience points. Think of each little piece of gum as a gold coin, once you've defeated that candy shell. Once you get to the end of the bag, you'll have something around the size of a block of Bubblicious. Maybe a little bigger. Not huge, but gratifying, after all you've gone through to get to it.

This doesn't sound so bad, if you really need something to do. But let me tell you -- halfway through the bag, you'll definitely be asking yourself if it was worth it.