Halloween Candy Oscars 2009 - Part 3

Great Halloween candy MUST comply to the following three rules. First, it must be Halloween-themed, by which I mean it cannot simply be some cheap, "fun sized" version of normal, everyday chocolate bars or candy - it must be uniquely Halloween shaped. Two, it must only be available at Halloween. If you can get it year-round, it's NOT Halloween candy, so listen up candy companies! Third, it must be delicious. Who cares if it meets the first two requirements if it makes you want to blow candy chunks all over your dead mother's grave?

Those are hard rules. No exceptions. And in the Hard Candy category this year I have two competitors. 2009's first offering is from Zed Candy followed by the ever-faithful Boneheads by Oak Leaf.

Zed Candy is selling Pumpkinheads in jack-o-lantern adorned tins as well as Skulls & Bones in tins decorated with a gold-toothed skeleton pirate and ghostly pirate ship. Each tin is supposed to contain 60 packages, but in all the excitement of the new candy, I forgot to count them before I dug in.

The Pumpkinheads are all the same. Check them out here. They are pumpkin-shaped, and taste like any orange candy should. Upon sinking your werewolf fangs into them, Pumpkinheads crush to super yummy powder.

Skulls & Bones are very different. If you can't guess what each package contains, I'm not going to tell you. The skulls and bones are mixed colours: blood red, regular red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white, and black. Each colour is a different flavour, but I found them to be quite inconsistent. Sometimes dark red ones were spicy like cinnamon hearts while other times they were fruity. Regular red ones were almost always fruity, but once in a while I happened upon an odd flavour I couldn't place.

Blue was most likely a blue raspberry flavour and was one of my favourites. Orange was orange, green was sort of apple-y and yellow was banana/pineapple-ish. Black was weird and indescribable, which leaves white. I can only depict it as some sort of delicious "bone" flavour. I seriously couldn't tell what many of them were supposed to represent in the fruit world.

Compared to Boneheads, the Skulls & Bones candy was relatively bad. I found Boneheads, roughly the same size and shape, to be consistently consistent. Fruit flavours were apparent and very good. Unlike "bobbing for appendixes" in a barrel full of zombie guts, you were never left guessing what you just ate.

Overall, I found that I liked Zed Candy's Pumpkinheads best, despite the fact that they cost almost $8. They were delicious to the max, and the nice tin was a total bonus. Boneheads, although consistent and excellent, just didn't have that special something to put them over the top. A solid second place for sure. Zed Candy's Skulls & Bones, however, are a failure in my books.

2009's Halloween Candy Oscar for Best Hard Candy therefore goes to ZED, for their formidable Pumpkinheads, and NOT for their Skulls & Bones.

Check out Halloween Candy Oscars 2009 - Part 5
Check out Halloween Candy Oscars 2009 - Part 4
Check out Halloween Candy Oscars 2009 - Part 2
Check out Halloween Candy Oscars 2009 - Part 1