Halloween is the one chocolate holiday that I don’t really need to go shopping after (though that won't likely stop me). In general I’ll have bought a bag or two of candy on the off chance that somebody shows up at my door on beggar’s night and in general I’ll still have that same bag or two of chocolate the morning of November 1st. What can you do? I don’t want to be that guy who has kids show up at the door and has nothing to offer them. So it’s the day after Halloween and here I am with my expected two bags of leftover chocolate. There aren’t a lot of kids in the neighborhood (there are more dogs than kids so they had trick or treat for the dogs which I thought was nice), but there are neighborhoods that butt up against mine that do have kids so I figured I'd better be prepared. The total count for the evening: three dogs, no children. Ah, well. Such is life. Now I have candy for my candy bowl at work.

The nice thing about having all this leftover candy is that when I grabbed my candy I picked up some things that I had never tried (in miniature form, of course). In the mix were Milky Way Midnight (the dark chocolate vanilla nougat Milky Way) and Dark Chocolate Snickers. The Dark Chocolate Snickers didn’t strike me as too much different than the normal one. Snickers tends to be about the nougat, caramel, and peanuts (which, they assure us, it is “packed with”) and the chocolate is just along for the ride. The dark chocolate adds a little something extra, but it's still got all the things that make Snickers great. Good stuff. The Milky Way Midnight I can’t comment on as far as differences are concerned. I’m not a big Milky Way eater (I tend to grab a 3 Musketeers instead for some reason – not sure why because I do love the Milky Way action) so I can’t say if it’s all that different from the base model. I can say I really liked the Midnight. It was quite tasty and all of the remaining ones have been added to my personal candy stash rather than the candy bowl.

I know I haven’t been posting a whole ton, but I have been eating other chocolate. I’m slowly nibbling my way through my Godiva spoils (and just got another card in the mail for more free chocolate – they’re out of control!) and have had a few interesting items at work one of which provided a painful learning experience. If you have an office or cube with a southern-exposed window (in the northern hemisphere) then your chocolate may be at risk. I have black cabinets in my cube and I had a whole bag of Harry and David truffles in it and after returning from the weekend I found them to have merged into one monstrous truffle beast. An entire bag of truffles I won’t be able to share (and will be forced to eat myself – naturally). I’ve got to figure out where and how to store my chocolate for the weekends so this doesn’t happen again.

As for the other things I’ve been eating, well, they’re going to get a separate post of their own rather than bulk this one up further.

And if you’re into the bargain chocolate thing I suggest you act fast! They need to clear shelf space for the Christmas chocolate so the remaining Halloween goodies are probably going to disappear very quickly. I know at the store I go to for lunch they already have Christmas chocolate on an end-cap so I’m betting that they’ll have the whole Halloween aisle cleared out sometime today and fully replaced with Christmas swag. Good luck shopping!