I'd like to preface everything I'm about to say with this: I am half-Belgian. Chocolate will run through every conversation I have with my family until the end of time. It ran throughout my childhood. It continues to run through my veins. Also, I hate it and it's disgusting.
Listen. LISTEN. I respect your decision to worship at the altar of the cocoa bean, but I do it from my perch over at the Church of Gummy. Chocolate is messy to the point of inconvenience, boring to the point of tears, and rich to the point of...it's just really rich. Gummies, tho? Gummies are none of these things.
Think back on your funnest summer adventures. Each time you unwrapped a Snickers, did you get to really enjoy it? Or did it go something like this?
Poolside, on a 95-degree day, our heroine enters, stage left.
"Ugh, I'm, like, really craving chocolate. Who else needs chocolate? If I get a Snickers from the freezer will you — you will? OK, great."
*Three minutes later*
"Here you go. Ugh, I love these every so often, you kn—oh fuck. Fuck! I have Snickers all over my entire body. And, like, in my hair? Pass me that towel!! Now, please! Dammit, I just wanted chocolate.
End scene.
That's what I thought. And did you have that same thing happen the last time you opened Sour Patch poolside? Precisely. It also feels important to note that if you're going to eat something that melts easily, you probably wouldn't want that something to quite literally look dumpy while you're putting it in your mouth. Rainbow meltiness is pretty, at least.
But, OK, fine. Say you managed to get all the chocolate in your mouth without having it melt faster than a wicked witch in water. You're all warmed up and ready to go. For all the hype around chocolate, you'd think a Three Musketeers would be orgasmic from first bite onward. But it's not. It's just...fine.
Sure, there could be caramel or nougat or cream or alcohol in your chocolate, but it would still end in the same mouth-coating dullness. Get way into a bag of gummy bears or Skittles or HI-CHEW or anything and you're wide awake from start to finish. A fruity candy is an experience. A chocolate one is a bummer.
In the cases where chocolate is more than a one-note letdown (@ Leonidas, what's good?), it is rich enough to make one sick. Literally! A Delish staffer who shall not be named here recalls getting physically ill after eating a fair amount of chocolate cake one time. She was 16 at the time! She did it on her own accord. She attributes the subsequent vomiting to the richness of the cake and nothing else.
Another hates anything with even the tiniest bit of dark chocolate, which is a whole other can of (hopefully gummy) worms. Why would anyone voluntarily eat dessert that was bitter?! Ugh. Gross.
Let that all marinate while I preemptively make amends with the family who raised me on pralines, truffles, and gigantic blocks of chocolate. Rather, let it melt. I'll see you in Gummy Church next week.
