Hands up who likes maple syrup! Okay, hands up who likes bacon! Now everyone who didn't raise your hand get out, because I don't want you to see these good people crying over what should have been a great, great, idea.
I freely admit that I was the most excited about Lollyphiles! maple-bacon lollypops. The tantalizing thought of having meat in your candy; invoking dreams of portable pancake breakfasts. I mean, this is one step closer to the chewing-gum meal in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! Bacon and maple syrup are best friends. This could only be awesome.
But...
The Look: This time around the lollypop has a dark brown sheen with... a bizarre piece of gristle lodged in the top of it. Like someone scalped a barbie doll only to find it had actual brains inside of it. When I pictured a lollypop with bacon in it, I pictured little diced pieces of bacon crystalized within it; like the mosquito in amber in Jurassic Park. Only edible. More edible.
But that is not what you get. Not by a long shot. Apparently the way Lollyphile! gets the bacon into the maple syrup lolly is by ramming a hunk of bacon gristle into the top while it's still hardening. The result looks something like what would happen if you pushed too hard on a baby's soft spot.
It's pretty damn off putting. Both the one I ate and the one my girlfriend ate looked this way. So either we were just really damn unlucky, or they're all like this. I'm leaning towards the latter.
Okay, so the look is awful. Really awful. But my dreams of sweet-meat-sweets can live on if the stuff tastes as good as it should.
Well...
The Flavour: Overall first impressions are positive. The sweet syrup flavoured candy contrasts nicely with the salty 'brain' of bacon on the top of the sweet. However, I didn't really feel the candy bit tasted all that much like maple syrup, more like toffee or golden syrup. Which seems like a small point in the scheme of things, but there's something very specific about the alchemy of flavours between smoky bacon and maple syrup that just didn't seem to be happening here. It wasn't unpleasant, just not what I had hoped for.
Okay. So far, so positive, with a few reservations.
Then the bacon started flaking off.
As you suck on the lolly the bacon becomes more and more exposed at the top. But rather than being a chewy piece of bacon jerky, it's more of a large lump of really hard... pig flavoured... wood. The only way to really get to taste the bacon proper was to scrape at it with your teeth or to allow little pieces to flake off. Either way your mouth becomes filled with pig grit. I wouldn't say I found this pleasant, but I wasn't totally disgusted by it. Maybe I was blinded by my desire for this treat to be good. But I will tell you that it made my girlfriend disappointedly give up on the lolly at that point, even though she loved the maple flavoured section.
Should you buy it?: So what we have here is maple syrup candy that doesn't taste like maple syrup coating bacon that looks like brain and feels like its doing it's best impression of tree bark. Do I need to spell it out?
In the end I'm not impressed. I can only really recommend it in an adventure seeking kind of way. But unlike the absinthe one, you're unlikely to want to travel this road again no matter how much you liked the flavour. Sad really. They came so close to greatness. But like Icarus, these lollypops just flew to close to the sun. And melted into strange shrunken heads with the brains bursting out the top.
Next up: Lollyphile! -or- How I Sucked A Hobo Treat
-Dashiell 'MS + B = ♥' Asher
Image courtesy of Lollyphile.com
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