Blonde chocolate has yet to reach the popularity of milk, dark, and white chocolate, but it is already recognized as one of the most ingenious variations of white chocolate ever created.

The history of blonde chocolate can be traced back to the year 2004 when French pastry chef Frederic Bau was busy showing off his skills during an exhibition in Japan. He apparently got so carried away during the show that he left his white chocolate melting in a bain-marie for four days. When he finally got back to it, the chocolate had become a pale brown and had a very distinct smell and flavor. Apart from its caramel-like color, this new confection had the milky smoothness of white chocolate, but also butterscotch, toffee, and shortbread-tasting notes, as well as a distinct aftertaste of roasted coffee. Frederic Bau quickly recognized the potential of his discovery, and blonde chocolate was born.

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A Japanese candy company has been making national news headlines for its idea to produce gummy candy that tastes like an ‘imaginary fruit’ called Kiraspika (キラスピカ).

Last year was a great one for gummy candy producers, and the market continued to expand throughout 2023, with fruit-flavored gummies being the most popular. While there are plenty of fruit flavors to choose from, including intriguing fruit combinations, companies are still limited to the fruits available in our world. But what if someone broke down barriers and started making candy that tastes like imaginary fruits? That was the genius idea that Japanese sweets maker Kanro recently came up with. Last month, the company launched a new type of gummy candy that tastes like ‘Kiraspika no Mi’, a made-up fruit with an original flavor, design, and even an origin story.

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A cafe in Taiwan has been getting a lot of attention online for serving puppy-shaped ice-cream that most people describe as adorable and terrifying at the same time.

When you think about food, the first thing that probably comes to mind is taste, but the fact is that eating is a visual experience as well, and sometimes you can be put off by a dish, even though you know it is delicious. That’s kind of the vibe I’m getting from the puppy-shaped ice-cream served at the Sowing the Sweets cafe, in Taiwan. I’m sure it tastes good – it’s ice-cream, after all – but at the same time I find the idea of digging into this realistic puppy with a spoon disturbing and morbid.

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Ever since Nestlé introduced white chocolate, 80 years ago, chocolate has been available in only three main varieties – dark, milk and white. Well, it’s apparently time to add a fourth type to the list – Ruby pink chocolate.

Zurich-based Barry Callebaut, the world’s largest based cocoa processor, has apparently spent the last 13 years trying to produce naturally pink chocolate out of ruby cocoa beans. This cocoa variety grows in different parts of the world, including Ecuador, Brazil, and the Ivory Coast, but the Swiss company is the first to actually convert it into pink chocolate, through a sophisticated process.

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Paying $100 for a donut seems crazy, but Donutopia is no ordinary confectionery, it’s a culinary masterpiece covered in 24-karat gold flakes and edible sugar diamonds. These treats are made with the finest ingredients, including $39 Bling H2O water.

“Each one takes three to five hours to make,” says Jeanne Kaminski, co-owner of Dolicious Donuts in West Kelowna, Canada, where the delectable donuts were invented. They were inspired by a loyal customer who wanted to use one of their creations to propose to his girlfriend. He asked for a cream-filled Bismarck donut to act as a pillow for the engagement ring, but they decided to make him something truly impressive. The first Donutopia got such positive feedback that they decided to include it on the menu.

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There’s a wacky new diet product sweeping Japan, and it’s modeled after Willy Wonka’s famous Everlasting Gobstopper. Aptly named the ‘60-Minute Candy’, it’s a lollipop with a three-centimeter ball of sugar that lasts for an entire hour!

The 60-minute-candy has gone viral in the Japanese Twitterverse, with hundreds of women passing it on as a great way to suppress sugar cravings. A gigantic lollipop doesn’t really pass for diet food, but a few licks of it apparently beat gorging on a candy bar, and since it lasts so long it’s also more affordable.  Well, because it’s long-lasting, it’s actually great to suppress cravings for foods with higher calories. And they’re so handy that people could carry them around and take them out from time to time for a good lick.

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It looks like a large drop of water, but it’s actually a cake. This Japanese invention is as delicate as it looks and sounds, but it needs to be consumed in only 30 minutes, after which it will simply turn into a sweet puddle of water.

The water cake looks like a large bowl of jelly without the color, but its makers insist that it’s cake. The strange dish is a variation of the well-known Japanese rice-cake confection, shingen mochi. Mochis are trademarked desserts, only created by the Kinseiken Seika Company. A regular type of shingen mochi is made from a particularly soft type of mochi rice cake, sprinkled with kinako soybean powder and eaten with brown sugar syrup. Traditionally, it is yellow in color, with a sticky and soft jelly-like consistency.

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Most teenagers can’t wait until they’re 21 so they can have a legal ID, but here’s one shop in Japan that will make them want to stay young forever – an ID proving that they’re a sixth grader or younger. Because that’s how young you’ve got to be to enter Japan’s Future Sweets Factory – a magical place filled with all things sweet and delicious. Kids get to enter the factory alone, leaving their parents behind in the lobby area.

Future Sweets Factory is located on the premises of the hugely popular Patisserie es Koyama (famous for its special roll cake), in Sanda City, Hyogo Prefecture. The entrance to the factory is through a large, colorful egg-shaped dome. Beyond the dome lies a waiting hall where children bid goodbye to their parents for a few hours. The kids proceed through a special kid-sized door to where all the magic happens, just like in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!

Inside the factory, away from their parents’ watchful eyes, kids are treated to samples of freshly made sweets. True to its name, at the Future Sweets Factory kids get to sample all kinds of sweets that are yet to hit the market. They also get to watch the chefs bake three special surprise sweets that cost only 150 yen each. The factory is decorated to suit the kids’ tastes – with cartoon characters and robots.

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Sweets are not just meant for eating, they can be used for art too! Artist Michelle Wibowo recently used tasty treats to create a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel painting – The Creation of Adam. Measuring 18’9’’ by 9’2’’, it features 10,000 marshmallows and half a billion cake sprinkles. It’s been rightly dubbed, ‘The Baking of Adam’.

Michelle took 168 hours to complete the project that marks the 450^th anniversary of Michelangelo’s death. “Britain is currently gripped by baking fever with a real emphasis on unique designs and showmanship,” said the 35-year-old artist who baked the masterpiece for Cake Angels. “When we learnt of Michelangelo’s anniversary celebrations, we really wanted to join in. We decided to challenge the boundaries of cake design by immortalizing his most heavenly creation in our own special way. No celebration is complete without cake and we really hope that Michelangelo would have given us his official seal of approval.”

According to creative director Alex Balzaretti, “Cake Angles is all about inspiring the baker through creativity and innovation. We’ve been looking for a project for a long time that enabled us to do that and it became apparent that 2014 was going to be a historic year in the celebration of the life of Michelangelo. His most important and probably prized work of art is The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and what more heavenly creation to be picked.”

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Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, has just passed the 100 billion valuation mark, but thanks to a couple of business-savvy ice-cream makers from Croatia, anyone can have a slice of it for as little as 1 euro.

Brothers Admir and Ibi Adili run the Valentino ice cream shop in Tisnom, on Croatia’s Murter island. After noticing his 15-year-old daughter Bibi spent a lot of her free time on Facebook, Admir came up with the idea of creating a Facebook ice cream to attract other fans of the social network. All he had to do was make a plain white ice cream, decorate it with blue syrup, slap a “Facebook” sign on it and wait for the new business to roll in. Believe it or not, his plan actually worked. The treat has been a big hit with tourists this summer, and Adili told reporters it’s been going like crazy. His Facebook ice cream apparently tastes like chewing gum and candy, but it’s not the flavor that has customers begging for more, but the name and the trademark “Facebook” logo on the sign.

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From cooked insects to fermented bird meat, humans have been eating all kinds of outrageous foods for hundreds of years, but there are some things that I just wouldn’t dream of putting in my mouth. One of them is the anus-shaped Belgian chocolates sold by a cheeky British chocolaterie.

If you think the chocolate “Edible Anus” looks remarkably like the real thing, that’s because it’s made using a mold “crafted from the posterior” of the company’s “stunning butt model.” Feel like throwing up yet? There’s really no proof of that on their official website, so you’ll just have to take their word for it. The allegedly delicious treats are hand-crafted in the UK, and contain no artificial preservatives, if it’s any consolation. According to the geniuses behind this novelty desert, the Edible Anus is “the perfect gift for the whole family” and will “light up” Grandma’s face, as she “unwraps a homely selection of chocolate cracks”. I’m pretty sure my family would disown me if I sent them a box of these unique treats, but they’re actually a great gift idea for your proctologist. Read More »

Nothing says “I love you” like your detailed mug rendered in delicious chocolate. At least that’s what the Japanese at 3D-printing firm KS Design Lab and FabCafe, in Tokyo, are hoping you’ll think, as they offer patrons the chance to “chocolatize” their faces as gifts for Valentine’s Day.

Valenntine’s is big business in Japan. As we previously reported, a lot of Japanese chocolate companies record half their annual sales in the days before the romantic holiday. In the Land of the Rising Sun, only women offer gifts to men, usually in the form of chocolate sweets. Trying to stand out from the competition, 3D-printing firm KS Design Lab and Tokyo’s FabCafe, in the Shibuya district, have teamed up to offer a very original service to a group of women attending their workshop – 3D printed models of their faces in chocolate, to be given as presents on Valentine’s Day. Some of you may find them oishii (delicious), but I think they qualify more as kimoi (creepy). “We were brainstorming together about how the 3D-printing technology could appeal to consumers, when we hit on the idea of Valentine’s Day chocolates,” PR rep. Kazue Nakata explained.

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Combining two of women’s favorite things in the world, chocolate and shoes, Texas chocolatier Andrea Pedrazza creates what can only be considered the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for the ladies – chocolate high-heels.

The two weeks before Valentine’s Day is the busiest time of the year for Dallas-based chocolate shop CocoAndre. I’m sure there are other great places to buy tasty chocolate in D-Town, but only here can men find the most delicious designer shoes at a fraction of the price. Master chocolatier Andrea Pedrazza pours the brown goodness into plastic high-heel molds and decorates them with gourmet ingredients to make them look as realistic as possible. Unsurprisingly, her most popular creations are chocolate Christian Louboutin shoes which sell for $35. To recreate the designer’s signature red soles, the food artist uses red ganache. Available styles include simple colors, zebra or cheetah print and polka dots, so men wanting to gift their wives with their favorite shoes for cheap are bound to find something they like.

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I’m a big fan of white chocolate, but not even the strongest sweets craving couldn’t make me take a bite out of Annabel de Vetten’s creepy baby heads. They’re way too scary for me, but according to the English food artist they’re quite a hit at parties and baby showers.

The disturbing white chocolate artworks were originally designed as a private commission, but apparently they came out so good that Annabel decided to make several more. Then, her works were discovered by strange cake curator Miss Cakehead, who also brought the infamous STD Cupcakes to our attention, and now the eerily realistic newborn baby heads are a popular chocolate treat. “I just pictured ‘dead, milky eyes and skin’ and hit the nail on the so to speak. And creased the mold while it was setting to get a soft, ‘damaged’ effect. So, strangely enough, no challenge! I was a little worried some might think this is going a bit too far. But it’s only chocolate and if someone doesn’t like the shape it’s in, they can just go buy a Mars bar,” de Vetten told HuffPost.

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Chocolate has traditionally been seen as a gift appropriate for women. But here’s something that gives it a manly twist – beer flavored candy.

Beer has been used as a candy flavoring for quite some time now and is something that many chocolatiers are experimenting with. The earliest known beer candy was introduced around three years ago, by Nicole Green. Ms. Green is the proprietor of Truffle Truffle, an online confectioner. Their top-selling product is the “Beer and Pretzel Collection.” The collection consists of goodies such as the beer-and-pretzel truffles and caramels, beer brittle and beer marshmallows.

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