My grandma made this candy when I was a kid. In fact, I use the recipe she saved from the label of her Sather’s Cherry Drops (I don’t think Sather’s is in the Cherry Drop business anymore—they seem to lean heavily toward gummi candies at this point—but you can usually find cherry chips in the baking aisle of the grocery store). As I child, I did not fully appreciate the wonderfulness of this candy. Like many children, my sophisticated palate favored things like Nerds, or Candy Cigarettes, or Charleston Chew (random fact: I once lost three teeth eating a frozen Charleston Chew).
As an adult, I love this candy. I usually make it around Christmas, but the rest of the year I favor Cherry Mash for my cherry-chocolate fix. It has the perfect balance of cherry and chocolate and is, in my humble opinion, superior to the similar Twin Bing, where the cherry flavor is lost to the chocolate-peanut mixture. I have also tried the Big Cherry, which features a whole cherry inside the chocolate-peanut mixture. It was ok, but my heart belongs to Cherry Mash.
I have tried to put finely diced cherries into this candy, but I don’t think they add much to the flavor or texture. If you want to go this route, I recommend candied cherries over maraschino. Even well drained, the maraschino cherries still had too much liquid in them and the cherry layer did not firm properly when I used them. Continue reading ‘Cherry Chocolate Candy’
