A sight for any (homesick) Australian

Expat Australians the world over....what does these photos say to you? Do your eyes mist up and your heart sigh in longing? ;-) For that matter, past visitors to Australia....do these chocolate bars bring back any memories?
What do we have above? Well, we have a little tableau courtesy of Cadbury Australia, makers of the majority of Australian chocolate treats. Cadbury chocolate is known by Aussies, Brits and Kiwis as tasting pretty damn fine, for commercial chocolate bars and Hershey's can't even compare (although I don't think Hershey's is so awful, really). I'm sure Aussies will be jumping to explain but I'll get in first-
Left to Right:
*Caramello Koala (arguably the definitive Australian-themed chocolate treat. My choice of words was carefully deliberate there!) Giant sized! A chocolate in the shape of a happy koala, filled with flowing, gooey caramel.
*Strawberry Twin Freddo Frogs - Chocolate frogs filled with pink strawberry filling. You either love em or hate em. I prefer the peppermint freddos, with their lurid green filling.
*Freddo Frog - Also giant sized! Cadbury chocolate in the shape of a frog. An Aussie favourite since 1930. The chocolate makes it good. :-)
*Crunchie- Oooh, the controversy. Crunchie was released as a direct competitor to the Violet Crumble, a very popular Australian chocolate bar of honeycomb covered in chocolate. Debate RAGES! It rages FIERCELY over which is better. Staunch supporters of Australian culture always choose Violet Crumble over the perceived imposter. It's also pretty well accepted that the quality of the honeycomb in a Violet Crumble is superior to a Crunchie, but many say the quality of the Cadbury chocolate in the Crunchie is better than the Violet Crumble (now owned by Nestle). I got into quite a heated debate with friends on the weekend about the respective merits, so I'm planning a Crunchie/Violet Crumble tasteoff in the near future. I will blog this event. There will be photos. I will have a clipboard. It will be very serious.
*Cherry Ripe- This is another choccie bar with an Australian heritage. It's cherries and coconut covered in dark chocolate. Despite all that it has going for it, and my love of dark chocolate (there's not enough chocolate bars for dark chocolate lovers!) I don't really go for this as much as you'd expect. I think there's too much coconut and it gets stuck in your throat! But, I ADORE the Cherry Ripe icecream on a stick - cherries and coconut mixed into vanilla icecream and coated in thick dark chocolate. That is bliss.

Why do I have a box of hundreds of Cadbury chocolate bars? Want to see more?
READ ON!


A and I spent last weekend surrounded by many, many boxes of chocolates for a fundraising drive in support of our vocal group. We're planning to tour Europe again next year, and we made a lot of money with chocolate drives last year. Since Cadbury got into the fundraising scene, with their name-brand chocolates, they've been the leaders for most groups trying to raise money. They're easy to sell and you get a profit of 50% of each item you sell. Take a box into work and when it comes to 4pm in a large office, it's not difficult to sell a giant Freddo frog for only $1 to a worker in need of a sugar hit! $1 or $2 (for bigger bars) is affordable and gives the pleasure of good chocolate and the knowledge you're helping your friends raise money for whatever thing they're trying to do (soccer club, drama society, new classroom, European tour...)

So, last weekend we found ourselves surrounded by over $1000 worth of chocolate and a large piece of floor space needed to mix up the contents so everybody had a mixed selection to sell. Besides the things mentioned above, we also had bags of Chupa Chups, bags of mini Easter eggs, Natural Confectionary Company jelly snakes (these taste incredibly good...and they're good for the people who don't want chocolate!) and Summer Rolls/Nougat Honey Logs .
And, you know over $1000 worth of chocolate only packs into 24 boxes. Most of us managed to sell through an entire $60 box in the first week! I can see a few more of these drives to come, and a few more Saturday afternoons debating how many bags of snakes should go in each box while surrounded by thousands of happy Caramello koalas (see below!)

Incidentally, here's a photo of our loungeroom floor right in the middle of the packing. This shows about 1/2 of the stock; there were more boxes behind A, who was sitting there with paper and pen working out calculations (simulatanous equations, no less! I last did them in Yr 10!) of how to divide up the stock...
It wasn't so bad really...anything you can do while watching James Bond's Octopussy on the TV has to be fun!