Staying sweet with Hershey's Candy Corn

This is as pure of a dessert as you'll ever see.

My favorite foods to try are the ones that make you ask, "How did they ever come up with that?"

Think pretzel crust pizza. Or Any of Lay's ridiculously flavored chips. Or sweet corn potato chips, for that matter.

So it should come as no surprise to you that I was thrilled to break out the Hershey's Candy Corn bar recently. As you can guess, the bar has pieces of candy corn in it. As you might not be able to guess, it has no chocolate. The majority of its body is something called candy corn creme.

In other words, it's a remix on last year's successful — by my book — Hershey's Candy Cane bar. We should have one of these for every season.

But the Candy Corn bar really needs to come with a sugar warning. You couldn't get a faster blast of the stuff into your bloodstream if you jammed a needle filled with sucrose straight into your heart. It's not just sugar. It's not just sugar sugar. It's sugarsugarsugarsugarSUGAR!

Candy corn isn't exactly complicated stuff, but it seems nuanced next to this bar. Where candy corn has notes of honey, the Candy Corn bar has savage sweetness. Where candy corn has three colors and a fun shape, the Candy Corn bar has mostly monochromatic white and brutalist blocks.

It's good to eat in the way a sledgehammer is good to drive a nail. It's overkill. And it's amazing.

I do recommend buying the bags with miniature trick-or-treat-sized bars. Eating a full bar at once is a dangerous proposition.

Four sporks out of five.

Staying spooky with the Halloween Whopper

The Halloween Whopper was clowning around.

It's Halloween week, so I have some of the scarier ideas to hit the food world on tap over the next few days. Today I'm going to break down Burger King's Halloween Whopper, and then later I'll take on Hershey's Candy Corn bar.

Before we even get into the Halloween Whopper's recipe, let's address the gastrointestinal issue Loomising over everything. Yes, it made news for turning some things an unholy shade of green. No, we're not going to consider that here. This is a forum about eating, so take your freaky restroom observations to other dark corners of the Internet — like USA Today.

With that out of the way, let's talk burgers. The first thing you notice about the Halloween Whopper is its black bun. Burger King claims the thing has A.1. flavor baked in, although there's pretty clearly some food coloring involved, too. Other than that, the Halloween Whopper is standard Burger King flagship fare, save some A.1. Thick and Hearty sauce slashed on top.

In all honesty, it's hard to look down at the Halloween Whopper and bite into it. Something about the color says "mold" more than "spooky fun." It's dark in a shade that's somehow completely dissimilar to anything you'd eat, even something dark like pumpernickel.

Get past the color, and you get a bun that's slightly more peppery than normal. And you get a burger that's slightly more zesty than normal. These aren't bad things — the Whopper isn't high-quality "fast casual" territory, but it's always been a solid burger that's a nose above other fast food beef. 

Still, I think we need a little more flavor difference from a bun that looks so starkly different. This thing Haddonfield to have enough flavor to be scary in order to be called a success. Otherwise the Halloween Whopper name is nothing but an empty mask.

I checked out Burger King's Halloween Whopper announcement and was disappointed to find they didn't play up the fear potential a black bun and big flavors could bring. But they did say that the Halloween Whopper was a follow-up to flavored buns first unveiled in Japan. Some very quick research shows Japan got its own black-bunned burgers in the past as well as something called an Angry Red Samurai Burger with a red bun.

Which begs the question: What other colorful buns —and bun flavors — could Burger King bring us stateside? Personally, I'd like to see a Christmas Burger with a Red bun top and green bun bottom flavored like cranberry and fig leaves, respectively. Or a blue-bunned Summer Shore burger bearing the taste of sea salt. We can make hay here!

By the way, you'll need to make hay for your Halloween Whopper. Burger King cited a price of $4.99 in its announcement, but I paid $5.99 on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Either price is honestly too much green. This is a four-dollar burger by Myers reckoning, unless they can get more flavor in it.

Not to be Curtis here, but two sporks out of five. The Halloween Whopper is edible but still belongs on the blacklist. The King could have Strode for so much more.

Dunkin' Donuts Pumpkin Cheesecake Squares

Everyone loves pumpkin, especially when it's square.

Happy National Coffee Day! If you're reading at this hour, you clearly took part in some of the giveaways that were scheduled.

I myself grabbed some free coffee from Dunkin' Donuts on the way to work. But I felt a little guilty leaving the store paying nothing, so I snagged a doughnut — which is what they want when they offer the free java.

Regardless of whether I capitulated to consumerism prompted by corporate-induced guilt, the pastry I picked up is worth writing about. It was a seasonal special Pumpkin Cheesecake Square. As you can guess, the shape was square. The filling was pumpkin cheesecake cream.

The topping, meanwhile, proved to be some mess of too-sweet orange-and-white icing along with cardboard crumbles ... I mean graham cracker crumbles. They tasted like cardboard, so call them what you will, and I'll call them what I want.

Fortunately for Dunkin', the pumpkin cheesecake filling was enough to overcome the disaster up top. While it was sweet, it wasn't as sweet as you'd expect from Dunkin'. I'm guessing the cheesecake factor mellowed things a bit. The flavor ended with a note that came closer to approaching savory pumpkin than I'd ever have guessed.

They should really just glaze these things. But they're still worth a try, even given the outrageous premium Dunkin' charges for the mere privilege of misspelling the word "doughnut." You know I'm a sucker for pumpkin, but these still deserve a solid three sporks out of five.

The Great Burger Battle: Five Guys vs. Shake Shack vs. McDonald's

A carnivore's dream: Five Guys, Shake Shack and McDonald's, all on one plate.

We live in a golden age of hamburgers.

From the plethora of fast food options to the growing sub genre of "fast casual" joints to the fancier fare at non-chain restaurants, people are doing things with ground beef patties that have seldom been done in American history. Find a burger joint in just about any town these days and chances are you can top with something glamorous like a fried egg, avocado or candied bacon. And that's to say nothing of the higher-quality meats, buns and cheeses hitting the bun in recent years.

Some friends recently came up with the idea to do a burger taste-off, and your favorite food critic just couldn't resist joining. All told there were six of us sitting around the table — yours truly and Deb, the official wife of Rick's Food Critique, were joined by two other couples who play weekly trivia with us, Andrea and Jay, and Jon and Robin.

We grabbed takeout from three different restaurants readily available at the Inner Harbor in our home of Baltimore: Mainstay Five Guys was a clear choice to square off against a newly opened Shake Shack, and we decided to throw in McDonald's for comparison's sake. Options available in other parts of the city like Smashburger weren't considered for this particular competition, nor were non-chain restaurants. They'll have to wait for a future test.

Each couple decided what to order from each restaurant, so specific burger types and toppings varied. We won't list them all here, but you can safely assume just about everyone had a burger near their ideal from each restaurant, along with fries. The luckiest of us also had shakes from Shake Shack.

So who won? As you'd expect, that depends who you ask. But it was clear that McDonald's came in a distant third. We went with the classic Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and the cheese consistently scored poorly. The burger's bun also took a beating, becoming the point of comparison when someone wanted to insult one of the other place's bread.

As for the fries, long a point of pride for McDonald's, things only got worse. I personally felt they were drowning in salt, and they quickly turned limp and soggy. But their appearance next to Five Guys' and Shake Shack's fries was most disturbing. Jay put it best, saying, "They're so much paler than the others."

It was a much closer race between the other two burger joints. Shake Shack got some first-place votes, but it's my firm belief the burger deserves to be in the runner-up slot. It has a bunch of great qualities, like delicious Shack Sauce, flavorful meat and a buttery bun. It also scored highly for being the only burger without weak iceberg lettuce on top, opting for heartier greens. But the ratio between bun and meat was all off, with too much bread and too little burger. Some also felt the buttery bun went a stop too far, leaving it drowning in too much lard.

Shake Shack does deserve kudos for crinkly fries that keep their crispness all evening. And those shakes are truly worth the obscene prices the restaurant charges. They're thick, flavorful and hard to put down. If you're not pairing fries and a shake with your burger, you're doing Shake Shack wrong. It's almost like they knew what they were talking about when they named the place.

Finally, my winner was Five Guys. In short, its burger showcases the meat and tastes freshest to me. A few attacked the bun for not holding up to the grease and toppings, but I personally like the fact that it's there solely to provide a handle while you taste the good stuff in between. And I can't help but give bonus points for the sheer variety of toppings you choose from the menu.

Five Guys fries are an interesting study. They're virtually always soggy, but they're not repulsive the way McDonald's fries turn when they start to droop. Maybe it's the fresh potatoes, or maybe it's just a better oil. Either way, they're just as good as Shake Shack's, but for different reasons.

Not all of my co-judges agree with my rankings, but frankly this isn't their blog. I've avoided targeting any opinions with which I disagree — which you could also call wrong opinions — and hopefully we won't be ending any friendships over this. At the end of the day, I'm giving the spork of recommendation to Five Guys' burgers and Shake Shack's shakes.

All you really need to know is that you should skip the Mickey D's, though. The other two options will leave you much happier.