Gift from Finland...

It would appear that I have been 'on a break' with my blog this week however that is not the case. I have spent the week unwell and basically working then crashing out when I arrived home which has left no time for blogging. Hopefully after this weekend of self imposed rest I will be back to my usual self. 

On Friday, when I arrived home from work I had something waiting to cheer me up! Myself and one of my favourite bloggers, TexaGermaNadian, decided to have a sweetie swap. If you have never read her blog then hop on over there and you wont be disappointed! She is currently living in Finland with her husband who is playing hockey there. 

After a post on the love of liquorice in Finland (TGN did not like the stuff) we decided it would be fun for us to swap sweeties from UK and Finland.So on Friday, to my great delight, I arrvived home to this:

I was very intrigued with the 'TV Mix' as it looked so 80's. Regarding your warning TGN, there was liquorice in it!! The white sweets are like a minty casing around liquorice and the black sweets are also liquorice tainted. Some of the others were quite nice.

The chocolate, well that is very different to the UK chocolate. The caramel isn't the soft caramel that I'm used to either.I tried it but I can't say I'm bowled over by the Fazer chocolate.

I opened the Hyvaa with great excitement thinking I would have some jelly sweets. I choose the blackberry looking piece and guess what?!More liquorice! There were some other strange tasting sweets I had when I tried the rest of them and they were also so much softer than I thought.

Then I moved onto the last bag of sweets and had no clue. The colours didn't give any clue as to what I would be eating. All I thought was that I would come across liquorice at some point. As you can see in the picture below, some of the sweets have polar bears (Mints perhaps?!) and others had kittens with the words 'kiss kiss' on- well I've no idea about that one.

I was kinda right with the 'polar bear' sweets as it had some hard candy around a minty paste type sweet. It's not extremely minty but it was pleasant. The kiss kiss was some hard lime candy around some kinda chocolate paste which wasn't tasty. It reminds me of some sweets we have here in the UK, possibly called chocolate limes? The Rex sweets were kinda like mints, the Tosca ones were quite nice- they had a nice toffee taste to them. The Tosca sweets were probably my favourite of the lot.

Now for the liquorice...

I was warned from reading Miss TGN's post and was very apprehensive but I gave them a go. Well, words can not decribe how ridiculous I looked eating one. It was one of the most unpleasant sweets I've tasted!! I can't believe the popularity of these in Finland?! I even made my Mam try one and her reaction wasn't quite as sudden but it ended in her having to spit it out and she said, "That's not like liquorice as I know it."It definitly isn't. Then I gave it to my Dad and guess what...he LIKED them!!! Maybe it's the whole Dads will eat anything or maybe that's just my Dad? So TGN, I have managed to find someone who likes it! Proud?

I have sent my UK package off to TGN and hopefully she'll like some of the goodies!!

Do you have a favourite sweet either now or from childhood which you can't get anymore?