Ah, Valentine's Day!  A lame holiday, but an excellent opportunity to get yummy candy at half off on February 15th.  Traditionally this is the time of year when I start stalking stores for chocolate covered cherries, even though I think technically they are a year-round candy.

This is another "fringe candy" that I associate with drug stores like Walgreen's.  They always have an entire aisle devoted to candy, and you have to stock it with something, you know?  Why drug stores have entire candy aisles, when grocery stores devote only about 1/8th of an aisle to candy, is just another mystery.  

(Obviously someone is buying all that drug store candy; often, it's me.  Maybe the idea is that the kids pick out candy (or are pacified by the promise of candy) while mom and dad wait for their prescription.  This would also seem to mesh with the drug stores' habit of devoting an entire aisle to school supplies - another habit that seems anachronistic in this world of entire warehouse sized office supply stores.)

As such, although I checked the grocery store and Walmart (I was there for a particular kind of yarn I can only find there, I swear) before finally hitting Rite Aid in my annual quest for chocolate covered cherries.  And there they were!

There are two kinds of chocolate covered cherry.  Both kinds use maraschino cherries, and (usually) milk chocolate.  But one kind is filled with a clear fluid, and the other has a milky white filling.  This filling cushions the cherry inside its chocolate shell; a sort of candy amniotic fluid, if you'll forgive the utterly revolting analogy.

Most people seem to prefer the clear fluid, or so the packaging of clear fluid chocolate covered cherries would have you believe.  The package I purchased intimated in no uncertain terms that it was the cheaper versions which use the milky sludge.

Personally I will confess to liking the milky sludge versions.  Although it doesn't even seem to be sold anymore, I remember it being like a very small Cadbury Crème Egg, but with a cherry in the middle.  What's not to like?

Alas, it seems that the fondant filled chocolate covered cherry has been lost to the winds of time.  I checked online, and was only able to find the clear kind.  Now don't get me wrong, the clear kind is fine, if a little messy.  Sometimes it comes in an alcoholic version, at least historically, and I can totally get behind that.  (I am unable now to recall the movie where a recovering alcoholic was done in by a box of chocolate covered cherries into which hard alcohol had been injected - for laughs.)

One down side to chocolate covered cherries is that they have a terrible ratio between candy and packaging.  Because the cherries could so easily be destroyed by crushing, each one has to be packed in its own separate little plastic cup, and the whole thing buffered by Styrofoam sheets.  Inside a cardboard box, inside a plastic wrapper.  This must be one of the least eco-friendly candies on the market.  Delicious, but ecologically guilty.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user Dave Friedel