Ummm...aren't those illegal?

James had mentioned a few times that kids in his class passed around candy cigarettes to celebrate someone's birthday. With one brand of gum-cigarettes, you could even blow a puff of "smoke" out of the end. I remembered buying candy cigarettes at the store when I was a kid, but since you don't see them around anymore, I figured they must have been banned in the U.S. Well, I checked and even though there were a few attempts to ban them, candy cigarettes are not illegal in the U.S., and with a little bit of extra work, you can find them (even at Amazon.com). I wondered how hard they would be to find in Germany.

So, I couldn't resist. Right at our Real (like a SuperWalmart), there they were.

The ones on the left are chewing gum, though we couldn't make a puff of smoke appear. The ones on the right are chocolate and look like unfiltered cigarettes. James won't be passing these around to his classmates, though. I have heard that his teacher banned these from the classroom.





And I did come across some of the Roast Turkey flavored Pringles that have been on the shelves since Thanksgiving time. We had to try one, just to say we had. "They taste like stuffing!" was the consensus here. I'll stick with salt and vinegar, I think.








In other culinary news, I spent 20 minutes cutting up chunks of chocolate to put into waffle batter last weekend. I was so excited to make my first batch of homemade waffles a few weeks back, until I hit Step #4: Let batter sit for 1 hour. I know better now to start extra early. The waffles were yummy.

Not quite as tasty was my first attempt at baking cookies from scratch here. I tried making peanut butter cookies with a little disc of chocolate in the middle (I haven't found Hershey Kisses, yet) and I used the dry brown sugar that I mentioned early. The cookies were certainly edible, but they were very.....crispy. Not crunchy, mind you, but......crispy. Not crispy on the outside and nice and chewy on the inside. I'll have to fiddle around and see what I can figure out.