Let's Start A Line Of Feminist Rock & Roll Candy Bars

I bought this goddamn candy bar the other day at Gelson's. I don't usually shop at Gelson's but I'd heard a rumor that they've got this line of ice cream called Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, and one of the flavors is Sweet Potato with Torched Marshmallows, and I really wanted to eat that. I wanted to eat it for lunch. But there was no Sweet Potato with Torched Marshmallows at Gelson's and none of the flavors made my heart sing enough to spend $11 on a pint of ice cream, and so I ended impulse-buying that stupid candy bar with the terrible packaging that confuses me.

I guess it's for girls who refer to their girl friends as "girlfriends" to give to their girlfriends as some girlfriendy Valentine's gift? Because if there's one thing that girls love more than dudes it's chocolate, so let's just roll the two into one and put some cartoony drawings of sports cars and boxer shorts on the package and semi-ironically use words like "beefcake" and "tiger" and call it a day. I think that's insulting to men, and also to women. I took the above photo in recognition of how very little the most sketchy-about-women Rolling Stones lyrics bother me, compared to the existence of the Cinna-man bar. Plus "cinnamon" is such a beautiful word and why would you ever want to turn it into "cinna-man"? "Cinna-man" is awful. I'm going to say the word "cinnamon" a thousand times this week, to honor its loveliness and expunge "cinna-man" from my brain.

Anyway I'd never had a chocolate bar with cinnamon candy before, and I was intrigued, and I bought it and ate it and it was good. But not nearly as good as the cinnamon chocolate bar I made up in my head, which is a Neil Young-inspired chocolate bar called Cinnamon Girl. The cinnamon candy is heart-shaped, unlike the Cinna-man bar, which just has these dumb little shards of cinnamon candy (total missed opportunity, in my opinion). And the chocolate is still dark chocolate but with a really low percentage of cocoa, whatever the lowest percentage is to still qualify as "dark." And the packaging is chill and gorgeous and a much more elegant shade of red, like crimson or carmine or ruby, and instead of bubble letters there's the same font as the font Neiler's name's in on the cover of the "Cinnamon Girl" single. Maybe there's no illustration or maybe there's a picture of Neiler in 1969, being wonderful and beautiful and cool about girls.

I sort of want Cinnamon Girl to be made by Compartes, which is a chocolatier in Los Angeles that makes truffles with flavors like Raspberry Pink Pepper and Browned Butter and Caramelized Plantain and Huckleberry Balsamic, but I'm also open to launching my own line of feminist rock & roll candy bars, with funding from someone filthy-rich (my email's lizbarker77 at gmail.com). We will also make lots of Beatles chocolate bars, like Wild Honey Pie and Strawberry Fields Forever and Strawberry Fields Whatever, and I guess a Rolling Stones chocolate bar called Brown Sugar, and a Paul McCartney chocolate bar called Monkberry Moon Delight. Monkberry Moon Delight will have some kinda of weird and exciting berry, like jostaberries, and the chocolate will be way milky, because "monk" means "milk." It'll be thick and tall, like a Snickers bar, not flat and svelte like one of those self-righteous chocolate bars you get at Whole Foods. Maybe there's also banana and somehow the banana stays fresh forever, all mushy and moist and soft, and maybe there's also caramel or marshmallow or both. The marshmallows would be purple, because "Monkberry Moon Delight" by Paul & Linda McCartney is the purplest song in the whole wide world:

xo Liz