Top Eleven Most Viewed Posts

I- wow.  You know, sometimes you start something and you wonder if anybody will ever really think it's that great.  Maybe it's a painting, or a music track, or a short story, and you repeat to yourself over and over again "nobody else is going to care about this.  Nobody is going to want to see/hear/touch/taste/read/whatever this is."  But you go through it, and later you discover that, somehow, people have found what you made either by word of mouth or something else, and that they apparently shared it because it's somehow gone out and become something in the world.

When I started this, I was rather proud of some posts.  "Hey, my look at the American Rabbit movie has 115 views!  Huh.  My list of Xbox games I'd love if I was still thirteen got 212 views.  How the heck did part two of my Street Fighter review get nearly 110 more reviews than the first part?"

Then I realized that there were certain posts that blew those numbers out of the water.I started seeing posts in the upper two hundreds, then the three hundreds.  I kept going further back, and I found four hundred, five hundred, and more views on certain posts!  These were things I had no idea anybody would ever care about to click on if they found it on a Google search!  I think some of it might have to do with the person I talked about perhaps linking to my post, but a few I have simply no explanation for.

So, to celebrate my doing four years of this blog (with a few gaps here and there), I'm looking at the most-viewed posts I've ever written.  Some of them make no sense whatsoever.

Bite-Sized Reviews: Kinder Bueno

Any time I travel, I make it a point to explore the various foods that are available in a region.  In Arizona I watched for ingredients and flavors I couldn't get in, say, Maine, Ireland, or Italy.  Overseas, of course, you're going to explore the local cuisine, but there's one thing that I always love to do when I go into a grocery store:

Hit the snack and candy section.

I'll go into more detail later about how I used to binge on ice cream bonbons in Sweden like a drug addict, or my exploration of the different types of gummy candies in Europe, but for now I'm going to spotlight one that is now carried here in the United States, since I found it at a Walgreens in California.

I present the only candy I know with a name both German and Spanish: the Kinder Bueno.

Let me start by pointing out that I love chocolate mixed with hazelnuts.  I keep a jar of Nutella at work and at home, and I indulge now and again with some Italian Baci candies.  However, the treat I found in Italy when I was there were these chocolate bars, and I immediately felt them call to me.

Now, the first thing to remember is that this bar is actually made by Ferrero, maker of those little golden wrapped hazelnut chocolate balls that are only advertised as belonging to the swankiest parties.  Odds are they know their hazelnut.

What makes this treat different from every other hazelnut treat I've had is that this isn't just hazelnut blended into chocolate or sprinkled throughout.  Instead, this is a hazelnut cream-filled wafer with a chocolate coating.  Doesn't that sound luxurious?

The bar is also segmented, and when you break off a piece, hazelnut cream doesn't leak out everywhere, but when you bite into it, your tongue will get a tasty coating of flavor.  It has a nice crunch to it with the wafer, and the chocolate is consistently creamy.

This is one of my favorite candy bars on the market, and I need to find a local Walgreens to see if they carry it nationally, or if that one shop was just special.  Otherwise, looks like I might have to hit up Amazon.