Birthday bar.

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, Alexandre Dumas's classic adventure novel, The Three Musketeers, was being serialized in France. Eighty-eight years after that, the 3 Musketeers candy bar was introduced in America.

That doesn't have much to do with anything, except that I got this. 

Isn't that nice? And it wasn't even my birthday.

I always thought that the Milky Way bar, with its three ingredients (chocolate, nougat, and caramel) should have been named the 3 Musketeers, and that the 3 Musketeers bar, with its creamy nougat and no caramel, should have been the Milky Way. But I wasn't born yet and no one asked me. Besides, as it turns out, the 3 Musketeers got its name from the fact that the bar was originally three bars in one wrapper, each a different flavor, Neapolitan style: strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. Andrew F. Smith, in the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food, wrote that "When the price of strawberries rose, the company dropped them as an ingredient in the candy bar." He doesn't say what happened to the vanilla. 

I think we suffer from a distinct lack of variety in our candy in this culture. 

The one you see above is supposedly a "birthday cake" themed confection. Longtime friends of this site (your checks are in the mail!) will note that I have a history with "birthday cake" confections, including M&M's, Perry's Ice Cream, bad gummy bears, Oreos, Dunkin' Donuts, and Robert Irvine protein bars. Even actual birthday cake. The popularity of birthday-cake flavored things may be waning, but it's still around. 

The question is, is there anything birthday-cakey about this 3 Musketeers bar? And the answer is: No.

I expected that the filling would have that birthday-cake flavor, but that was my faulty assumption. The wrapper says that the filling is vanilla, not ... whatever it is normally? Which is what, vanilla? And while the wrapper seems to indicate that the nougat has colorful sprinkles mixed in, the reality is, they are very hard to see.

In a way it is festive, as indeed all candy is or ought to be festive, but it's virtually identical to the regular 3 Musketeers bar. I don't really see the point. The wrapper encourages us to #throwshine --rather than our usual #throwshade? -- but that's just part of the brand campaign, not specific to birthdays. I'm just lost in a sea of empty calories.

I wonder what Dumas would have thought of the 3 Musketeers bar. He was kinda fat, so I suspect had a sweet tooth. He might have liked it. I think he would have been surprised that his story of the Three Musketeers had become a children's favorite by 1932, which Smith says is one of the reasons the name was used for the candy bar. If you've ever read the Dumas novel, you know it was not meant for kiddies, what with the complex international situation, the torrid love affairs, the wife-hanging, and whatnot. Nevertheless, the popularity of the bowdlerized versions continues to the present time; Hanna-Barbera even had an animated version on the old Banana Splits show.

I wonder what Milady de Winter would have said about that!