Traveling Without Actually Going Anywhere: Universal Yums from Poland

This is the first Universal Yums box that we have received from Poland! In January 2024, we opened our mailbox to find sweets from the European country of Poland. My husband and I first tried the cocoa glazed gingerbread sticks, which were extremely thin, but very good. Cocoa only glazed about 80% of the stick though. I wish there was more cocoa glaze on each stick. Next, we ate a monster munch potato snack. The snacks looked like ghosts and were airy puffed potato snacks that I didn’t like. David thought they tasted like Cheetos without the cheese. Our third treat were paprika peanuts, that David said he could snack forever on. I on the other hand didn’t really like these mostly because I am not a fan of peanuts to begin with.

Next, we tried lemon cream cookies. The lemon cream had a very creamy texture. I really liked these cookies, and I ended up finishing David’s cookie. We then ate a dark chocolate marshmallow bar. This was a thick rectangle of marshmallow covered in a thin dark chocolate glaze. The marshmallow had a weird flavor; the booklet said it was vanilla, but I didn’t taste it. David thought there was not enough chocolate.

Afterwards, we ate cow candy milk fudge. It did not taste like how it was advertised in the book; the book said it was “a buttery caramel candy with a crumbly outside and a luxuriously soft inside.” I thought it looked like a hard piece of caramel with a weird consistency unlike normal caramel. My husband said it was “just weird.” Lastly, we ate chocolate covered jelly candy. I had one of lemon and another of cherry. It was fruity jelly with a yucky consistency covered in chocolate. I wanted to keep eating it because of the chocolate, but I had to stop because the jelly was just terrible!

I learned that the average person in Poland eats over 250 pounds of potatoes each year. Also, there are 400 bent trees in the ‘crooked forest’ of Gryfino, and no one knows why! Moreover, the largest desert in central Europe, the Bledow Desert, can be found in Poland! And the final piece of trivia I’ll leave you with is that ketchup is a common pizza topping in Poland — yuck!