Best confectionery exploitation of popular culture

Salem-based Harbor Sweets makes excellent candy, most of it in aquatic or nautical form, whether you're talking the pecan-and-caramel-in-dark-chocolate sand dollars or the sailboat-shaped white-and-milk-chocolate-dipped toffee Sweet Sloops. Both are delicious, so long as you don't wind up, in their wake, looking like a whale or a tanker. (Harbor Sweets also has a sugar-free collection, but isn't sugar-free candy an oxymoron?) Then along comes Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling biography of the horse that captured the nation's heart in the 1930s, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, not to mention the Gary Ross movie based on the book, and now there are sea horses in the Harbor Sweets marina. The new sea biscuits come in two designs: "nautical" (which looks pretty much like the sand dollar) and "equestrian," its milk-chocolate outside emblazoned with the head of a jockey hunched close to the neck of a racing horse. Inside? A cookie topped with peanut butter -- which we're hoping won't put horse lovers in mind of the glue factory.

Harbor Sweets, 85 Leavitt Street, Salem, (800) 243-2115.