Photographing Mexican Candies with Props

New project: Photograph a variety of Mexican candies before I eat them all.

The candies are

A fudge-like ‘Dulce de Leche’, or Mexican caramel made from goat’s milk.
Tarmarind roll. This is a fruit roll-up made from the gooey sweet-sour pulp from the tamarind seed, occasionally spiked with hot chile powder.
Guava roll. As above only made from guavas, and with a lot more sugar.

This is not as easy as it might sound. For one thing all the candies are in shades of brown. As are all my Mexican props.

Least successful. Photographing the candies on a fluorescent light table lit with two tungsten lights turned the colours weird. Adjusting the white balance on the camera merely created different shades of weird. The wooden frog is a candy dish that I wanted to use as a prop but the candies looked all jumbled up in it. The frog might have worked with just the pecan dulce de leche candies but unfortunately I had already eaten all but three of them…
The best result with this method was the slices of tamarind roll…
Trying to make them look like they’re from Mexico, I went with a blue Mexican placemat and some chile pepper lights. The objects are in a glassed-in balcony, and surrounded by natural, cloudy light.
The blue of the placemat complimented the brown tones, and this really says Mexico to me. Photographing them on an old wooden table with a carved wood frog as an accent. Lighting is natural, coming from a single south window.
This was the most successful from my point of view, although a little dark and brightening them up merely makes the image dull and less rich-looking.
I couldn’t resist all that sugar and ate them up leaving nothing left to photograph. Now I have to go back to Mexico as I can’t find anything like them here!