Thanks, C9Mouse. Here - to the best of my recollection - is exactly how I made the hearts:
1. I started with a custom heart shape, using paths (don't fill yet) but it was too pointy. I saved the shape in the paths palette and got to work on it with the selection tools, smoothing out the contours. Pretty easy to do, and entirely to your own taste.
2. After getting the shape just right, I created a new layer, selected the heart path, and filled it with a light yellow. I believe I also loaded that layer selection (Ctrl+click on that layer), created a new channel, filled the selected heart shape with white and used a gaussian blur on it to soften the edges. You can also then reload the heart layer, invert the selection and press delete to clean up the edges. Making this channel your selection, you'd then create a new layer and fill it with that yellow. This would be your baseline heart.
3. I duplicated that layer - so as not to destroy the original heart - and then used free transform on the new heart layer, enlarging the base to give it a forced perspective (again, to your taste). With the free transform tool activated, hold down ctrl+alt+shift (on mac, dunno - don't have access to a mac any more), and pull on either the lower right or left control point, and both sides will expand equally.
4. Dupe that layer, name one of them top, one of them bottom. Highlight your bottom heart, hold down your shift key and hit the down arrow 4 times. This is a quick way to move that layer's contents down 40 pixels. If you want to make your object thicker, go for it.
5. OK, now you've got to create 39 duplicates of the bottom heart layer, each one moving up 1 pixel at a time. To do this, make sure the bottom heart layer is highlighted, hold down the ctrl and alt keys and click your up arrow 39 times. Yes, that's a mess of heart layers, but just make sure you make *only these layers visible* and then merge all visible layers. You'll wind up with a thick stacked heart bottom layer.
6. As you can see from my PSD file, I then manually shaded this stacked bottom layer - and I made sure that the top heart was activated, so that I could see the effect. There are probably ways of using styles to do this, but this is where I prefer the manual touch.
7. I also used a bevel and emboss layer style on the top heart, just to give it that rounded effect.
8. Finally, I made just the top and bottom/extruded heart layers active, selected all (Ctrl+A), then copied merged (Ctrl+Shift+C), then pasted the combined result into its own layer. You can then use the Hue and Saturation tool on copies of this layer to make different colored candies.
Resize, add some text and ... voila! I did work on trying to add noise, et al, but wasn't happy with the results. Lots of experimentation on everything from the shading of the extruded bottom heart to the layer style on the top heart will give different results. Have fun!
Link to the PSD file (right click on file and save to your hard drive):
http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/chapps39@pacbell.net/lst?.dir=/Photoshop+Stuff&.src=bc&.view=