ZOMG, Candy!

“What is a Cadbury Creme Eggs Benedict?” is a perfect Jeopardy Before and After question. It also looks like a serious sugar bomb. Check out Cakespy’s… inventive recipe for an all sweets Cadbury Creme Eggs Benedict at Serious Eats.

I received several fun-sized bags of Caramel Apple Sugar Babies last Halloween in my NCA goodie bag. I thought they were a new product, but apparently they’ve been around for a while, as Candy Blog and Candy Addict both reviewed them back in 2007.

The wrapper called them “milk caramels with apple candy coating.” To me, they were like a chewy version of caramel apple lollipops (which I love).

They had a shiny panned shell in a cheerful shade of bright green. The shell was slightly crumbly, like that of jelly beans. It tasted of sweetly tart green apples, with a lovely brightness.

The caramel centers tasted of burnt brown sugar. They developed a grainy chewiness at the end as they melted away. At first, the caramel melded nicely with the apple coating, but as soon as the apple coating disappeared, the sweetness of the caramel became totally dominant.

They’re far from gourmet treats, and after a hand/fun pack-ful, the sweetness becomes overpowering, but I found them tastily addictive. An OM.

Lindt’s “A Touch of Sea Salt” bar has been on the market for a while: Chocablog covered it way back in August 2008, and Cybele wrote about it last October. I finally picked one up last week because it was on sale at good old Wegmans.

The package design is simple - a balanced Lindt square with a visible sprinkle of coarse salt and the curiously (carelessly?) capitalized note, “with Fleur de sel Sea salt crystals”. I love the blaze of blue in the background. A bit reminiscent of a PowerPoint slide, yes, but also pretty!

The chocolate itself looks like standard dark Lindt squares, with Lindt Excellence’s characteristic deep sheen and sharp snap. Unlike in the Salazon bars, there were no visible grains of salt. Unsurprisingly, the taste of salt was also far more mild in the Lindt bar.

The chocolate had a dark, thick, and glossy melt. It tasted deeply of cocoa but was sweeter than I remembered dark Lindt bars being. A glance at the back of the package showed that it had just a minimum of 47% cocoa solids, which put the relative sweetness in context.

The salt really was just a touch - a few grains here and there. When the fleur de sel did flash on my palate, it brought out a nice sweet and sourness to the chocolate (in a fruity way rather than a cheap Chinese takeout way).

I think this is a fine addition to the Lindt line and a great bar for everyday snacking. It wasn’t as complex as the Salazon line, but I found it quite admirable for a mass market bar. An OM.

Is it spring yet? I’m not used to living with snow on the ground for 3 months straight!

Chow’s got 10 hot chocolate recipes to take away the chill and satisfy your sweet tooth. They look tasty!

Hershey’s Zero bar’s claim to fame is its white coating. Specifically, it’s “caramel, peanut and almond nougat covered with white fudge.”

Mine came free, courtesy of Munchies Sweets and Treats.  It was a bit too abundantly full of caramel, I guess, as my bar’s trademark white coating was streaked with it.

The bottom layer of nougat was faintly sweet chocolate with strong almond extract notes. Every once in a while, I hit an actual peanut, which introduced a bit more nuttiness, but the almond extract was the predominant player.

The nougat was covered with a stripe of sweet and serviceable caramel. The white fudge coating was milky and overly sweet.

Overall, I found this bar to be too sweet, and its flavors weren’t distinctive enough. I needed to eat it slowly and carefully to pick out the different flavors, as they got all mushed together and masked by the sweet. An O.

My boyfriend shared this YouTube video about a German man who makes playable records out of chocolate. Let it be known that he sent me the scoop before Serious Eats wrote about it; it just took a while to make it through my posting queue for publication.

I think Nestle deserves a prize for making a candy with a name that’s so much fun to say: Sluggles. Sluggles sluggles sluggles sluggles. And so friendly sounding! I wonder if that’s why the Snuggie caught on more than the Slanket, because the former was way more fun to say than the latter?

Tangent aside, these are a fairly new addition to the Nestle/Wonka line. I bought them at the same time as the Puckerooms, and both were released together as Wonka’s inaugural gummies.

Sluggles came in four flavors - orange, lemon, strawberry, and grape - and four shapes. I hereby dub them almost-snail, worm, stepped-on, and standard-slug. Like the Puckerooms, all the flavors came in all the shapes.

The gummies were soft and immensely sproingy, a textural combination that I find ideal for maximal chomping addictiveness.

Orange was blandly sweet with a zesty citrus aftertaste. Lemon managed a brightly zest lemon flavor but was more muted than I would’ve liked.

Strawberry and grape were both bland. The formal was floral and sweet, while the latter was mostly sweet with a grape-y finish.

Compared to the Puckerooms, these gummies were rather disappointingly mild. I loved the texture, but I wanted punchier flavors.

At least the shapes are fun, and sluggles is still fun to say. An O.

And finally, here are Cybele’s review and Sera’s take.

According to its entry on Hershey’s website, the Zagnut has been around for ~80 years now (I think Hershey’s needs to update their mathing). Wikipedia says that it used to be owned by the Clark Company, though how Hershey’s ended up with Zagnut and Necco ended up with the Clark Bar, I don’t know. Cybele didn’t know either.

I do know that I found it tasty, and like the Clark Bar, it made me wonder how I’d never had one before. Mine came in a gifted sample box from Munchies Sweets and Treats, but I do believe I’ve seem then in Wegmans, housed in the retro candy display.

The bar was described as “crunchy peanut butter - toasted coconut.” It had the flaky layered center of a Clark Bar, plus an outer layer of what looked like compressed nuts.

The golden bar was super crisp. As I bit into it, there was a lovely crunch, and flakes well, flaked off. I also noticed tiny bits of peanuts in the texture.

It tasted mostly of peanuts/peanut butter with a touch of coconut to the finish. Some of it got lodged in my molars a tad, like brittle, but it wasn’t nearly as bad a teeth situation as you get with Butterfingers.

I loved the texture, with its mix of flaky and crispy, and the nutty/coconutty flavors were nice as well. I’m definitely a newly converted Zagnut fan. An OM.

This trompe l’oeil chocolate salami doesn’t look all that appetizing to me (I’m too scared of pure animal fat to enjoy sausage/salami), but the recipe sounds great: ginger snaps, dried fruit, and lots of chocolate!

When I was a kid, SweeTarts were my favorite non-chocolate candy. I loved them in the big coin-sized rolls; in the smaller, Smartie-like rolls; and, of course, in the little paper sleeves of 3 SweeTarts each that are still ubiquitous players in Halloween and Kiddie mixes.

It somehow totally escaped my notice that my favorite brand of compressed sugar candies has since been expanded to include gummies. I picked up a bag of heart-shaped SweeTart gummies in a post-Valentine’s Day sale.

The gummies came in classic SweeTart shades of purple, pink and purple+pink. It was two hearts melding to form one. D’awww/gag. While the shapes weren’t nearly as creative as other gummies in the Wonka line, they were cute and served their Valentine’s Day role well.

The chew was firm but not stiff. In other words, they didn’t immediately yield to my bite, but they didn’t put up much fuss either. Tiny grains of superfine sugar coated the gummies, adding a bit of textural grain (while also creating a mess when I spilled the bag).

To me, the two colors tasted the same: super grapey, with dark tannins. They tasted almost exactly like purple SweeTarts, except perhaps a tad sweeter and thus rounder.

I’d like to see them in a wider array of flavors, as a whole bag of identically themed gummies gets boring after a while. Still, I managed to snack through the ~70 gummi bag on my own, though it took a couple of weeks and quite a few episodes of House. An O.