Trader Joe’s Soft Peanut Brittle

Happy Leap Day! If you cry, Leap Day William might bring you some candy… This bag of Soft Peanut Brittle was yet another Trader Joe’s impulse buy for me. I think its proper name is Trader Joe’s Soft Peanut Brittle Covered in Milk Chocolate. The bag deemed it a “flaky, crispy peanutty treat.” It came…

Boozy Caramel Bonbons

This Serious Eats recipe for boozy vanilla caramels sounds absolutely decadent. Unfortunately, it also seems pretty complicated and requires a candy mold and candy thermometer, two tools that I don’t own. If you try it, please do send me some?

Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Rocky Road Squares

When I was checking out, my Trader Joe’s cashier commented on this tub of their Dark Chocolate Rocky Road Squares. She said it was one of her favorites. The tub contained 9.5 ounces of square tiles of dark chocolate studded “with marshmallows and peanuts.” The squares were irregularly sized, with some more rectangular than square….

Women and Chocolate Stereotypes

Slate has a fun piece and accompanying slide show about how chocolate has been marketed towards women over the years. Kind of the opposite tack that Nestle Yorkie‘s taken. Best line? “Though the notion that women become raging sluts at the sight of chocolate is relatively new, the relationship between chocolate and sex isn?t.”

Boozy Hot Chocolate

Serious Eats has a list of seven ways to spike your hot chocolate. Try them all before it gets too warm! That salted butterscotch sounds great – way classier than the peppermint schnaps + powdered cocoa mix I used to down at college football games.

King-Sized No More

I’ve been battling a cold for a while and ran out of stored tasting notes. I won’t be able to write more reviews until I get my sense of taste back – how I miss being able to breathe through my nose! – so y’all get bonus news posts until then. Via my friend Matt…

Sweetly Demented Chocolate/Raspberry Brains

It’s always fun when candy has some personality. Sweetly Demented is a homegrown candy shop that sells an assortment of creepy and freaky candies. I recently received some free samples of their “We All Think Terrible Thoughts,” which are 60% bittersweet chocolate brains filled with a raspberry ganache. The sizeable brains (about two inches long…

Choco Roll – Pudding

The last time I tried Choco Roll in their Taro flavor, it just didn’t work for me. Though my palate grew up eating lots of Chinese food, I couldn’t stand the Asian starchy root as a dessert. Recently, I came across a box of Choco Roll in a Pudding variety. Now that’s a flavor that…

Candy Meets Brain Science!

Via Dan Ariely’s blog, a new study has found that “Relative visual saliency differences induce sizeable bias in consumer choice [pdf]”. Why am I featuring a marketing study on this blog? Because they use candy as their stimuli! Here’s how it went down: Scientists manipulated the visual saliency of different pairs of snack food items,…