ZOMG, Candy!

Hershey’s Cacao Reserve line (BUY!) is their attempt to appear upscale while still being mass-market. The generous 9.1 oz bag of Holiday Collection truffles sent by Hershey’s contained about 8 each of their milk (35% cacao), dark (65% cacao), and spice milk (35%) chocolate truffles, all individually wrapped. While the packaging extolled the virtues of their carefully selected beans and gave elaborate tasting instructions (”swirl the melting chocolate across all surfaces of your mouth, noticing the early flavors, smoothness, mouthfeel, finish, and lingering notes”), nothing can change the fact that these truffles are mass produced. They’re nice, but I don’t think they’re worthy of that much elaborate ritual.

The milk chocolate (left) had a smooth and creamy molded chocolate shell with a nice melt and a slight sourness. The ganache had a slight grain to it and was the same sweet and slightly tangy milk chocolate.

The spice milk chocolate (right) had the same milk chocolate shell, but its ganache filling tasted of chai-like spices. I think I tasted cloves and maybe nutmeg? I’m not a huge fan of chai tea, but I enjoy chai-flavored things, and this was my favorite truffle of the mix.

The dark chocolate (center) was a disappointment for me. I love dark chocolate for its slight bitterness and character. The dark truffle turned out to seem just as sweet as the milk truffle and was rather bland for dark chocolate. If it hadn’t been labeled as such, I’d never have guessed that it had such a high cacao content.

Overall, I found Hershey’s offerings to be unremarkable but serviceable. The chocolate shells were nice and creamy, but the fillings could have been more smooth. If you’re looking for a comparatively inexpensive truffle indulgence, these would be a good buy. I’d rather shell out a little more and spend my indulgence calories on nicer chocolates from somewhere else. An O for the lot.

Holy cow! I managed to miss this one while I was on break - Episode 6 of this current season (Season 4) of Project Runway had an awesome challenge: 5 minutes to grab as much stuff as possible from the Times Square Hershey’s store to make a garment. Just check out the beginning of this clip (if it hasn’t been taken down yet) as the designers run and grab as much candy as possible. They’re living my dream.

Photos can be found on Bravo’s website (make sure you’re on episode 6 in the drop down menu). As of January 3rd, the full episode is currently online here, and I’m about to start watching as soon as I hit publish.

If you can sketch a design using just candy, you could win a 5 lb Hershey’s bar and Project Runway DVDs (challenge 6). Too bad I’m artistically challenged. Then again, it doesn’t look like that many people enter the weekly challenges, so maybe I will take a stab at it. I’ll be sure to post when the entries are in so you can see what’s been submitted, and I’ll let y’all know if I draw a picture made from candy.

Today marks the finale of Dagoba Chocolate (BUY!) Week, and I’ve saved the most interesting for last!

The Dagoba Chai is 37% milk chocolate, crystallized ginger, and spices. That last “spices” bit is annoyingly generic, and the ingredients list isn’t much help. There “spices” is replaced with “essential oils.”

When I ate this bar, I couldn’t figure out what the spices were because the ginger taste was incredibly strong. It overpowered everything. I like the essence of ginger in cooking, but I can’t stand ginger itself, probably because as a kid I accidentally ate too many slices of ginger out of our family stir fries (always an unexpected and unpleasant taste sensation).

Still, there was something about this bar that was intriguing, and it kept me reaching for more pieces. I never actually enjoyed it, however, so it only gets an O. At the chocolate party, this came in 12th (out of 13) with a score of 2.57/5. It was interestingly polarizing. Lots of 1s and 2s, but also a raving 5 and a few 4s. Comments ranged from “wtf funny flavor,” to “niceish - strange” to “can’t really describe it.” A few called it medicinal, which is understandable (anyone else forced to drink ginger root tea as a kid?).

The roseberry was the one I was most excited to taste. A dark bar (59% cacao) with raspberries and rosehips - sounds delicious! And it was pretty good. I loved how pretty the bar was. The pink bits of raspberry looked gorgeous against the dark, glossy bar.

I didn’t taste any rose notes when I sampled this bar, but the floral scent is definitely there. The raspberries add a gentle fruitiness that I wish was a little more noticeable. They also added a slight grit to the bar that I could have done without. An OM from me, and a tie for 5th with 3.533/5 from my friends.

Overall, I really enjoyed these Dagoba bars, even if none got a review above an OM. I think their ratings may have been skewed a little low because I tasted them with a bunch of other bars, some of which were less subtle and more interesting. The dark 59%, the hazelnut, and the roseberry were all on the brink of earning that extra G, but I pulled back because Dagoba bars are so pricey. The ones I bought cost $3.29 at the overpriced campus convenience store, but even online they’re $3.00 a bar.

I liked the Dagoba chocolate bars enough to want to eat my way through all the different varieties, though that would quickly get expensive. Dagoba will definitely make another appearance at my next chocolate party.

Dagoba Chocolate (BUY!) Week continues with the milk and hazelnut bars!

The milk bar is pretty straightforward. Milk chocolate, 37% cacao solids. According to Wikipedia, anything over 35% cacao can be called dark chocolate, so I appreciate that Dagoba still called this milk.

It’s a European/Cadbury-style milk chocolate with a yogurty finish (as opposed to the sour finish Hershey’s milk chocolate has). “Feels British,” wrote one of my friends. Others felt that the milkiness was too overpowering.

Like all Dagoba bars, the texture is smooth and creamy and wonderful. It’s good but unremarkable and a little too sweet (I’m a dark chocolate lover). An O for the Dagoba milk. A wonderful milk chocolate bar that suffered from my dark-bias. If you like milk chocolate, European-style, you’ll love this. It took 8th place with a 3.33/5.

The hazelnut bar was made from 37% cacao milk chocolate, roasted hazelnuts, and rice crisps.

Really, it’s hard to go wrong with hazelnut and chocolate, This bar was well studded with pieces of hazelnut, and it was wonderfully - you guessed it - hazelnutty. I found it a little too sweet, but most chocolate/hazelnut candies skew towards the sweet side, so it’s understandable.

I didn’t notice any rice crisps, and because it was a blind tasting, I didn’t know to taste carefully and seek the crisps out. Cybele’s review complained of too few crisps, so I’m going to agree with her. I give this bar an OM. Good, but uninspiring. This came in first at my chocolate party with a score of 3.96/5. I think it was so well liked because of the near universal appeal of chocolate and hazelnut.

Welcome to Dagoba Week! This week’s 6 Dagoba bars were blindly tasted by 14 of my friends (and me!) at my chocolate party along with 7 other non-Dagoba chocolate bars. I had my friends rate every chocolate that they tasted on a scale of 1-5.

The New Yorker ran an excellent piece on Dagoba Chocolate in their Halloween issue this year. I read the fascinating article after tasting my way through the half a dozen Dagoba bars (BUY!) (they offer 18 classic bars plus 3 single origin bars on their website; I have a lot more tasting left to do!), and it only made the company more impressive in hindsight. Even if Hershey’s does now own it.

The Dagoba dark 59% is a dark bar with 59% percent cacao (duh). The ingredients list is pretty incredible: Organic Dark Chocolate (organic cacao beans, organic evaporated cane juice, organic cacao butter, 0.5% non-GMO soy lecithin). Impressive, no?

The bar had a strong snap and a beautifully dark gloss. The melt and mouthfeel were incredible - soooo creamy and smooth - and it had a great finish. I thought the mild sweetness was perfect, though one of my friends, an admitted dark chocolate hater, found it too bitter. Others loved it. A couple found rum or alcohol notes, which surprised me, as I didn’t notice any.

I give it an OM. It’s delicious and the best plain dark chocolate bar I’ve yet to taste, but there’s no gimmick to the bar to make it special enough to really stand out. Still, it is now my go-to dark bar for slow savoring, provided that I have a little extra to spend (Dagoba bars are expensive!). The Dark 59% tied for 5th at the chocolate party with a 3.533 out of 5.

The Dagoba Lime bar is dark chocolate (59% cacao), lime, and macadamia nuts. The chocolate is smooth and creamy, which is unsurprising. I expect it’s the same chocolate base as the dark 59% bar.

I broke up the bars into small pieces for tasting. The piece I got must have not had any macadamia nut pieces in it because I have no macadamia nut related notes on this bar. I can’t imagine they would have made a huge taste difference, and macadamia nuts are pretty bland, though buttery. The lime component of this bar is subtle but definitely present. Overall, the bar was good, but I personally didn’t care for the limey finish. Another OM from me. This placed 10th in my friends’ ratings with a score of 3.133/5.

Chocolate party, that is. I’ve been stockpiling nice chocolate bars and haven’t gotten around to eating them yet. Now I have too much chocolate to possibly eat on my own (my life is so hard, I know), so I’m going to throw a chocolate tasting party. Yum!

The featured guests:

The Reese’s line of candies (BUY!) has grown immensely since I was a kid. Now Reese’s peanut buttery treats literally come in several shapes and sizes, not to mention fillings and coatings and textures. The classic peanut butter cups (specifically, the miniature ones) are still my personal favorite, with Reese’s pieces coming in a close second.

I’m pretty late in the game to the Elvis PB cup. They made such a splash in the candy review blog world when they first debuted that I didn’t see a point in adding my voice to the chorus. But I saw these in the campus convenience store the other day, vaguely remembered reading somewhere that they were no longer being made, and figured I’d give them a shot before they disappeared off the shelves.

I’m too young to really get all the Elvis hoopla - my strongest Elvis associations are with Uncle Jesse’s Elvis worship on Full House - but I did know about his love for (fried?) peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Hence the flavor combo in these Reese’s cups.

I don’t know which came first in the development of these cups, the Elvis branding or the banana flavor addition, but it works. These smell like regular Reese’s, but when I ate a tiny piece of chocolate that had flaked off the cup, it tasted strongly of banana. In the cup itself, however, with the chocolate and hefty peanut butter layer, the banana creme layer isn’t overwhelming at all.

Elvis’s Reese’s cups have earned an OM. I still like regular Reese’s better, but I’d go for one of these any time I felt like something a little different.

I got super excited when I saw the Take 5 Marshmallow at Party City. The Take 5 (BUY!) is one of my favorite candies, as is the See’s Scotchmallow, so maybe the combination of the two would be candy perfection!

Sadly it was not a candy revelation. To the contrary, it was rather unremarkable and forgettable. The Take 5 Marshmallow just didn’t have that magic combination of sweet and salty that the original mastered so well. The marshmallow creme was intended to replace the caramel, but it did so unsuccessfully.

While the caramel imparted a burnt sweetness to complement the salty peanut butter, the marshmallow creme is too one-dimensionally sweet. And while the caramel brought a wonderfully moist and sticky chewiness to the bar to balance the dry stickiness of the peanut butter, the marshmallow was fluffy when it needed to be chewy and, as you can see in the photo, was as dry as the peanut butter.

I’m not surprised that this Limited Edition version didn’t make it into the regular line-up. The Chocolate Cookie Take 5 was released around the same time as the Marshmallow and still seems to be available.

Remember to enter my 5 gum giveaway!

I like Jolly Ranchers (BUY) because I’m neurotic and impatient - I crunch up my hard candies instead of waiting for them to dissolve, so they don’t last very long. Fortunately, Jolly Ranchers don’t crunch very well, so I’m forced to savor them. And Bold Fruit Smoothie flavored Jolly Ranchers are, for the most part, worth savoring.

I picked these up at my local mall’s Dollar Tree. Unfortunately, it looks like Hershey’s is no longer making them, as their Jolly Rancher website no longer lists them as a flavor. Apparently they were introduced way back in 2004, but no clear word on if they’re still being made. At any rate, the code on my bag tells me that they’re good until August 2008, so no worries there (Cybele at Candy Blog has the key to deciphering Hershey’s codes).

To me, the name Bold Fruit Smoothies seems a bit oxymoronic. I associate smoothies with muted fruit flavors because of the yogurt dilution effect, but these candies are actually boldly flavorful, and yummy to boot.

The Bold Fruit Smoothie flavors are peach smoothie, orange smoothie, strawberry smoothie, watermelon smoothie, and mixed berry smoothie. They taste initially of Original Flavored peach, orange, strawberry, watermelon, and raspberry Jolly Ranchers, respectively, followed by a mellow vanilla yogurt or cream flavor. The flavors are surprisingly strong and persist until the entire candy is dissolved.

The orange smoothie flavor is my favorite, as the “smoothie factor” is especially prominent. It tastes like an orange creamsicle in hard candy form. The “smoothie factor” was also quite apparent in the strawberry smoothie but was fairly muted in the peach, watermelon, and mixed berry smoothie flavors. I hate raspberry Jolly Ranchers, and I hated the mixed berry smoothie as well. It’s that olfactory raspberry kick that I can’t stand. Try eating a raspberry Jolly Rancher and pinch your nose, and you’ll notice the taste difference immediately. Incidentally, that’s also a fun trick to try while eating Jelly Belly beans.

I wish I’d thought to buy a bag of original Jolly Ranchers for comparative purposes. I think the texture of the Smoothies are creamier than regular Jolly Ranchers, and they certainly look creamier, but I’m not sure if it’s just my imagination. At any rate, if you can find a bag, I’d recommend them picking them up, if only for the novelty factor.