ZOMG, Candy!

The Topic is a UK bar comprised of “milk chocolate, hazelnuts, soft nougat, and smooth caramel centre.” Sounds good so far! The bar’s wrapper is rather simple and not at all modern looking, but it’s not quite retro. I like the kind of homey feel it gives.

The soft caramel of the bar strings out when bitten, like the cheese on a gooey slice of pizza. In case you can’t tell, that’s a good thing in my book. The nougat was sweet and soft and chock full of hazelnuts (according to the wrapper, they make up 15% of the bar) that made it marvelously nutty. As for the chocolate coating, it was real chocolate with lovely European milk chocolate dairy notes.

Overall, it was overly sweet – something I think would be unavoidable when combining chocolate and nougat and caramel – but still tasty. An OMG.

I do my best to be as objective as possible, and when extraneous factors influence that objectivity, I always try to disclose them. That’s why I always tell you when something I’m reviewing was a free sample, or when I’m tasting something from a candy genre that I personally dislike (like white chocolate or licorice).

In today’s review, there’s no way the sheer cuteness of the Milky Way Magic Stars didn’t make me think more highly of them. The Magic Stars are basically just tiny bits of milk chocolate, shaped like stars. No biggie, expect that they’re imprinted with little emoticon expressions, which turns them into ridiculously adorable tiny bits of milk chocolate, shaped like stars. See for yourself:

The top row is my favorite. Pacifier, surprise, and unibrow; what’s not to love? As far as taste goes, they’re your standard British milk chocolate (a fresh dairy finish), which I far prefer to U.S. milk chocolate (sour Hershey’s tinge). The Magic Stars chocolate isn’t especially creamy or indulgent or really noteworthy in any way, but it’s pretty good for mass produced. And the stars are just so darn cute! An OM from me. I wish I’d bought more to share with friends at home.

The other day, I was chatting with a friend about the candy blog, and she made a comment about how it must be hard to keep finding new candy to try. You’d think so, but no. There are bazillions of types of candy out there (various plain chocolate bars alone could take ages to get through), and when you go international, you find even more. The Milky Way Crispy Roll is unavailable in the U.S. (I bought it in England), which I think is a shame, as I rather liked it.

Readers unfamiliar with U.K. and U.S. candy differences should know that in the U.K., Milky Ways are more like 3 Musketeers. What Americans call Milky Ways, the British would call a Mars bar. And what Americans call a Mars bar, well, they don’t make those anymore, right? So it doesn’t matter (I think they’re like Snickers Almonds?).

Anyway, the Milky Way Crispy Roll is a eggroll (of the sweet variety, like a Pepperidge Farm Pirouette, rather than the savoury deep-fried version) filled with a whipped nougat-y filling. According to the wrapper, it’s “milk chocolate (30%) covered wafer biscuit fingers with a lightly whipped filling.”

The eggroll/wafer biscuit thingie is nice and crispy and carries a faint buttery flavor. The whipped filling was overly sweet for me and only partly mitigated by the plain lightness of the eggroll, and the chocolate coating is serviceable, but nothing to write home about. Still, I found it a rather elegant indulgence for a mass produced bar and award it an OM.

Mars Planets were a UK treat I had high hopes for mostly because they included what looked like malted milk balls, and I loooove malted milk balls. I could (and have) eaten malt powder straight and dry as a snack. I wonder if I should be ashamed of that… it seems rather akin to eating cookie dough straight off the log (haven’t done) or ice cream straight out of the tub (big fan of that one).

There are three types of Planets in the bag, soft, crispy, and chewy. Soft is the biggest, crispy is the middle size, and chewy is the smallest, so you can tell them apart by size before you bite into them. After they’re bitten in half, you can see that soft looks like it’s filled with nougat, crispy with crisp malt, and chewy with caramel. In reality, that’s mostly correct, but just wrong enough enough to disappoint.

Soft is filled with a chocolate nougat that’s pretty generically flavored and way too sweet. Chewy is filled with a nondescript caramel – no interesting burnt sugar or vanilla notes there, just overwhelming sweetness. And crispy, to my great dismay, didn’t taste like malted milk at all. I’d thought it was a Malteaser (Mars’s malted milk ball brand), but it tasted just like bland crispiness. No malt flavor whatsoever.

I commend Planets for their neat idea, but the execution was poor. All of the Planets were too sweet and too boring. An O. You can read Chocablog’s take on them here.

Friends of mine know that I have an irrational adoration of llamas. They’re so adorable! And soft! And cute/ugly! Which is why I absolutely loved this Starburst commercial.

Note: Photo below is of an alpaca, which is related to and actually cuter than the llama by dint of being smaller. If llamas were horses, alpacas would be ponies.

For some reason, this post disappeared after I wrote it the first time. It was originally supposed to publish after Russian Candies I and II but instead published as blank nothingness (much to the disappointment of Leslie, who gave me the candy in the first place). Fortunately, I still have my tasting notes, so I can recreate the review.

Dove Bitter Chocolate with Lemon Peel and Coffee

I think Dove really needs to rethink the packaging on this one, as I noticed neither the lemon nor the coffee on the box. The coffee bean blends right into the chocolate, and the lemon looks like it’s just an extension of the yellow satin. What if some poor little Russian child or Russian tourist who can’t read Russian mistakenly bought this? He or she would be in for a flavor surprise.

All that being said, the flavor combination of chocolate, lemon, and coffee worked better than I thought it would. The bar had a crisp snap to it (and a slight bloom, but hey, it flew from Russia to Ohio to Texas to Connecticut. Stuff happens), probably because it’s quite dark, and little bits of grit from the coffee beans and dried lemon bits.

Upon first bite, the lemon flavor really smacks you in the taste buds. It tastes like super sweet candied lemon zest at first, then gives way to a coffee finish with a slight bitterness to it. It’s an interesting flavor combination that some of my friends loved, but it wasn’t quite for me. An OM.

Spartak Elite Dark Bitter Aerated Chocolate (72% cacao).

Leslie calls this one “exotic dictatorship chocolate” because it was made in Belarus. I really like aerated chocolate because it’s such a unique textural experience, and I was excited to try this one, as I’ve never had a dark aerated bar before.

The bar was quite glossy and dark. At first, it tasted quite dry, and unlike milk aerated chocolate, it doesn’t melt in your mouth very well. The chocolate itself was a bit on the sweet side for dark chocolate and had a slightly musty finish. Also an OM.

I’m a little late to the game on reviewing the Wildly Cherry M&M’s, as I am on many Limited Edition candies. That’s what happens when you’re a college student on a meal plan who doesn’t go grocery shopping. I found these at one of the many gas stations we stopped at on my spring break roadtrips. The cashier saw me buy two bags (one to eat in the car, as I couldn’t wait to taste them, and the other to photograph and review later) and remarked that she liked the Razzberry ones better (my review of the Razzberry M&M’s). I agree.

I love the cute little bag design that makes Red look like a cherry. As you can see, the Wildly Cherry M&M’s come in two colors, red and a darker maroon. They’re slightly larger than regular M&M’s, like the Razzberry ones, and also like the Razzberry ones, the larger size makes the sugar shell feel a little thicker and a little crunchier. I found the flavor to be reminiscent of artificial black cherry rather than of fresh cherries. It was quite faithful to the slightly medicinal flavor of a cherry cordial. They’re not as intoxicating as the Razzberry M&M’s, possibly because the slightly medicinal cherry flavor is far more common and therefore less interesting than it’s slightly medicinal raspberry counterpart. An OM from me. I passed the first bag around the car, where it was favorably received by my road tripping companions. I popped a couple of the second bag to take tasting notes but have since had no desire to pop more.

Check out Sera on Candy Addict and Heather on Chocolate Bytes for other takes. I wonder if they’re the same as the Cherry Cordial M&Ms from last Christmas the Sugarhog.net reviewed.

Oh Limited Edition items, how you appeal to my candy blogger impulses! The bright orange wrapper on the Snickers Limited Edition Nut ‘n Butter Crunch (I’m fond of pointing out how Reese’s has driven us to associate orange candy bar wrappers with peanut butter) promises “milk chocolate, peanuts and creamy peanut butter taste.”

Peanut butter taste? That worries me. Why not just creamy peanut butter? It must be some horrid substitute made from oil or something. Yum…

I must admit that I’ve never been a Snickers fan, as I don’t really like peanuts that much. I used to hate nuts in things. Now that I’ve been candy blogging for a while, I’ve learned to tolerate and even enjoy eating nuts. But I’ve still never had the urge to grab a Snickers bar. I don’t even think I’ve ever had a standard-sized Snickers (just the mini versions), so though I felt that the Nut ‘n Butter Crunch was smaller than usual, I couldn’t be sure. It weighed in at 1.71 ounces.

First of all, this bar doesn’t live up to its name, as it’s not that crunchy. The peanuts are the only thing providing texture to the bar. It had a strong peanut smell, probably thanks to whatever provided the peanut butter tate. The milk chocolate coating was slight sweet and covered a thick filling of peanuts in a pasty… thing… that’s definitely not peanut butter, as its texture is not at all creamy. The Nut ‘n Butter Crunch was an extremely salty bar (14- mg of sodium), possibly due to the peanuts and the nuts. The sweet and salty mix of the bar works well, and the texture is pretty good as well.

I give the Nut ‘n Butter Crunch an OM. All the peanuts make it high in protein, and it tastes better than most of those supposedly healthy protein bars that are covered in chocolate and full of sugar. Maybe this is a candy indulgence that you can pretend is good for you!

For some reason or another, I see Almond M&M’s as the forgotten M&M. Well, after Crispy, I guess, but those are no longer being made. For some reason or another, Almond M&M’s just don’t get that much attention, and I only recently got to try them. That was a shame, as I found them to be pretty good.

I was disappointed to find that there were only 12 M&M’s in my single serving bag. They were larger than milk chocolate or peanut M&M’s, but still, only 12? I easily polished off the entire bag, which then led to a good case of candy overindulgence guilt.

I liked the Almond M&M’s better than the peanut ones (which isn’t saying much, as I find peanut M&M’s boring) because they’re darker and crunchier. The almonds had a stronger, nuttier taste than the bland, unroasted peanuts found in peanut M&M’s.

Though the almonds were great, Almond M&M’s are not a candy you want to dissect into its separate components to eat. Instead it’s best when all crunched together so that the almond’s nuttiness can mitigate the sweetness of the sugar shell and milk chocolate. An OM.

Ethel’s Chocolate Lounge is a chain of chocolate cafes owned by Mars. Think Starbuck’s but with truffles and hot cocoa and mocha lattes. For now, they’re only in Illinois and Las Vegas; I made it a point to track one down in the Fashion Show Mall on the Strip. I picked up four truffles at $1.50 each: a PB&J, a honey truffle, a cinnamon truffle, and a gingerbread tile. The stores are full of comfy couches, armchairs, and beautiful molded truffles in a huge variety of flavors.

I chose the PB&J (top right in below photo) because the girl behind the counter informed me that it was their best seller. Number two in popularity, if you’re curious, is cheesecake, which I tried on site (you get a free truffle for going into the store; the cheesecake was white chocolate, overly sweet, and could have been more cream-cheesy). The PB&J truffle was filled with grape jelly and peanut butter.

I like my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with strawberry preserves on 12-grain bread, which skews heartier and darker than the peanut butter and grape jelly on Wonderbread classic that I felt this truffle was trying to emulate. Its grape jelly filling was way too sweet for my taste, and I wish the peanut butter were saltier and nuttier. An O.

Moving clockwise to the bottom right, next is the Gingerbread tile from Ethel’s holiday collection. There were actually two gingerbread truffles to choose from; the other was called a gingerbread gem. I went with the tile because I was told it would be more heartily spiced and more heavily ginger-flavored.

The tile was prettily decorated, as you can see. The thin chocolate shell surrounded a rather thin but still creamy ganache with a wonderful gingerbread flavor. The ginger flavor was present without being overwhelming, earning an OM for this truffle.

The bottom left truffle with the visible grains of sugar is a Cinnamon truffle. Like the gingerbread tile, the ganache was creamy but thin and encased within a thin chocolate coating that carried a nice snap. I found the ganache flavoring to be spot on, with the perfect amount of nice, spiced cinnamon. Overall, however, I found the truffle to have a too sweet finish. Another OM.

Finally, there is the Honey truffle (top left). The ganache on this one was smooth with mild honey notes and a buttery toffee finish, which I found to be quite nice. It, too, was on the sweet side, just shy of cloying, and yet another OM.

Overall, Ethel’s truffles are nice and accessible. I wish their ganache fillings were richer and thicker, which would make them more indulgent. As they are right now, there’s nothing spectacular about the Ethel’s line, and you could get better truffles for the same price.