ZOMG, Candy!

I got a bunch of Japanese Kit Kats in my free sample box from Tsunami.hk. For some reason, Kit Kats in Japan have taken on a life on their own, with dozens of always available and seasonal/limited edition flavors, some of which are quite weird.

Today’s review is of the first of the lot: Royal Milk Tea (ginger ale, 2 kinds of matcha, and raspberry cheesecake were the other ones Tsunami.hk sent).

I liked this Kit Kat’s outer packaging, with its plaid background and depiction of the iconic Queen’s Guards. The box held two individually packaged pairs of fingers. Their packaging was blue with a single guard’s silhouette.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect for the flavor. Does the “royal” apply to the milk or to the tea? I guessed that it would be a tea-flavored take on a cafe latte/cafe au lait.

The fingers were white chocolate with the usual Kit Kat cookie wafers. They tasted of vanilla and fresh milk, with a strong creaminess at the finish.

There was a bit of fragrant floral-ness mixed in with all that lovely dairy-ness, which made me think that they were aiming for Earl Grey for the tea component.

I loved the complexity of the flavors, but it was a tad too sweet for my taste. An O.

I got these Cherry Raisinets in my NCA pre-trade show goodie bag (get used to seeing that; it was a biiiig goodie bag). The press release describes them as “Montmorency Tart Cherries… drenched in rich Nestle Dark Chocolate”.

The bag brags that they’re real fruit. I wish they’d chosen more realistic cherry images though; the half ones on the bag look super fake/maraschino-y.

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Wonka’s Squishy Sploshberries Gummies are yet another new addition to Wonka’s Edible Garden of gummies. These, too, were in my free 16 lb bag of Sweets and Snacks Expo preview goodies, courtesy of the NCA.

I thought they were just berry-flavored gummies with foamy bottoms, until I tried one and discovered that they were berry-flavored gummies with foamy bottoms and liquid goo inside!

I do believe that liquid goo is the “splosh” component of the name. Though it could also be the “squish”, I suppose.

The Squishy Sploshberries came in raspberry, goji berry, cloud berry (apparently that’s a real thing), and blueberry flavors.

The gummies were all varying shades of a honey/amber color with a white foam gummi bottom and a gooey liquid center.

The foam gummi sort of had the texture of marshmallows and just tasted lightly sweet and fruity, while the inner liquid was thick, a bit grainy, and powerfully sweet and fruity.

Cloud Berry, the flower-shaped one, was the lightest colored of the bunch and was more yellow than orange.

I have no idea what cloud berries are supposed to taste like, but Wonka’s gummi version of it was great! It tasted like sweet white grapes, what some candy makers call muscat flavored.

Goji berry was strawberry-like in shape. While it tasted somewhat like strawberry candies, I also got some seediness to that I usually associate with raspberry candies.

The actual raspberry gummi took that seediness and gave it more depth. This one tasted more deeply of raspberry than the strawberry did and was covered in lots of bumps to look like the bottom of a real raspberry.

Blueberry looked like a weird leaf or a bunch of berries on a vine. I was blown away by how well Wonka captured the distinct flavor of blueberries – the flavor is spot on. And delicious!

I really enjoyed the Squishy Sploshberries. They were uniquely flavored, with flavors that were powerful and well done, and I loved the added flavor injection and textural contrast of the inner goo. An OM.

I have to admit, I had a beef with this bar even before I tasted it. Its name is too darn long – it’s annoying to type out “scrumdiddlyumptious!” So I’m shortening it to WESCB, for Wonka Exceptionals Scrumbdiddlyumptious Chocolate Bar.

Wonka Exceptionals is Nestle/Wonka’s new line of higher quality – and higher priced – candy bars. I got mine in my free 16 lb bag of Sweets and Snack Expo preview goodies, courtesy of the NCA.

The WESCB has “bits of scrumptious toffee pieces, crispy cookies and crunchy peanuts wrapped in milk chocolate.” It sounds pretty amazing but busy, which is also how I’d describe the crazy shiny purple packaging.

Inside, the bar was strangely segmented into different-sized pieces (mine came broken along one of the lines), each imprinted with the Wonka W. I actually like the lack of uniformity. Theoretically, you could break off an appetite-appropriate chunk.

The WESCB was packed full of bits and pieces. Peanuts were the most predominant flavor and scent contributor, almost tricking me into thinking that the bar had peanut butter in it. They brought a deep, roasty nuttiness and a lot of crunch.

The crunchy toffee bits cleaved cleanly and added some nice dark caramel notes, while the cookie bits added further crunch.

The milk chocolate bar had a thick melt, but it was so full of stuff that the melt was barely noticeable. On its own, the chocolate was a tad too sweet for my taste, though it was definitely a cut above plain Nestle chocolate.

While I liked the idea of the WESCB, I think it failed me in execution. There was way too much peanut flavor that totally overwhelmed everything else, losing the potential of the other flavor components. An O.

Nestle’s been doing a great job of breathing new life into their Wonka lineup. While I haven’t loved everything that they’ve rolled out, I do love the creativity and imagination that’s gone into their new products.

I’m devoting this week’s reviews to the bunch of new Wonka products that I got in my NCA goody bag (sadly, I’m not heading to the Sweets and Snacks Expo [formally the All Candy Expo] tomorrow. Because I’m in Italy for a cognitive science conference. I know; my life is so hard).

These Whipped Wingers Gummies are “from Wonka’s Edible Garden,” which is a cute thematic (and psychedelic) tie-in for their new gummies. They come in four shapes – wasp, butterfly, dragonfly, and ladybug – and four flavors – pineapple, orange, watermelon, and tropical punch.

The shapes and flavors are not linked. That is, all shapes come in all flavors, and vice-versa. The gummy shapes were well-defined, with sharp etchings.

All of these gummies had a soft, creamy texture, which I take to be the whipped component. Unlike most other gummies, they were totally opaque.

Pineapple was yellow, mellow, and sweet. I wouldn’t have guessed that it was pineapple flavored, as it was rather generically sweet and fruity.

Orange was orange and had muted citrus notes. Watermelon tasted round and floral with a solid artificial watermelon candy flavor and a seedy, fruity finish.

Tropical punch doesn’t taste very punchy to me. Instead, I get the red fruitiness of strawberry, with maybe a little grape in there.

The Whipped Wingers were too lightly flavored for me. While I appreciated the idea and effort, I found them to be rather meh flavorwise because that added creaminess so diluted the fruitiness. An O.

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.

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.

I bought a bag of Wonka Sour Puckerooms Gummies on sale for just a dollar (along with a $1 bag of their new Sluggles Gummies, which shall be reviewed in the future). I hope the Puckerooms’ on-sale-ness doesn’t mean that they’re on the way out! I found them adorable, creative, and most importantly, tasty!

I love the bright, colorful, slightly psychedelic-hippy-ish packaging on these babies. And I love that, when Wonka chose to make a sour gummy, they thought outside of the cutesy animal box and went with cutesy fungi instead.

The mushrooms come in three shapes and three flavors, but the shapes don’t correspond to a specific flavor. In other words, all three flavors come in all three shapes: a pointy mushroom, and bulbous mushroom, and a mushroom-cloud-y mushroom (aka a bulbous mushroom with a little stretch to the stem).

The Puckerooms are really more sour than sweet – the white sour coating is basically sugar. The chew is soft but also quite sproingy, making them fun to chomp on.

Red is cherry. I expected the somewhat medicinal flavor of artificial cherry. Instead, I found it more reminiscent of Hawaiian Punch.

Purple is grape and tastes of deep purple or black grapes. It’s like grape juice concentrate. I’m usually not a purple-grape candy person, but these were actually enjoyable for me.

Yellow-and-orange is lemon-orange and is by far my favorite. The colors are pretty, and its clear citrus zesty notes brightly sing on the tongue.

You can really only go so far with mass-produced gummies, and I think Wonka’s made it to the pinnacle with their Puckerooms. The shapes are fun and the texture is spot on. My only critique is that I wish there were more flavors. Please? An OM.

I often came across Nestle’s Yorkie bars during my summer in England, but I never bought them because they’re “NOT FOR GIRLS!” It wasn’t that I was intimidated by the tagline or the red-slashed purse-toting icon; it was that I believed any candy company misogynistic enough to have such a slogan, even if only tongue-in-cheek, didn’t deserve my business.

I’m just as anti-marketing solely to women (when such marketing is also done stupidly) by the way.

So how did I end up with this bar anyway? My friend Steve visited Economy Candy and was thoughtful and sweet enough to bring me back a goodie bag generously stuffed full of candy deliciousness. This bar was included in the mix.

The bar is pretty basic, just five thick segments (~3/4 inch high) of pure milk chocolate, each stamped with YORKIE in block sans-serif caps. You’d think that a no-girls-allowed bar would have some manly bits, like nuts, mixed in (I’m talking about peanuts and almonds; get your mind out of the gutter). Maybe the manliness lies in the thickness of each chunk. Girls’ jaws must be too delicate to take on that task (keep staying out of that gutter).

The milk chocolate is smooth and creamy, though it’s not as luxuriously thick on the tongue as other slightly more premium bars (such as Ghirardelli or Lindt). But that’s to be expected, as this is really more of a vending machine/checkout aisle grade candy bar.

The chocolate is sweet, with strong caramel notes, and it melts to a lingering sweet finish. I wasn’t surprised by the sugar-bomb nature of the bar, as it smelled powerfully of generic sweetness. It was too sweet for my taste. Still, it wasn’t appalling or anything, so an O.

Just to prove how sweet it was – we had a bit of a mouse problem in my house. Being smart little mice, they found their way into my candy drawer. First, my giant slab of treacle toffee (made of boiled sugar) got gnawed on and had to be trashed (I had been saving it for ages! I so love Walkers’ treacle toffee…). Next they got to a piece of taffy (made of boiled sugar).

And finally, they got into my chocolate stash. Thankfully, they bypassed my hoard of finer chocolates, included a prized Valrhona bar, and instead went straight for the Yorkie, probably due to its high sugar content (don’t worry; I photographed and tasted mouse-free chocolate).

On the plus side, I was able to use the gnawed on Yorkie bits to set a humane mouse trap and managed to catch this adorable little bugger. We had put out a store-bought humane trap – and spent weeks watching the mice dance around it. The Yorkie bar, a piece of cardboard, and a bucket did the trick in about 30 seconds.

Unfortunately, his buddy didn’t fare so well; when the store-bought nice trap didn’t work, I set out a snappy one, also baited with a bit of Yorkie. The above mouse survived because I was too racked with rodent-murdering guilt to put out anymore snap traps.

But if they get into the rest of my Walkers’ toffee stash, I might not be so nice again…

Nestle‘s Cranberry Raisinets have been making the rounds in the candy review blogosphere lately (check out Candy Blog and Candy Addict). A PR rep sent me some free samples, three 100-calorie packs, to be precise, along with an offer that I think you, dear readers, will appreciate. But we’ll get into that in a bit.

Calling them Cranberry Raisinets seems almost nonsensical, but I can think of linked two reasons why they’re named what they are. Calling them Craisinets would probably lead to all kinds of naming rights battles with Ocean Spray (makers of Craisins), and calling them anything else would lose the brand recognition that Raisinets brings.

That’s why we get so many variations on a theme in the candy world (and the marketing world, really); it’s far more difficult and expensive to launch a new product than it is to tag it onto an existing brand.

Still, I’m not sure exactly how much cachet the Raisinets name brings. I see Raisinets as kind of innocuous candy. Instead of being a love/hate thing, they’re more of a love/would rather eat something else thing.

I remember being a kid and trying to pick around the chocolate-covered raisins in bridge mix and feeling vaguely duped each time I mistook one for a chocolate covered peanut. For me, standard Rasinets are something I don’t buy for myself but that I don’t refuse when offered to me. I also feel the same way about raisins, by the way.

Each 100 calorie pack holds a respectably substantial amount of candy (i.e. much more than is shown in the above photo), and each Cranberry Raisinet has a relatively substantial layer of milk chocolate. It’s super thick and tongue coatingly heavy, which is pleasant, though the chocolate itself is rather one note. I thought it had a lightly sweet berry finish, but that may have been the cranberry rubbing off.

As for the cranberry inside, they were sweetly sour, which makes sense, as they’re sweetened dried cranberries. I would’ve preferred an unsweetened cranberry, as I bet a tarter tang would stand out against the heavy chocolate more (I had the same issue with Emily’s dark chocolate covered cranberries), but that would probably have less mass market appeal.

All in all, I find these an improvement on the Raisinet, thanks to their barely perceptible hint of sour. I prefer Emily’s because they use dark chocolate, but Emily’s is harder to find.

I’m torn whether to give these an O or an OM. While I wouldn’t buy them for candy savoring, I think these would really hit the spot at the movies as a decent, not too bad for you, munchable treat. But I never buy candy at the movies (too overpriced), so an O it is. But a good one!

And now, dear readers, the fun reward part for making it through the review. Nestle’s PR peeps have offered to run a giveaway through ZOMG, Candy! Five randomly selected winners will receive their own Cranberry Raisinet samples. To enter, leave a comment with a working email address and your thoughts on Raisinets or movie theater candy by noon EST on Wednesday, August 5th. U.S. readers only, please, as international shipping is pricey!

Good luck!