ZOMG, Candy!

My May trip to Italy meant a layover in Frankfurt, which in turn meant that I got to buy lots of Duty Free Ritter Sport. In fact, I managed to leave Europe with not one but two sets of mini Ritter Sport assortments.

The below Schokowurfel set had 6 varieties (Sorten?): Creme Coco, Mandel Split, Caramel Crisp, Crocant, Cappuccino, and Edelnougat. I’ll cover the first three today and hit the next three on Wednesday.

These tiny Ritter Sports were individually wrapped and each just one square big. They’re slightly larger than the square segments of a regular Ritter Sport bar. The size difference is especially noticeable in their height.

It wasn’t until after I’d eaten them all that I realized that I photographed one upside down. Oops.

Creme Coco came in a white wrapper. It was milk chocolate with a white coconut cream filling. The filling contained dried flakes of coconut that were crisp and just shy of crunchy.

The chocolate was soft and sweet and nutty. The two flavors played off each other beautifully, with the dusky sweet balancing out the crispy nutty coconut. I thought it was a lovely mix of flavor and texture. An OM.

It was pretty easy to guess at a translation for Creme Coco. Mandel Split left me lost with no clue what to expect.

It turned out to be milk chocolate on the outside with a white chocolate filling with a few peanut bits mixed in. The peanuts were quite flavorful, but I’ve never been a big fan of peanuts.

I respected the high quality of the ingredients that went into the Mandel Split, but I didn’t find it very exciting or special. To me, it just tasted like nice chocolate and peanuts. An O.

Finally for today, Caramel Crisp was easily comprehensible. It was milk chocolate with golden brown caramel-flavored filling.

At first I thought the filling contained rice crisps, but careful excavation revealed them to be thin flakes of unidentified crispiness. They had a nice complexity that made me think they could be honeycomb, or at least honeycomb flavored.

I really enjoyed the filling to this chocolate. It had nice caramelized/burnt sugar notes that I love in real caramel, but it had the solid texture of a grainy ganache. That plus the intriguingly delicious crisps earned this an OM.

Cybele reviewed this set several years ago on Candy Blog. Looks like the assortment has changed a little since then. Come back on Wednesday for the other half!

I absolutely loved the Milka Joghurt bar when my roommate introduced me to it. Consequently, I snapped up every chocolate and yogurt bar that I could find in Italy, including these two strawberry yogurt bars.

One’s by Ritter Sport, and the other is by Milka, and I thought it would be appropriate to review them together.

The Ritter Sport bar was very soft and pliable. The yogurt was a creamy filling inside the milk chocolate Ritter Bar squares. As with all Ritter Sport bars, each square was stamped with the logo.

I loved the color contrast between the milk chocolate brown and the bright pink strawberry filling, the latter of which was flecked with darker pink bits of freeze-dried strawberry.

The milk chocolate was thick and on the edge of melting in my fingers as I tore the segments apart. And I do mean tore – it was that soft. The milk chocolate was great and tasted of caramel.

The strawberry filling was sweetly floral with an undertone of tanginess from the yogurt and flashes of sweetness every time I came across a bit of the freeze-dried strawberry. Those crunchy bits added bright sparks of flavor.

I enjoyed the flavor combination of strawberry and chocolate, but it was a bit too sweet and not tangy enough for my taste. I preferred the regular yogurt version.

The Milka Strawberry Yogurt bar was also soft and pliable. It, too, was segmented, though each segment was rectangular and stamped with the Milka logo rather than the Ritter Sport logo (of course).

The Milka bar was more muted in its coloring, so it didn’t look nearly as striking as the Ritter Sport version. It’s chocolate was lighter brown, and the strawberry filling was beige with pink bits.

This bar had a far more genuine strawberry yogurt flavor – it tasted just like the store-bought real deal! It had more depth and complexity, more fullness of flavor.

The filling had a light crunchiness, I think from real strawberry seeds. They didn’t add any flavor flashes, though.

The Milka bar’s chocolate was thinner than that of the Ritter Sport’s, and I thought it wasn’t as nice. It lacked the Ritter Sport’s caramel complexity.

Still, I liked the Milka bar better than the Ritter Sport because the filling had more spot-on strawberry yogurt flavor. But I also found it too sweet and preferred the tarter and tangier plain yogurt bar. Both get Os.

This is the last of Ritter Sports’ 2010 summer flavors that I picked up in Europe. The other two, Peach-Passionfruit Yogurt and Wildberry Yogurt, were reviewed earlier in the week.

Stracciatella is a flavor of Italian gelato that’s analogous to chocolate chip ice cream. I have to admit I didn’t try stracciatella gelato while I was in Italy – I was too busy eating yogurt gelato!

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This Ritter Sport Wild Berry Yogurt was the second of Ritter’s three limited edition summer flavors that I found while abroad (I reviewed the first, Peach-Passionfruit Yogurt, on Monday).

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I was recently in Europe for a conference, and I went a little bonkers buying candy (as usual). Three of my prize finds were the three limited edition summer Ritter Sport bars, which I’ll be covering this week. Today, we’ve got Peach-Passionfruit Yogurt.

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Here’s yet another Ritter Sport bar to wrap up the week. I saved my favorite for last, the Dark Chocolate with Marzipan.

The bar promises that it’s “made with 100% finest marzipan”. With a claim so lofty, they’d better deliver!

I do love the neat 4X4 square of Ritter Sport bars. It looks tidy and symmetrical, which I find quite charming.

The bar smells strongly of cherries, which was surprising. I wish I’d gotten a look at the ingredients list before my friends devoured the bar and tossed the wrapper.

The marzipan filling was thick and pasty. It tasted lightly nutty, a mix of almond extract and cherry cordial notes.

The marzipan was in perfect proportion with the dark chocolate. The chocolate itself was snappy and smooth and balances just wonderfully with the taste and texture of the marzipan.

An OMG for a bar that I will definitely buy again. My original is long gone because I shared it with friends. I brought it to lunch, having broken off a row and saved it for myself for later. Had I known how delicious it would be, I don’t know if I would have been generous enough to share it.

This Ritter Sport bar came from Target. At $1.99, Target’s Ritter Sport bars are the best deal I’ve ever seen.

I was a bit surprised to see that Target carried the Cornflakes bar, “with crispy-crunchy cornflakes”. It’s an unusual combination to find in the States, but a tasty one!

The cornflakes were more or less horizontally layered within the milk chocolate bar. They endowed it with a lovely crunch, creating an all around lovely texture when added to the thick and creamy milk chocolate.

It’s similar to the more familiar chocolate and rice crisps combination but with a much sturdier bite and a stronger grit that doesn’t melt away and disappear as quickly as rice crisps do.

The milk chocolate was dusky with a lovely complexity and edge to it, and the cornflakes added an almost nutty depth of flavor that made this bar a great treat. It’s pretty addictive, mostly thanks to the extra-special crunch. An OM.

This is the second of the Ritter Sport bars that I bought in Spain. Those two made me want to try more, so I did. I picked up a couple more at Target (they were only $1.99!), which gave me enough bars to make this a Ritter Sport review week.

The Dark Whole Hazelnuts (or Negro con Avellanas Enteras) was a dark chocolate Ritter base “with hand selected whole hazelnuts”.

You know how some things promise whole hazelnuts, or almonds, or peanuts, or whatever, and there are always a few broken ones mixed in? Admirably enough, every hazelnut in this bar remained intact. Well, until I chomped into them, that is.

And there were lots of them too! The bar was generously studded with whole roasted hazelnuts. Their dry roasted nuttiness contrasted well with the smooth dark chocolate.

This bar was a deconstructed Nutella/gianduja. It made it easy to appreciate how well chocolate and hazelnuts go together.

The chocolate itself was fairly simple, a dark chocolate that lacked complexity. It had a lightly sweet finish, but that was about all I got in terms of its flavor profile. Still, it was tasty enough to do what was required of it – balancing out but not overpowering the hazelnut. An OM for the decently executed combo.

This Ritter Sport Butter Biscuit was one of the more… inane purchases that I picked up in Spain. Ritter Sport bars are pretty easy to find in the States, but they usually run $2.50 and up, and this guy was only a Euro, so I bought it (and another one that I’ll review later) to save a buck.

I carted it around Spain and flew it to Boston. Then I realized that bringing it home to Austin, Texas in the summer was a terrible idea, so I left it in Boston in the capable care of my boyfriend (he doesn’t eat candy. I know, it’s weird that we still manage to get along) and made him bring it to me in Rochester.

A couple months and multiple states and countries later, I finally broke it out. It was worth the wait.

Believe it or not, this was the first Ritter Sport bar that I’ve ever tried. Somehow I just never picked them up in the course of my candy blogging duties. I think it’s because they look smaller, even though they’re really not (100g is pretty standard for a chocolate bar). They look smaller and squatter because they’re thick.

The Butter Biscuit is a “butter biscuit with fine cocoa cream”. It smells wonderfully sweet and fruity, with just a hint of cocoa undertone. The mix is so intoxicating that I’m smelling my last 1/4 of the bar as I’m writing this, and I want to chomp into it again (but I won’t because I’ve already brushed my teeth and it’s past my bedtime).

The square bar is subdivided into 16 smaller squares, each with the Ritter Sport logo imprinted on it. It’s a milk chocolate bar, and it got a bit soft in the summer heat, which is why it looks a little wonky and warped.

The bar is actually comprised of three layers. The base is a thick layer of milk chocolate. Within the square of the base is a smaller square of buttery biscuit (cookie) that doesn’t quite reach the edges of the chocolate, and atop it all, making up the bulk of the subdivided blocks, is the cocoa cream.

The cocoa cream is a paler shade of brown – almost greyish – than the milk chocolate base and shell. I can’t distinguish its flavors from those of the chocolate, which has lovely caramel notes and a tinge of fruity sweetness to the finish. I think it’s mostly a mouthfeel thing, as the chocolate as a whole feels more buttery than expected.

The biscuit (cookie) layer is a substantial 1/2 cm-ish. It packs a big crunch and tempers the sweetness of the chocolate. I don’t notice that it adds much in terms of flavor, though it does have a weird grassy finish when eaten in isolation. I do not recommend eating the biscuit in isolation.

Despite the slight cookie weirdness, this guy was goood. If you eat more than a few squares at a time, it does gets too sweet. I ate it a manageable 2 squares at a time and give it a hearty OMG. I would most definitely buy it again, except that I now have to eat my way through the rest of the Ritter Sport oeuvre. From the looks of it, that’ll take a while.