ZOMG, Candy!

Remember that line drawing commercial with the boy and the owl and how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? One… two-hoo… a-three… crunch!

Tootsie Roll is running a “How Many Licks” Sweepstakes for a chance to win lots of prizes. The contest doesn’t end until July 2009, but winners are drawn every month.

Also, from watching the scroll at the bottom of the website, I learned that the Tootsie Roll Industries makes lots of candies that I didn’t know it made, like Razzles and Andes mints. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go about updating my categories now.

Chocolate and mint is a classically delicious combination. I bet the Girl Scouts owe their continued existence to the continued financial support of Thin Mint sales. I’ve already reviewed quite a few chocolate and mint candies on the site. Here are three more.

Hershey’s Mint Truffle Kisses

Yet another variety of Kiss from Hershey’s (excellent photos of the lineup here), this time a molded chocolate shell with a mint truffle filling. The mint filling was soft and only lightly minty. There’s not much of a mint finish, but it’s there. I’d prefer more mintiness, so an O.

Andes Mints

In my mind, Andes mints are the classic chocolate mint. As a kid, the shiny foil wrappers made them seem super fancy, and the mints within were such a treat. Now that I’ve revisited them as an older candy eater, I was surprised at how light the mintiness was. I guess it seemed stronger while I was a kid. They were duskier than the Mint Truffle Kisses and had a crisp snap. An O.

Zachary’s Thick Mints

I’d never heard of Zachary Thick Mints until I stole this one from my friend’s I-banking gift basket. The wrapper says it’s “real chocolate and cool, creamy peppermint.” It’s quite similar to a York Peppermint Patty, only smaller and thicker.

The mint paste inside was thick and only minty in the finish. I also found it rather salty. An O, as it’s too weak in mintiness for my sake.

Basically, all three of these chocolate/mint combinations were too tepid for my taste. Give me richer chocolate and more powerful mint flavors, and then we’ll talk.

I’ve already reviewed the vanilla version of the Charleston Chew once with tepid results. So why do they warrant a re-review? Because I’ve tried them in chocolate (not much of a difference and certainly not worth mentioning), and I’ve tried them frozen. Frozen Charleston Chews are a candy revelation if you’ve only had the non-frozen version.

The Chocolatey Charleston Chew features a thin chocolate (probably mockolate) shell around a light chocolate nougat-y filling. Like its vanilla brethen, the nougat is soft, yielding, and just slightly sticky. I wish the “Chocolatey”-ness of the bar came through better. It could definitely use amping up in the chocolate flavor realm. An OM.

But wait! There’s more! Pop the Chew in the freezer, forget it’s there for a while, and rediscover it later. Now frozen, the Chew cleaves like toffee when you bite or break it, but once in your mouth, it melts into that pleasant chew. It’s an awesome textural change, and suddenly this mediocre bar becomes something quite addictive, deserving of an OMG.

A few more notes - the Charleston Chew is relatively low cal and low fat and lasts a long time if you eat it frozen, making it a pretty diet-friendly indulgence. And Yale Med School’s dining hall sells them at room temperature and out of the freezer. I had a nice chat with the guy running the register when I complimented them on their thoughtfulness. Clearly, Yale Med knows their stuff.

And finally, happy Independence Day! Won’t be much celebrating of that here in England, I’m sure, so you readers in the states will have to have a veggie burger for me.

These days, candy that only costs 25 cents a box is definitely a rarity. I’m guessing that Cry Baby Tears (BUY!) are a retro/nostalgia candy that have been around for a while. From the looks of the packaging, Cry Baby Tears are supposed to be so sour that they make you cry. They certainly were tart and puckery, even if they didn’t actually bring me to tears.

Cry Baby Tears are little tear-shaped compressed sugar candies with Cry Baby stamped on them. You can’t tell from the pictures because the New Haven humidity wreaked havoc on them, but it’s there. They’re also not supposed to be all yicky and mottled looking. Again, the humidity. Grr!

Cry Baby Tears come in grape (purple), watermelon (green), cherry (red), lemon (yellow), and orange (orange). The cherry flavor is the weakest and overpowered by the sour, while the lemon packs a puckery kick, and the orange has a nice finish. The candies themselves are sour, and they also have a sour coating for a little extra wallop.

I’d give Cry Baby Tears an OM. They’re good and sour - so sour that I can’t eat too many before my mouth and throat start hurting - and that’s exactly what you want in a sour candy.

“First it’s candy…Then it’s gum!” is the Razzles (BUY!) tagline. And indeed, it starts out as candy and ends up as gum. Unfortunately, it is not a very tasty incarnation of either food group.

The Tropical Razzles flavors, according to the wrapper, are pineapple, strawberry-banana, tropical punch, tangerine, and kiwi-lime. All that matters is that they all taste and feel like a Flintstones vitamin. They’re grainy with that weird undertaste that reminds me a little of the taste of blood. Mmm. Blood.

The flavors don’t last very long in the candy form, and the gum form just tastes oddly generically sweet. The texture of the gum is also too stiff to be a pleasant chew.

The Razzle transition from candy to gum is bizarre. It breaks apart, then resolidifies itself. Kinda cool. If only it were also palatable.

I’ve seen Charleston Chews (BUY) around grocery stores before, but only in big bags. I couldn’t figure out exactly what they were from the packaging, so I wasn’t ready to commit to buying a whole bag. Fortunately, I found this lone… bar? rod? roll?… version to try.

The Charleston Chew is a roll of vanilla nougat (the Tootsie Roll website says that they also come in chocolate and strawberry) covered in a thin layer of chocolate. The chocolate coating smelled of cheap, mass produced chocolate and tasted like it too. Then again, there’s something to be said for cheap, mass produced chocolate. Sometimes it can be transporting, like Proust’s madeleine. And from the retro look of the packaging, it seems that the Charleston Chew is dependent upon its ability to bring people back to their childhoods.

All in all, it’s not a bad bar. The vanilla nougat is soft and yielding, with a manageable amount of sticks-to-your-teeth-ness. Alas, I left the rest of this at home, so I will not be able to try the frozen version. If I could find the single rolls in chocolate and strawberry, I’d buy them to try them, but I wouldn’t bother buying an entire box or bag of them.