ZOMG, Candy!

I received a bag of Surf Sweets Fruity Hearts as free samples from the manufacturer. The press release said that they were launched in time for Valentine’s Day, though it was never explicit about whether these were a limited holiday edition or not.

They were, however, explicit about touting all the benefits to the Surf Sweets line. These are organic, gluten-free, and vegan. No big surprise: they’re available at Whole Foods.

The Fruity Hearts were watermelon and cherry flavored. They were difficult to visually distinguish. Both were pink though my lighting made them look red in the photo; the watermelon was a slightly lighter shade.

The texture reminded me of fruit gems. They were soft enough for me to easily bite right through, exposing slick and shiny surfaces.

There was a slight sproinginess when I chewed them. The surface was covered with a crunchy granulated sugar that added a nice textural contrast.

Watermelon was sweet and floral with a brightly fruity finish. It reminded me of a mellow, more natural version of a watermelon Jolly Rancher.

Cherry was also brightly fruity but had a darker edge with plummy notes. It reminded me of cherry Popsicles.

I enjoyed the texture and flavor intensity of these. Watermelon and cherry aren’t my favorite candy flavors in general, but these are seasonally appropriate choices.

It’s nice that Surf Sweets takes extra care with their ingredients, but it’s even better that their organicness and wholesomeness doesn’t come at the expense of deliciousness. An OM.

I found these Cadbury Popping Mini Eggs in Canada. I love Cadbury Mini Eggs and always try to snatch them up around Easter time, so I was super excited to try them with a popping twist.

Tiny print on the bottom of the wrapper called them, “solid milk chocolate eggs with popping candy in a crisp candy shell.”

On the outside, they looked identical to regular Mini Eggs – same tiny egg shape, same matte candy shell, same slight speckling. All the fun was hidden inside!

The milk chocolate was the same as that of regular Mini Eggs: lusciously thick and creamy with dusky, caramel tones. In the Popping Mini Eggs, however, that melt was interrupted by the texture of the popping crystals.

Those poppers added an crackly tickle in the mouth. For me, it was mostly experienced in the back of my throat.

The feeling was fun and rather surreal, like holding tiny live jumping creatures in my mouth. As far as I could tell, they didn’t affect the taste at all.

When I eat regular Mini Eggs, I like holding them in my mouth and letting the sugar shell melt away and meld into the thick milk chocolate within. With the Popping Mini Eggs, I preferred to crunch through the shell and chomp right to the popping-ness.

The popping was a fun addition to an already tasty treat. I can’t decide if I like these better than the regular version. I think the Popping Mini Eggs are fun, while the regular Mini Eggs feel more indulgent because it’s easier to experience their melt. These get an OM.

Usually I review Easter candies after the holiday is over – love those steep next day sales! But today, I’m actually reviewing an Easter product before Easter, thanks to free samples from Hedonist Artisan Chocolates.

These Farm Egg Truffles are made to look like (aka are not made from) farm eggs. They are mind-bogglingly gorgeous with their shiny, speckled shells. Each truffle was about the size of a real egg, if that egg were cut in half and left with a flat back.

They came in Bittersweet (dark brown with white speckles), Peanut Butter (light brown with dark brown speckles), and Coconut (white with yellow streaks and blue-green speckles).

Bittersweet lived up to its name. Its ganache was dry, rich, heavy, and thick, with almost no sweetness.

It tasted of pure chocolate goodness, lots of genuine dusky cacao flavors, and a lightly smoky cocoa finish. Sometimes, simple can be so good!

Peanut Butter had a dry and crumbly peanut butter ganache. I polished off the whole thing before I remembered that I had meant to retake the cross-section photo – there were whole roasted peanuts hidden in there as well!

The whole peanuts were a great addition – dry and crunchy with a strong, roasted nuttiness. They also carried a perfect hint of saltiness that really made the classic chocolate and peanut butter combination sing.

Coconut had a thin, white chocolate shell with a lusciously creamy ganache. The white chocolate was high quality, very mellow, lightly sweet, and full of vanilla goodness.

Strands of coconut were mixed into the ganache, which added a textural contrast – that special squeaky chewiness that coconut has – and a lovely floral nuttiness.

I’m a little ashamed to say that I ate all three of these in one sitting. My friends were disappointed to learn that there was none left to share, though they delighted in eating the extra Easter truffles that Hedonist also sent me.

Peanut Butter and Bittersweet get OMGs while Coconut gets a ZOMG! For the sake of my waistline, it’s probably good that these are a holiday-specific treat.

It looks like noon on April 20th is the deadline if you want to order some for yourself in time for Easter. I promise they’ll draw oohs and ahhs and yums!

I am the queen of buying things on sale, hence this post on Valentine candy over a month after Valentine’s Day. I bought the Dots in a post-holiday sale, of course!

The box calls them “cherry, vanilla, and passion fruit flavored gumdrops”. They had translucent pink or red tops with white bases. All of them smelled just like red Jello: sweet, artificial, and red!

I like Dots when they’re soft, as these were. Their center was like that of a jelly bean but even softer. I could bite through them quite cleanly, with just a tiny amount of stickiness.

Red tasted slightly of dark red fruit with a medicinal cherry tinge. It was pretty classic artificial cherry flavor. I’m not big on red candies, but these were at least reliable.

Pink had a mild, sugary fruit flavor, with no sourness or passion fruit brightness. While cherry was as expected, passion fruit was a barely-flavored let-down.

The vanilla flavor was in the creamy white bases. It added a creamy undertone to the fruit flavors while also somewhat muting them.

They weren’t bad by any means, but these Valentine Dots were rather boring. At least they got the seasonal coloring correct! An O.

In general, I don’t believe in buying seasonal treats when they’re actually in season. They taste great throughout the year, and they’re cheaper when you buy them in post-holiday sales!

Just Born was the buzz of the candy/food blogosphere when they announced their chocolate-covered Peeps. I wasn’t going to review them since Easter is long gone, but I decided that they merited one because I felt that they weren’t worth the hubub.

They were pretty cute, as they managed to maintain the Peeps chick shape. I appreciate the pseudo-eyeball touch! They were also pretty fragile – the chocolate coating cracked pretty easily.

Taste-wise, though, they were just kind of meh. The milk chocolate was Hershey’s style. In other words, too sweet, rather grainy, and tinged with sourness.

The marshmallow inside was entirely yellow, unlike regular Peeps which are white with a colored outer layer. It tasted mostly of sugar.

The texture, however, was lovely. Check out the fluffy air bubbles! It was super soft and squishy, like homemade/gourmet marshmallows are. I guess the chocolate coating is a great air barrier and helps keep the marshmallow fresh.

I wouldn’t buy these again, on sale or at full price, but they’re totally innocuous. An O.

I bought this Chocolove Holiday bar on sale in January. Thus I think that it’s safe to assume that “holiday” is PC for Christmas. It’s described on the back as follows: “Sweet currants, tart cherries, zesty orange and spicy ginger compliment a mix of crunchy pecans, walnuts and hazelnuts enrobed in dark chocolate… This classic combination is inspired by a popular holiday chocolate in France known as mendiant.”

The chocolate itself was very mild. At 55%, it was nicely shiny and snappy and had a smooth texture and taste. It wasn’t very distinctive, but it served as a great foil for the bar’s mix-ins.

The pecans and walnut bits add a light nuttiness and textural contrast. The hazelnuts are wonderful – the best nuts of the bunch. Their distinctive nuttiness floats above the chocolate flavors.

The currants and cherries were also great – little chewy bits of sweet and tartness that brightened the bar. I think I only got a few errant pieces of ginger, and I only think I did because they were quite candied and had lost their ginger flavor.

The orange zest was my favorite add-in. It was bright and tart and citrusy and paired amazingly with the chocolate.

The fruits and nuts really made this bar. I wish the chocolate had a bit more depth and complexity instead of taking a backseat to all the additions, but it still made for a tasty combination that kept me popping more squares. An OM.

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 was just in Target this past weekend and saw that they already had an endcap of Easter candy on display. It’s still January! Ridiculous as that was, it at least served the purpose of reminding me that I’ve been sitting on some jelly bean tasting notes from last Easter-ish (ish because I bought them after Easter. I love post-holiday candy sales!)

There’s nothing on the packaging of Hawaiian Punch Jelly Beans to indicate that they’re holiday-specific. I think I caught them on sale post-Easter, though, so I’m not sure if these guys are available year-round. They’re made by Brach’s, and they boast of containing loads of vitamin C and real fruit juice.

I find the real fruit juice/pectin claim amusing, as they come in colors that are definitely not found in nature. “Hawaiian Punch” (dark red) has a deep artificial red candy flavor. I can’t remember what Hawaiian Punch the drink tastes like, but I imagine it’s similar to that.

“Fruity Juicy Red” (pinkish red, I think) just tastes generically of red hard candy, while “Green Berry Rush” (kiwi green in the back) tastes mutedly of green apple.

“Berry Blue Typhoon” (psychedelic blue) tastes of gnarly artificial blue raspberry flavors. “Lemon Berry Squeeze” (not pictured but probably yellow) had a sweet and tart lemon flavor with a cherry finish.

“Mango Passionfruit Squeeze”  (yellow-orange with orange speckles; the prettiest ones, I think) had a decently authentic mango finish to the flavor, with that slight seediness that you get as you eat closer to the pit. Finally, “Orange Ocean” (orange) just tasted sweetly of muted citrus.

While there was nothing wrong about these guys, per se, I found them generically sweet with flavors that were too weak to hold up in the strong Easter jelly bean market (check out a 2008 round-up from Candy Addict; Cybele from Candy Blog has also reviewed loads of them).

Hawaiian Punch Jelly Beans get an O, with the caveat that it looks like they may have been reformulated since I bought them – Candy Warehouse has a photo of them with far more speckles than mine had – so they may taste different now.

Via Serious Eats, an adorably photo-graphed recipe for homemade candy corn. If you start now, you’ll just make it in time for Halloween!

Also via Serious Eats, a method for making chocolate balloon bowls. Great for putting out candy – like homemade candy corn – at a Halloween party.

Yet another treat from my NCA Halloween goodie bag: Chocolate Mousse Marshmallow Cat Peeps! I write about Peeps a lot, but I’ve never actually formally reviewed them. I feel like they’re a candy that’s so ubiquitous that people already know all about them.

I decided to give these guys a review – if a short one. They not only look different from the standard chick/bunny peeps but also taste different as well.

Chocolate mousse is a good moniker for these. They look like it, taste of it, and even share a similar fluffiness.

They’re basically soft, fluffy, cocoa powder flavored marshmallows coated in fine granulated sugar. They have a sweet finish, but they’re Peeps; they’re supposed to be sweet!

Nothing extraordinary, but fun! Worth a try if you’re a Peeps or marshmallow fan, and definitely helpful for future Peeps dioramas. An O.