ZOMG, Candy!

Hershey’s Zero bar’s claim to fame is its white coating. Specifically, it’s “caramel, peanut and almond nougat covered with white fudge.”

Mine came free, courtesy of Munchies Sweets and Treats.  It was a bit too abundantly full of caramel, I guess, as my bar’s trademark white coating was streaked with it.

The bottom layer of nougat was faintly sweet chocolate with strong almond extract notes. Every once in a while, I hit an actual peanut, which introduced a bit more nuttiness, but the almond extract was the predominant player.

The nougat was covered with a stripe of sweet and serviceable caramel. The white fudge coating was milky and overly sweet.

Overall, I found this bar to be too sweet, and its flavors weren’t distinctive enough. I needed to eat it slowly and carefully to pick out the different flavors, as they got all mushed together and masked by the sweet. 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.

Cybele from Candy Blog called Charles Chocolates’s Orange Twigs a signature item, which is perhaps why they included them in the box of free samples that they sent me. Charles Chocolates calls them “delicate milk chocolate ganache with a hint of fresh orange… coated in a thin layer of 65% bittersweet chocolate and then finished with a sprinkling of confectioner’s sugar.”

The orange twigs come in a clear cylinder, and the twigs themselves are also cylindrical. It’s outer dark chocolate layer was quite thin delicate. The inner filling has a soft ganache-like melt but had a bit of a grit to it.

It tasted very sweet and very bright and very, very orange-y. The orange completely dominated whatever chocolate went into the twigs. The finish was also overly sweet, and the powdered sugar coating certainly didn’t help temper things.

I love citrus-flavored sweets, and I love chocolate, but the combination of chocolate and orange has never really done it for me. While the orange twigs were well flavored and well made, I found them too sweet for my liking. An O from me, with the caveat that my roommates did finish the tube.

Jelly Belly just debuted their 92nd flavor of jelly bean - a honey bean, infused with real wildflower honey. They’ve got a descriptive PR team working for them. Check out the press release:

“A comforting and soothing flavor, Honey Bean Jelly Belly bean is golden yellow and drenched in the taste of honey from the chewy center to the tender shell of the jelly bean… Savor it for the straight-from-the-hive flavor along with a cup of tea.”

The beans themselves are beautiful - shiny beads of amber that almost look translucent. I want to string them together and turn them into jewelry. They would make great drop earrings!

As usual, Jelly Belly has managed to be pretty spot on in their flavor capture. They taste just like little drops of honey - sweet and floral - but they have the gelatinous and slightly grainy texture of jelly beans.

As Cybele noted in her review, these aren’t a mindlessly-chomp-through-a-whole-bag candy. The inevitably saccharine nature of their flavor means that they get to be too much after a while. But they are nice in small doses, and they seem like they’d play well with other beans. An O.

I picked up this box of Snowy Bears Sour Gummi Candy as a post-winter-holidays sale item. I don’t really see why these had to go on sale, as they’re not really holiday-specific, but I’m not complaining about getting to save a few cents!

Like most sour gummi candies, these bears were covered in granulated sugar and sour stuff. Also, like most sour gummies, they weren’t that sour. The gummi chew was lightly stiff, with minimal spring-back and just a little chew.

The gummies came in three colors and flavors. Red was sour to start before it gave way to cherry with deep red notes. I was pleasantly surprised by how much depth there was to the flavor and how long that flavored lingered in the finish.

White was pineapple (after a slightly sour start), with a standard but nice pineapple core-flavored bite.

Finally, green, too, started out lightly sour. It then turned into a mellow floral fuji apple/apple juice flavor.

I was impressed at how tasty these non-brand name gummis were. They packed an impressive flavor punch, and I’m pretty sure the whole box cost less than $1 when I bought it. An O because they’re not terribly unique, but if they were super cheap-o again, I may pick up another box to munch on.

Apparently my distaste for Rochester winters has been, well, apparent. I recently got an email from Lisa Reinhardt, a University of Rochester grad, telling me that she sympathized about Rochester winters.

Fortunately for the sake of the blog, she was also emailing to tell me that she was the owner of Wei of Chocolate, a chocolate company that makes organic, vegan, and Fair Trade chocolates, and would I like to try some free samples, two of which would be chili chocolate? Yes, please!

I got a bag of 6 dark chocolates with very (for lack of a better word) yoga-y names and claims to bring you warmth, insight, joy, etc. According to the company website, Wei of Chocolate will help you “take your experience of chocolate to a whole new level by experiencing the finest quality organic chocolate, infused with intentional blends of deliciously complex flavors designed to balance body and mind.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

I’ve often seen bags of Haribo Sour S’ghetti in stores but usually opted for more familiar gummis. I finally took the Sour S’ghetti plunge when they showed up at Aldi for around $1 a bag, a deal that was too good to pass up.

The s’ghetti are ~2 inch gummi noodles covered in granulated sugar. They have a super stiff chew that really gets stuck in your teeth. The noodles come in three flavors: apple, strawberry, and blueberry.

Apple is green, yet tastes more mellow and floral than granny smiths do. It also lacks the sour tang of granny smiths.

The red strawberry is a slightly medicinal red fruit flavor. Because of that, I originally pegged it as cherry, but the bag has pictures of strawberries on it, so strawberry it must be.

Finally, the blue blueberry just tastes of sweetness and fruitiness. There’s a strong finish I can’t quite place - either fruit punch or blue Gatorade?

There’s nothing extraordinary about these gummis. I didn’t mind the stiff texture, though some may be annoyed. The messiness of the granuated sugar coating (it got everywhere) was a bit annoying, but I was more miffed that it was sweet rather than sour. These weren’t nearly sour enough for my taste. In fact, I didn’t find them sour at all!

I give them an O. I probably wouldn’t buy them again, even if they were on sale.

Remember when I reviewed Hedonist truffles that were maybe no longer for sale? That’s because they replaced them with new truffles, their Holiday Collection, comprised of Champagne Pomegranate, Egg Nog, Fig, Ginger Molasses, and Orange Clove. I was lucky enough to get a free sample box to try (and managed to pick up a hidden away cardamom truffle while I was there!).

Champagne Pomegranate is a molded dark chocolate shell with a milk ganache. It smells lightly fruity. The truffle contains definite fruity notes of red fruits, but I wouldn’t place it as pomegranate, exactly. I get some light, boozy undertones from the champagne (though that could be my imagination). Finally, the light sprinkle of granulated sugar on top was a nice textural touch.

Egg Nog is a dark chocolate shell around a creamy white chocolate ganache. The flavor profile is nearly all nutmeg, with a light eggy-ness below. It tasted super fresh, but it was too much nutmeg for me.

Fig smells absolutely lovely, of fresh cinnamon. The ganache is chock full of figgy-ness, as in actual bits of figs. The figs impart a light chew and grit that blend so well with the duskiness of the dark chocolate and the strong cinnamon notes. It works really nicely!

Ginger Molasses was a dark chocolate shell with a super creamy molasses ganache, topped with bits of candied ginger. I love that topping and the ganache. The latter tastes like creamy brown sugar with dark notes of molasses and goes well with the dark chocolate couverture.

Orange Clove is yet another dark chocolate shell, this time topped with a bit of candied orange peel. It has strong clove notes with a citrus undertone; the clove comes through first, then a light citrus/orange oil essence comes through. It’s too much clove for me, but clove is in the name, so it’s not unexpected.

The ginger molasses and the fig are my favorites and merit OMGs. Champagne pomegranate gets an OM, and orange clove and egg nog, while well made (like everything Hedonist does), gets an O. All in all, a lovely, seasonally-themed set.