ZOMG, Candy!

I bought this bag of Kraft Jet-Puffed Mallow Bites at the dollar store because they had a big “New” banner. I don’t think there are other mass-market “milk chocolate covered miniature marshmallows” out there.

Opening the stand-up, resealable bag unleashed a strong and sweet milk chocolate scent that reminded me of a milk chocolate Hershey’s bar. The chocolate that covered the miniature marshmallows was similarly sweet and Hershey’s milk chocolate-like.

The chocolate cracked around the marshmallows when I squished them or bit into them. Its melt was grainy and carried a slight sour tinge.

The marshmallows were soft and pillowy with a neutral sweetness. I love jet-puffed marshmallows when they’re warm and toasted to bring out their caramel notes, but just plain puffy sugar doesn’t do anything for me, so I didn’t find these to be terribly exciting.

I’m not sure what these Mallow Bites are supposed to be for. They’re too sweet for just plain snacking, and I think they’d melt into a gooey mess as baking mix-ins. Maybe they’d be good in snack mixes?

I think my favorite part about the Mallow Bites was the big CHOKING WARNING on the back instructing us to Eat one at a time. Don’t be gluttonous!

An O because they’re reasonably tasty, but they’re too sweet, and I don’t really get what they’re going for.

I’ve written before how, when I was a kid, Ferrero Rochers were the pinnacle of fine chocolate. These Ferrero Raffaellos are in the same vein as the Rochers, but without those golden wrappers and tiny stickers, it just isn’t the same!

Like Rochers, Raffaellos are spherical wafers filled with ganache and coated with chocolate. The wafer shell was lightly crispy and served as a great foil for the creamy white chocolate center.

The center ganache was sweet and rich with vanilla notes – very frosting-like. There was a blanched whole almond hidden in the center that added a great crunch and nuttiness.

The whole treat was covered with a thin layer of white chocolate and rolled in dried shredded coconut that made a mess. I found the coconut to be disappointing – it was too dry and didn’t add any flavor.

I don’t recommend deconstructing the Raffaellos during the eating process, as the inferior dried coconut really needed the creaminess of the ganache center to balance out its dried out flavorless-ness.

Popping one whole, however, yielded a reasonably tasty mix of flavors and textures, so an O.

These Brookside Dark Chocolate candies were free samples that I picked up at Sweets and Snacks. I got mini bags of their Dark Chocolate Acai with Blueberry, Dark Chocolate Pomegranate, and Dark Chocolate Goji with Raspberry, which I’ve previously reviewed.

All of these were little discs of flat jelly candies coated in dark chocolate. Some of those jelly discs were placed back to back to make full spheres, while others were left as little half spheres.

Dark Chocolate Acai with Blueberry may be the same product as Trader Joe’s Powerberries, which I’ve also previously reviewed. If they are the same, I was wrong about the Powerberries being abnormally-shaped Brookside candies, as the Brookside candies were similarly variable in size.

The dark chocolate coating was slightly grainy with a mild sweetness. Their centers had a mellow blueberry flavor that was jammy, like blueberry preserves.

While the fruitiness was nicely light and sweet, it wasn’t bright enough to cut through the sweetness of the chocolate. This was my least favorite of the three Brookside products, so an O.

Dark Chocolate Pomegranate’s center tasted more of cranberry juice than pomegranate. Like the Goji with Raspberry, its bright fruity sweetness really nicely cut through the chocolate, making it a harmonious flavor pairing.

I think the Goji with Raspberry are my favorite Brookside flavor, but the Pomegranate ones come in a close second. They’re just a tad more tannic. An OM.

Last week, I reviewed Sour Jacks’ original candies. Today, I’ve got a review of their watermelon gummis.

The Watermelon Jacks had a completely different texture from the Sour Jacks. While the latter were stiff, the Watermelon Jacks had a pleasantly sproingy chew that bounced against my teeth.

They tasted of classic candy watermelon flavor: sweet with a bright jewel-toned flavor, and also wholly unlike anything approaching actual watermelon’s flavor. They were also much less sour compared to the Jacks.

I enjoyed the texture and found these to be a solid effort for a watermelon gummi, but watermelon gummi’s have never been high on my preference list, so these get an O.

I’d never heard of Sour Jacks before I saw them at Sweets and Snacks earlier this year. It seems like they fight Sour Patch Kids for sour anthropomorphic candy gummi territory. I picked up free sample bags of their original Sour Jacks and their watermelon gummis at the expo.

Sour Jacks came in orange, lemon, green, and red, like Sour Patch Kids do, and they were similarly covered in sour sugar. The Jacks’s sour sugar packed quite a puckery sting.

The Jacks differed, however, in their texture, which was not as chewy as Kids. Instead, they started off stiff, then softened and became a bit squishier and a little molar-sticking.

Orange was lightly sweet and citrusy with a brightly zesty finish. Yellow was lemon. Sometimes citrus candies end up tasting similar to each other, but this lemon was distinctively lemony with a strong edge of lemon zest.

Green, on the other hand, lacked distinctiveness. It may have been lime, but it lacked any zestiness and only tasted vaguely citrusy.

Though green was blah, red was worse – it tasted medicinal and bitter. Hooray for artificial colors! I think it was supposed to be cherry?

I really enjoyed the yellow and orange half of the mix, but I found green lacking and red repulsive, so let’s say it evens out to an O.

Buddy Fruits was one of my saviors at Sweets and Snacks. After entire days of gorging on candy samples, their fruit pouches of blended fruit (basically apple+other fruits sauce in portable format) were a health preserver in a sea of sugar and salt.

In addition to free samples of their blended fruit pouches, which I ate while I at the Expo, I also got free samples of their Fruit Bites – little pouches of fruit gummis that were all natural, preservative free, and made only from fruit.

All of my Fruit Bites came in resealable, single-flavor 1 oz pouches. The Bites were soft with an instant give and no bounciness, similar to fruit pate but without the grain.

They reminded me of fruit leather, only in moist, gummified form. The colors were similar to those of fruit leather as well, deep purple-blacks and orange-browns that were clearly natural rather than due to artificial colors.

It meant that they didn’t make for super glam photos. I was nearly done with the photoshoot when I realized that the Bites were molded to look like their mascot’s face.

Pomegranate & Acai’s pouch contained 7 slices of apples and a pomegranate (I’m doubtful that’s a whole pomegranate, but it would be silly to say that it contained 48 arils or something). It tasted intensely of bright, sweet apple, and finished with a tannic edge of pomegranate juice, though if you told me it was cranberry, I would’ve believed you.

Raspberry’s pouch had 16 raspberries and 7 apple slices. The apple flavor here was less noticeable here – the seedy flavor of fresh raspberries dominated, which I enjoyed.

Banana had 10 slices of banana and 7 apples. It smelled strongly of overripe banana and tasted liked it smelled before yielding to the sweet intensity of the apples.

This was my least favorite. Though the banana flavor was genuine, it was almost too much so. I don’t like overripe bananas, and the Banana Bites just made me think of that half-mushed banana you dig out of the bottom of your backpack because you forgot you shoved it in there last week.

Apple’s pouch claimed 10 slices of apple. It packed a concentrated punch of apple cider sweetness into each little Bite.

Finally, orange (8 orange slices and 7 apple slices) was my favorite. It started off tasting just like a glass of orange juice before yielding to the bitter edge of zest and orange oil. I’m not sure how much little kids would like it, but I appreciated its complex capture of a real orange’s flavor nuances.

I was super impressed at how intense each Bite was. I felt satisfied eating just a few at a time because they packed so much flavor. Apple and orange were my favorites and get OMs and  Raspberry and Pomegranate & Acai get Os.

Banana gets an O as well – I didn’t like it, but I respect what it was going for, and I think people who really like bananas probably would like the Banana Bite as well.

Finally! I’ve made it to the last 2 (of 8) Perugina bars that were generously given to me as free samples at Sweets and Snacks. Last Friday, I covered the “plain” chocolate bars, Monday was chocolate with nuts, and today are the last two, Cappuccino and White Chocolate.

Cappuccino was “crunchy grains of coffee enveloped in milk chocolate.” The subtitle called it “milk chocolate with cappuccino crispy,” so I thought maybe it would be full of cappuccino rice crisps.

Visually, it was obvious to tell that the bar was full of stuff, as its bottom was all bumpy. Somehow, though, that didn’t translate to its texture.

I didn’t feel any crunch; just a tiny amount of subtle starchy grit remained on my tongue after the thick and creamy chocolate melted away, and I was really working to try to find it. I guess the crispies just got dissolved in the chocolate?

The cappuccino bar smelled and tasted strongly of coffee. I had high expectations for a coffee-flavored chocolate bar from Italy, but alas, I found it to be too sweet. More Mocha Frappuccino than fine Italian espresso.

The White Chocolate bar boasted that it was “enhanced by the delicacy of natural vanilla flavor.” The ingredients list was just sugar, milk, cocoa butter, whey, and less than 1% soy lecithin and natural vanilla flavor.

That’s impressively sparse – note the lack of palm oil or any other non cocoa-butter fat.

It had a light snap with a thickly creamy melt. It started off sweet, sweet enough to bring a tiny tinge to my throat, then took on a rotund fruitiness before finishing with a vanilla scent.

Both of these bars were enjoyable enough in small doses (half a square or less) but quickly become too sweet for me. I wouldn’t turn to them for regular snacking, but the remainder of these bars are going to make my next batch of cookies taste awesome. An O.

Today I’m reviewing three more of the Perugina bars that I got as free samples at Sweets and Snacks. I’d covered the three plain bars last week; today’s theme is chocolate with nuts.

Milk Chocolate with Almonds was described as “a crunchy almond caramel blend with the delicate flavor of milk chocolate.” Its break was soft, and like the plain milk chocolate bar, tasted of caramel and malt.

The bits of almond within the bar were super tiny. They added some crunch and a hint of nuttiness, but the overall effect of the additional almonds was subtle.

Milk Chocolate with Hazelnuts, with the addition of “crunchy caramelized hazelnut pieces”, was similar in flavor and texture to the almond bar, only its nuts added a dryer crunch. I didn’t get the great roasted nuttiness that I expected from the hazelnuts.

Dark Chocolate with Almonds had a strong, sharp snap. The chocolate itself was already crunchy, and the nuts added more crunch and grit.

The dark chocolate base was deliciously complex: strong cocoa flavors with a light fruitiness and notes of coffee. The almonds added a subtle but noticeable roasty nuttiness.

I enjoyed the Dark Chocolate with Almonds enough to give it an OM. As for the milk + nuts bars, they weren’t nutty enough for me, so just an O.

My first, “Whoa, I’m at a candy convention” moment at Sweets and Snacks came when the guy at the Perugina booth sent me off with one of each of their chocolate bars. Life is good when an Italian gentleman in a fine suit gives you loads of free chocolate. Can that happen more often? Please?

I walked off with 8 bars in all, plus some Baci and their new Baci White. Today, I’m just covering the three “plain” chocolate bars.

All of the bars were 3.5 oz and came packaged in paperboard envelopes that opened width-wise to reveal (and easily release) the foil wrapped bars. The bars themselves were scored into a 2X5 grid of rectangles, each stamped with a cacao pod.

Milk chocolate had a solid snap, though its chew was soft-ish. It melted with a velvety smooth texture, but it didn’t melt in a way that coated my tongue. The flavor was all caramel and malt, like a Whopper with better chocolate and in chocolate bar form.

LUISA Dark was from the “original and exclusive recipe by Luisa Spagnoli, founder of Perugina” and was 51% cacao. It had a sharper snap than that of the milk chocolate. It didn’t melt well until I chomped it up into little bits – then it melted smoothly.

The flavors were quite intense, sweet with the fruity taste of berries. It thickened at the end of the melt and had a bittersweet finish.

Finally, bittersweet chocolate was 70% cacao. Its snap, as expected, was even sharper than those of the milk or LUISA. As I chomped through it, it cracked and dryly shattered between my teeth.

The flavor here was pure cocoa at its best. Deeply earthy, it tasted like good cocoa powder smells.

Though it wasn’t sweet for much of its flavor profile, it also avoided being bitter, making its name sort of a misnomer. Finally, it finished with just a subtle hint of sweetness.

The Perugina milk chocolate wasn’t my favorite milk chocolate – I like my milk chocolates so thick that it glues my tongue to the roof of my mouth – but I loved the flavor intensity of the LUISA and the bittersweet. A O for the milk and an OM for the other two.

I got this bag of Wonka Kazoozles as a free sample from the Nestle booth at Sweets and Snacks. It was strawberry melon-flavored “delickoricious chewy candy”. Delickoricious is a ridickoricious word.

I’m not sure how close my sample was to the final packaging, as it said “sales sample – not labeled for retail sale”, and though it claimed that it contained “2 strawberry ropes with watermelon filling”, my bag had 4. The bag itself was crackly, and its inner surface was reflectively shiny, like mylar.

The Kazoozles looked like red and green versions of my beloved filled licorice pencils and smelled like a bag of red fruit snacks. Each was about 6 inch long and softly floppy, so that its top half slowly bent over when I held it upright. Ridickoricious.

The candied red outside was stiffly chewy, similar to a Twizzlers but softer and less stick-in-your-teeth-y. It tasted of sweet fake berry with just a smidge of plasticky undertone.

The green center was a finely grainy fondant with the texture of dried up frosting. I didn’t get any watermelon flavors, candied or otherwise; it just tasted generically sweet to me.

As the Kazoozle’s chew continued, that sweetness intensified and brightened near the end. It wasn’t a super classy or fancy candy, but I enjoyed it enough.

It’s not quite the perfect replacement for licorice pencils – Kazoozle’s have a higher rope to fondant ratio than the fatly fondant-y pencils that I like – but it’s pretty good. An O. I’d give it an O+ if I could; it’s not quite at OM level.

Cybele from Candy Blog reviewed a different iteration of Kazoozles a few years ago. Hers look fatter and actually were 2 to a package.