ZOMG, Candy!

A little over a week ago, I discovered the new eater of my minimal grad student disposable income: A Southern Season. It’s a megalopolis of gourmet goods: fine meats and cheeses and chocolates and pastas and pastries and spices and candy…

I wanted to eat all the things! But all the things were too expensive, so I splurged on a few high end pieces from Recchiuti and Vosges. Today, I’m starting with the high-ending-est of them all: Recchiuti’s Asphalt Jungle Mix, which was a super splurgey $19.99 for a 6 oz box.

Why the crazy profligate spending? I remembered Cybele writing positively about it and David Lebovitz raving about it. Though now that I revisit David Lebovitz’s post, I see that he’s lucky enough to be buddies with Mr. Recchiuti and didn’t have to pay for his mix…

The minimalist box calls them “a riot of burnt caramel hazelnuts & almonds, cherries two ways, and peanut butter pearls.” Let’s break them down, shall we?

Burnt caramel hazelnuts and almonds were chocolate covered and cocoa dusted. Those hazelnuts were awesomely roasty and crunchy and hazelnutty – they tasted incredibly fresh – with a tinge of burnt sugar sweetness to the finish and a overall cocoa sweetness.

Similarly, the almonds were intensely nutty and sharply crunchy. If there was burnt caramel to these, I didn’t notice it, but I still loved the intensity of toasty nuts.

Cherries one way was a cocoa dusted, chocolate-covered candied cherry. It was juicy and slightly moist and chewy, bright and flavorful with a slightly boozy finish. This was my favorite of the bunch, as it positively burst with flavor.

Cherries the other way was a dried cherry covered in dark chocolate. That cherry center brought an amazing flash of fruity sweetness that was slightly tart. It was good, but the other way was better for me.

Finally, peanut butter pearls were really fun. They were little balls of milk chocolate peanut butter with a dark chocolate center that then contained a little ball of crisped rice. A Matroyshka treat!

It started out with a creamy milk chocolate and the texture of the rice crisp, then transitioned to an extreme peanut butter nuttiness that finished with a flash of salt. Peanut butter lovers would love this.

This mix was tasty and delicious. But at $53/lb, I can’t see myself ever buying these again; they’re just too expensive. Though I did love those chocolate candied cherries… An OMG for the candied cherries and an OM for the rest.

Endangered Species is a brand that I’ve had a few times but only properly reviewed once. A sale at Whole Foods prompted me to pick up a couple of bars for review.

Their gimmick is that they give 10% of their profits for animal conservation. As an added plus, their cacao is “100% ethically traded”, which I think is in the spirit of Fair Trade without the full certification.

Each flavor is branded with an endangered animal, and the inside of the wrapper describes the animal and their plight. The Dark Chocolate with Hazelnut Toffee was the black rhino.

The beautifully tempered bar was scored into 12 squares, each imprinted with their tree logo. The 72% dark chocolate had a sharp snap and broke pretty cleanly along the breaks.

That chocolate was dry with a smooth, non-creamy melt with no astringency. Its flavor was that of dusky cocoa powder with a light sweetness.

The toffee bits were sprinkled throughout the bar. They were pretty tiny and added a light crunch and little flashes of sweetness.

I didn’t get any buttery toffee notes, but there was a light but noticeable nuttiness from the hazelnuts. I wish the toffee made more of a noticeable impact.

An OM, mostly carried by the great flavor of the chocolate, with a lament about the missed toffee opportunity.

These Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Almond Toffees are packaged and priced like their Tahitian Vanilla Caramels. I somehow missed them when I bought the caramels, but I nabbed them for a taste test on a recent visit.

The bag called them “crunchy toffee and roasted California almonds, covered with premium dark chocolate.” They were shiny panned chocolate spheres with a toffee/brittle center.

The dark chocolate shell was on the thick side and had a great semisweet flavor. Its melt was thick and smooth, and the chocolate itself was lightly sweet with a dusky finish.

The toffee center had a light crunch with a clean break. It was studded with small bits of nutty almonds.

Alone, that toffee center had a strong saltiness that overwhelmed its buttery nuttiness. With the chocolate, however, that saltiness became a great foil for the sweetness of the chocolate.

The chocolate and toffee were both of high quality and went well together, making these a greatly poppable mix of textures and flavors. An OM.

Here’s my second (and final. ARG!) review of the Trader Joe’s Belgian chocolate bars, the Dark Chocolate {filled with} Chocolate Buttercream. As with Monday’s review of the milk chocolate and caramel bar, we shall now dispense with the silly {}s.

This bar was also comprised of six attached, filled segments. The dark chocolate was nicely tempered, making for a beautifully shiny bar.

That dark chocolate had a smooth, thick melt and lovely flavors. The cocoa depth was just wonderful and complex with a light sweetness and a hit of berry fruitiness.

For me, that dark chocolate was the highlight of the treat. If I knew who made it, I’d buy it for snacking on its own.

The center buttercream had an unexpectedly unusual texture. It was creamy with a light sugar graininess, but it was also thick and sticky with a cool melt.

Goop is a good descriptor, though I bet that doesn’t move as many bars off the shelf. It also occupied a weird state of matter, as it held its shape on its own but was also quite malleable.

That goop tasted like nicely dark chocolate frosting. It too, had an admirable depth of flavor, though it paled in comparison to the wonderful pure dark chocolate that it came in.

I liked this bar more than its caramel counterpart, though not enough to give it a boost in the ratings. If I had to choose just one to buy, I’d pick this one. An OM.

Trader Joe’s recently introduced a new line of Belgian chocolate bars {filled with} stuff. They made a big splash on my radar because one of them was {filled with} speculoos cookie spread, which is SO MUCH NOMS!, and my Trader Joe’s didn’t carry them and probably never will.

Instead, it carried the other two, caramel and chocolate buttercream. I’ll review the caramel today and save the chocolate buttercream for Wednesday.

I think the full name of this bar is Les Chocolats de Belgique Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate {filled with} Caramel. Why yes, those {} are rather silly. I shall now ignore them.

The chocolate bar was six conjoined segments of caramel-filled milk chocolate. There were a few tiny bubbles in the chocolate, but otherwise the surface looked smooth and matte.

The milk chocolate was solid enough to bite into with a slight snap, and it had a thick and tongue-coating melt. The chocolate alone was quite caramelly with  a dairy creaminess.

The center caramel was positively limpid. It was far too liquid to chew and just melted away on the tongue, leaving behind notes of scorched butter and sweet brown sugar.

One segment of this was delicious, so I broke off a second segment. To corroborate my tasting notes, of course.

The second segment took the sweetness level over the top. What was nice took on a sour, throat-burning tinge.

This is a bar to be savored one segment at a time. An OM if you can stop at just one chunk.

After I reviewed Brookside‘s Dark Chocolate Goji with Raspberry, Joanne noted that Trader Joe’s had a candy called Powerberries that was similar. I saw a bag on my latest Trader Joe’s trip and picked it up to see how they compared.

The Powerberries looked similar enough to the Brookside’s from the outside – same stand-up pouch packaging, similar product images, and the same boast of being a “natural source of flavanol antioxidants”.

It was enough to make me wonder if they were made by the same manufacturer (Trader Joe’s does a lot of repackaging).

Once I opened the package, however, I noticed a few differences. Though both products were shiny panned chocolate shells around jelly discs, the Powerberries were irregularly sized.

While the Brookside Goji pieces nearly all contained two back to back discs as a center sphere, the Powerberries contained between one and three discs (though most also contained two).

In general, the chocolate layer on the Powerberries was thicker than that on the Brookside, though there was some interpiece variability in both bags. That chocolate had a nice deep cocoa duskiness to it with a little thickness and graininess to the melt.

The discs felt grainy against my tongue. They had an instant jelly give with no chewiness and tasted of strawberry preserves with a deeper blueberry finish.

I enjoyed these, but I preferred the Brookside Goji version. Those were brighter and tarter and really let the juice centers sing.

The fruit juice centers of the Powerberries were nice, but they didn’t pop as much, mostly because they had thicker layers of chocolate to fight against.

The Trader Joe’s Powerberries were $3.49 for 8 oz, while the Brookside Goji chocolates were $3.99 for 7 oz at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. At that slight price differential, I’d go with the Brookside Goji. Still, I enjoyed the Trader Joe’s, so they get an OM on their own merits.

Cybele and Sera have also reviewed these. Cybele and one of her commenters say that they’re the same as Brookside Acai with Blueberry. My guess is that Brookside sells the uniformly sized ones under their own brand, while Trader Joe’s gets the more erratically sized ones to sell.

I picked up a bag of assorted Russell Stover candy for half off in a post-Christmas sale. I guess the little bow in the top left corner was what made it holiday-y.

I think the packaging was so sparsely decorated that it needn’t have been designated a holiday-specific candy. But who am I to complain about sale candy?

There were three kinds of individually wrapped chocolates in the bag, with two each of coconut, mint, and caramel. Kind of a waste of packaging space for just six chocolates, if you ask me. Today, I’m covering the coconut, and we’ll hit the rest later this week.

The coconut was a rounded rectangle of dark chocolate filled with fluffy white coconut. The obvious comparison is with Mounds, a similar dark chocolate-covered coconut treat. How would Russell Stover’s version compare?

Pretty favorably! The dark chocolate shell was quite substantial, thick enough to provide a bit of crunch and snap. It didn’t have much of a melt, but it had surprising depth of flavor.

I was reminded of a Ghirardelli flavor profile. Lots of nice cocoa duskiness with a slightly sweet finish.

The flaky coconut paste was mild in flavor. It was lightly sweet and nutty while avoiding any of that artificial tropicalness that I associate with coconut and sunscreen.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I definitely prefer these to Mounds. Though Mounds are a bit nuttier, the Russell Stover wins out thanks to its superior quantity and quality of chocolate. An OM.

I bought this bag of Brookside Dark Chocolate Goji with Raspberry at a Bed Bath & Beyond because I needed a few more dollars to use my coupon. It turned out to be a great unplanned addition to my shopping list.

The bag described them as “smooth dark chocolate surrounding a sweetened real fruit juice piece, made from a blend of goji berry juice, raspberry juice and other select fruit juices.” They were shiny chocolate balls with these little flat jelly candy centers.

The jelly centers were comprised of two little discs. The discs were pressed flat side to flat side, then surrounded by chocolate.

The discs had a slight graininess to them. Some of them yielded instantly when bitten, while others were a little chewier. They were like a cross between a gummi worm and a fruit gem.

The fruity flavor of the discs was quite bright and intense. I’d place it as a mix of strawberry jam and cranberry juice. The flavor intensified as the chew went on.

The chocolate coating was nice but nothing to write home amount. It was slightly grainy with deep cocoa flavors. The melt could have been smoother, but it was an otherwise fine foil for the fruity centers.

These were winners solely based on the intense and tasty fruity flavor of the centers. I’d really like to try more of their line. An OM.

A Belgian friend of mine in Rochester was kind enough to remember me on his latest trip back to his homeland. He brought me back a box of Belgian Pates de Fruits from Duc d’O (also available online!)

Pates de fruits, also known as fruit jellies and fruit pate, are much better than gummi candies. They’re usually made from no more than pureed fruit, sugar, and gelatin. The real fruit part is what makes them special.

The entirety of this box was made from pureed apricots plus “flavours” and “colouring”. Interestingly enough, none of these were apricot flavored. Instead, they were, from left to right in the below photo, raspberry, pear, orange, strawberry, and grape.

All of the fruit pieces were made of two half jellies stuck together and rolled in granulated sugar. The pates had a soft, immediate give, while the sugar sand added a hearty grit and crunch.

Pear was golden and pear shaped. It had a great seediness and tasted quite genuinely of Bartlett pear flavor with a slightly sweet and sour finish.

Strawberry was a little red triangle. It was mild and sweet with a lightly floral flavor and reminded me of strawberry preserves.

Raspberry was hard to distinguish from the strawberry. It was slightly darker and had a more mottled surface. It lacked any seedy astringency, though it had deeper red fruit notes than the strawberry did.

Grape looked like a golden version of raspberry. It tasted more like raspberry than the raspberry did, as it had a seedy finish. It tasted of raisins with a vibrant, fruity, slightly sour finish.

Finally, orange was a golden, puckered ball. It started with an initial hit of zesty citrus almost sourness but then mellowed out into a milder, muted orange marmalade flavor.

I wish pates de fruits were more prevalent in the U.S. They’re great, concentrated bites of real fruit flavor, a refreshing departure from the usual fare of artificially flavored and sweetened gummi bears and worms. An OM.

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.