ZOMG, Candy!

I’m so terrible about impulse buys at Trader Joe’s. Everything looks awesome! Like these Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Salted Caramel Truffles.

What a mouthful of a title! Which came with a mouthful of a blurb on the box: “our three most popular flavors combined to create a sensational, sweet, salty bite. Rich, melt-in-your-mouth dark chocolate truffles with a creamy peanut butter center, layered with buttery caramel and a subtle salty finish.”

Each truffle came individually wrapped in shiny copper mylar. They were gorgeously shiny domes, the shape of giant gumdrops.

The chocolate at the bottom of the dome was much thicker than the chocolate of the upper shell. That chocolate had a nice snap and a smooth melt with an incredibly deep cocoa flavor.

The caramel was liquid and runny and left a light grain after most of it had melted away. It tasted of sweet butterscotch, with an especially buttery finish.

The peanut butter was smoothly creamy with a dry nuttiness. The nuttiness was noticeable even against the chocolate and caramel, but I wish it had been nuttier.

The truffle was a delicious mix of sweet and salty and nutty. I think the peanut butter flavor could’ve been turned up more, but it was still a darn good mass-produced truffle. An OM.

Last year, Hedonist Artisan Chocolates sent me free samples of their bittersweet drinking chocolate, but it never really got cold enough in North Carolina for me to bust it out. Recently, I got a free sample of their cinnamon chipotle drinking chocolate, which I made to get me through Thanksgiving prep.

Hedonist described their Cinnamon Chipotle drinking chocolate as “a thick, spicy dark chocolate beverage to warm your soul.” The directions were pretty simple: stir 3 tablespoons of the mix into 3/4 cup of very hot water or milk and enjoy.

The mix was made of bits of chocolate, cocoa powder, and cinnamon and chipotle spices. It smelled strongly of cinnamon with undertones of cocoa and a spicy smokiness.

The thickness and richness of the resulting drinking chocolate is really up to you – just add more mix or less water to change the concentration. I wasn’t super careful when I made my cup. I used a mix of hot water and milk and just kept adding mix until the thickness was to my liking.

The drinking chocolate started off sweet and chocolately before the chipotle come through with a lightly smoky undertone and strongly spicy kick. Cinnamon, which was so strong in the scent, was less dominant in the flavor, where it provided just a light hint. Rich cocoa undertones played below the drink’s flavor profile.

The chipotle definitely warmed up my tongue, and the tingling that it provided lingered for quite a while. This was not a drink for those who are scared of spiciness (for those people, I’d recommend the bittersweet version).

It was, however, a great drink if you love spicy chocolate. Turning the chocolate into a slowly sippable treat was a nice way to maximize the amount of chocolate enjoyment time that you get for your calories.

A $12 tin makes 5 standard servings, making it about a dozen times pricier than Swiss Miss cocoa mix. BUT it’s infinitely better and feels like a really special gourmet indulgence. An OM.

If you’d like to try this or any of Hedonist’s delicious chocolates for yourself, or if you need to pick up some holiday gifts (the drinking chocolate tins would make great hostess gifts!), you can get 20% off your online order from now through December 1st with the coupon code ZOMG!

Do yourself a favor and nab some of their salted caramels while you’re there.

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.

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.

Yogurt was a big trend at this year’s Sweets and Snacks Expo. There were all kinds of yogurt-covered things, from pretzels to granola bars to candy.

Today’s review is an example of the latter. Welch’s covered their fruit snacks in yogurt to create Fruit ‘N Yogurt Snacks (hereafter FNYS because repeatedly typing ‘N makes me feel stupid). They were handing out oodles of free samples of their strawberry flavor at the Expo.

Each FNYS was a hexagonal prism of a fruit gummi coated in a thin, white layer of yogurt. The yogurt cracked when I squished the snacks. When I held it in my mouth, it melted easily and creamily.

The gummi inside was soft and sticky. I could bite through it cleanly, but when chewed, it got a little sticky in my molars.

The gummi tasted like generic red-fruit berry candy but benefited from a bright tartness, helped along by a hint of tartness from the plain yogurt coating.

The sweet and tart gummi was nicely balanced by the creamy yogurt, making for a tasty treat that carried a nice (but pretty useless) health halo. An OM.

Now that Halloween is over, winter holiday chocolate should be making its way onto store shelves. I believe Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate with Peppermint is sold year-round in Europe (any European readers want to weigh in?), but here in the U.S. it’s a limited edition for winter. Mine was a free sample from Sweets and Snacks.

The wrapper promised “a refreshing peppermint filling.” It had a strong, pepperminty scent with just an edge of bitterness. Each square was a white peppermint fondant covered in dark chocolate.

The thin dark chocolate coating was crunchy to bite through and smooth in its melt. It had a deep cocoa flavor and finished with a light sweetness.

The peppermint fondant was soft and thickly squishy. It tasted like it smelled: pepperminty with a hint of herbal bitterness.

I found it pleasantly refreshing but not effervescent or super mouth-cooling. It was much more mild than a York Peppermint Pattie and had a higher chocolate to peppermint fondant ratio. I welcomed the change: an OM.

This bar of Sirius Karamellu Nizza (say that last part carefully) came all the way from Iceland! My friends Jane and Nate went there on their honeymoon, and they were thoughtful enough to send me candy that they bought on their trip.

The Sirius Karamellu Nizza was translated on the underside of the wrapper to milk chocolate with toffee. The bar was scored into six segments, and each was imprinted with the Sirius logo.

The milk chocolate was full of little bits of crunchy toffee bits. The chocolate portion had a thick and creamy melt and tasted lightly sweet, with notes of caramel.

The toffee bits shattered cleanly between my teeth. They had a great buttery flavor that was a nice foil to the lightly sweet milk chocolate, and their crunchiness contrasted with the melting chocolate as well.

I wish this bar was available in the U.S. It was so well-balanced and delicious – an OM. There was also a licorice version that I probably won’t review since I don’t like black licorice.

I’m currently at the Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans, so I’m turning things over to some globe-trotting friends this week. Cameron and Meredith are former roommates of mine (we did lots of chocolate truffle tastings together), and they’re writing about some treats they bought on a recent trip through Japan. ~Rosa

For our second and third post (to run on Friday), we have a selection of fruit gummies from Meiji! Rosa’s reviewed a red grape variety of these before, which as we discovered is actually a slightly different product from what we’ve got here.

As you can see, there are two package sizes: Both contain ~50g of candy, but the larger packages (labelled as 2700mg – this number appears to refer to the amount of collagen in the candy) are fairly traditional fruit gummies while the smaller green package (1200mg collagen) is the dome-shaped, gooey-center gummy that matches what you’ve seen before.

We picked these up in the Ameyoko shopping area, along with about 80% of the candy we brought back. Ameyoko is a several-block area nestled along the rail line to Ueno Station in Tokyo. The area was famous for its candy shops a long time ago, although it’s probably more famous as the site of a major black market in the postwar era.

Nowadays it’s mostly a mishmash of all sorts of stores, with lots of clothing and fashion accessories. But there are still several candy vendors, and the grocery store we went to is almost hilariously candy-centric – something like 75% of the floor area is aisle after aisle of candy, both local stuff and the major national brands like Meiji.

On to the taste. Meredith and I had substantially divergent opinions on some of these, so I’ve listed our notes separately. She’s obviously the more experienced gummy consumer!

Without further ado:

Red Grape!

Cameron: These are pretty basic mass-produced gummies: chew is firm, not at all sticky, with a robust and not overly sweet grape flavor. I kind of think red grape is the easiest gummy to get right, since it has a strong, fairly standard flavor that you can get from basically any manufacturer. O

Meredith: I disagree! In my gummy experience there are two general categories of grape candy: the basic mass-produced type that Cam describes, which has the generic grapeish flavor of Dimetapp and the sugar content of grape soda, but basically nothing else to recommend it; and a second type that does some degree of justice to the complex seedy flavor of real grapes (the gold standard here in my comparatively limited experience being grape Hi-Chew, which I love).

I’d put these gummies more in the second category: They have an aroma and flavor that is seedy and a little wine-y, and a chewiness that is pretty gummy-typical but nonetheless satisfying. OM. I probably would have eaten the whole package if Cam didn’t have me on a tight candy-sampling schedule.

Lemon!

Cameron: Much less generic flavor. There is a lime on the packaging in the background as well, I think these might actually be a citrus blend rather than pure lemon. A bit softer than the other flavors, and a bit stickier.

They have a slightly chemical hint to them unfortunately, but overall they taste very much like the “dry” lemon flavor that is super popular in Japanese beverages right now (which is a bit tarter and much less sweet than American lemon flavored beverages). OM

Meredith: I thought these totally smelled like CC Lemon (side note: Japan spoiled me forever in terms of deliciously tart citrus soda) but tasted a bit over-sweet and medicinal, like pinesol or a bottom-shelf whiskey sour. I’d still give it an O for soda nostalgia, though!

Mango!

Cameron: These actually taste more like apples to me than mango. You don’t really get mango out of them until the aftertaste. After closer inspection, could that be an apple on the package, behind the mango? I think so.

Mango is such a hard flavor to capture in candy, and these certainly don’t excel at it. Like the rest though, they’re certainly not bad candy… just, uninspired. O

Meredith: While I agree that these gummies don’t really taste like mango, I didn’t get apple either.  If I didn’t know they were supposed to be mango, I’d call them magnolia gums.  They’re really floral and perfumey, which was unexpected but pretty tasty in their own right. O

We’ve got a couple more gummies to cover – that post will run on Friday.

I’m currently at the Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans, so I’m turning things over to some globe-trotting friends this week. Cameron and Meredith are former roommates of mine (we did lots of chocolate truffle tastings together), and they’re writing about some treats they bought on a recent trip through Japan. ~Rosa

Hello folks! It’s a pleasure to be here.

I recently schlepped a 40-something pound duffel bag of candy and snacks back from Japan, at the instigation of my travel companion and co-taster Meredith. Customs gave me some pretty weird looks! We’ll be picking a few of the gems from the pile to share with you over the next couple of posts.

Today’s selection is Tiramisu Chocolate and Maccha Tiramisu Chocolate. The packaging lacks an English translation of the brand name, and searching by radical helpfully provides “former time pioneer”. If anyone knows the answer, I’m all ears!

The gold symbol on the right proclaims that they were a 2011 selection by Monde Selection; I’m unaware of how reputable that organization is.

On to the candy! Tiramisu Chocolate’s up first.

Cameron’s Notes:
It smells like cocoa, dark and powdery, but it doesn’t come through in the flavor – the cocoa layer on the outside is very thin. The almond in the middle is quite nice – the crunch is right on. I’d guess they probably dry-roasted the nut from the flavor and crunchiness.

The middle tiramisu layer dominates the flavor and lingers nicely, but it is not as almondy as I would hope and is instead very buttery. I’d prefer this treat to be a hair sweeter and have stronger nut flavor, but overall it’s pretty tasty. An OM – I’d eat these happily, but there are a lot of things I would buy instead if I saw them on the shelf.

Meredith’s Notes:
I am a huge sucker for any sort of coated almond confection, so I had high expectations for the tiramisu almonds, and they mostly delivered. I thought the middle “custard” layer might be yogurty based on its appearance, but it had the more neutral flavor and slippery mouthfeel of a vanilla buttercream, providing a satisfying contrast with the almond crunch.

Based on its name, I also expected some sort of coffee flavor to come through at some point, but I guess that referred more to the layered construction than the flavor, which was 99% butter-almond, 1% cocoa, 0% coffee. Though not complex or wildly innovative, these almonds are a solid contribution to the coated nut domain. OM.

On to the Maccha flavor!

Cameron’s Notes:
The maccha is undetectable to my nose. Notably softer than the cocoa flavor, to its detriment I feel – doesn’t nail the crunch nearly as well. The maccha powder is quite bitter – comparable to a dark chocolate, but lacking the complexity to back it up. It eventually ends up at the same butter flavor as before.

There’s a nice moment where the two flavors balance, but it’s fleeting, caught between the overly aggressive initial maccha flavor and the rather bland butter aftertaste. I like maccha in other contexts, but these are clearly inferior to the cocoa flavor. –

Meredith’s Notes:
As an even bigger sucker for matcha-flavored anything, I found the matcha tiramisu nuts disappointingly weird. The unsweetened matcha powder coating the nuts completely dominated the experience and left an astringent, musty aftertaste in my mouth and nose.

I bravely sucked all the bitter powder off a second nut so that I could evaluate the inner regions of the confection without the confounding surface mustiness. Indeed, the matcha flavor was much more balanced and subtle in the buttercream layer. This would have been a much better treat if the matcha-infused buttery layer had been rolled in cocoa instead of matcha. A – from me too.