ZOMG, Candy!

These Dark Chocolate Chipotle Almonds were another free sample from Sugarfina. They came in a little plastic 2×2 inch box, which I believe is their petite size. It held ~20 almonds.

They were much larger than most dark chocolate-covered almonds that I’ve seen, I think because the almonds were first given a chipotle-flavored candy shell before their shiny outer layer of panned chocolate.

That candy shell gave these almonds a great sweet crunch with a lightly spiced smoky chipotle flavor that brought just the right amount of firey heat to the finish.

The almond centers were crunchy as well. Their roasted nuttiness paired well with the chipotle and the chocolate.

Finally, the outer dark chocolate layer was lightly fruity and sweet. It provided a nice undertone to the spicy nuttiness, making this a well-balanced treat all around.

These almonds were like nothing I’d ever had before, and I found them to be an enjoyable treat. I’d love to buy these as a pick-me-up snack, though their $5/~20 price tag on Sugarfina (that’s 25 cents a nut!) puts them into the special-splurge section of my grad student budget. An OM.

On Wednesday, I covered the cordials from my free sample of online candy boutique Sugarfina‘s Cocktail Hour Tasting Bar. Today, I’ll go through the gummis in that assortment.

The gummi half of this assortment included Hard Cider Pints, Belgian Ale Pints, Champagne Bubbles, and Champagne Bears.

The Hard Cider Pints were yellow bottle-shaped gummies coated in a mild sour sugar that also carried a tinge of effervescence. The chew was super firm and not at all sproingy, and the flavor was that of a mild apple juice.

I didn’t get any booze notes, though I suppose the slight pseudo-fizz from the sour sugar was meant to simulate the carbonation in hard cider.

The Belgian Ale Pints were on the opposite end of the gummi texture spectrum – they were super soft and sproingy. The scent was strong and incredibly beery. It was pretty cool to get that bitter, wheaty scent from a gummi!

The gummi tasted sweeter than I expected. It had a sweet and fruity berry flavor with a light beery aftertaste that was probably due to the strong scent.

Though it definitely smelled like beer, the flavor wasn’t very beery to me, but I still enjoyed it. In fact, I’d probably drink more beer if it tasted like this gummi.

Champagne Bubbles were white gumdrop-shaped gummis covered in little white nonpareils. The nonpareils provided a crunchy shell, while the center gumdrop had a soft and instant give when bitten into, with no bounciness.

I enjoyed the bright sweetness of these bubbles. They were just shy of being tart and tasted like ripe green grapes, sort of like de-alcoholified champagne, I guess.

Finally, the Champagne Bears were pink and gold gummi bears that were soft and sproingy with intense flavors. The pink bears tasted like a mix of strawberry and peach, while the gold ones were brightly sweet and fruity.

I didn’t get any alcoholic champagne flavors from the Champagne Bears. To me, they’re more like Bellini Bears. With their pleasantly sweet and strong flavors, they were still quite enjoyable.

The gummis in this assortment were tasty, and though none of them carried the flavor of actual alcohol, they were a good approximation of the booze they represented. The Belgian Ale Pints were unusual enough to warrant an OM. The rest get Os.

A little while ago, I was delighted when Hammond’s Candies offered to send me some free samples from their catalog. I was even more delighted to get some caramels and these Piggy Backs in the mail a week or so later.

The Piggy Backs were like giant, generously-sized turtles weighing in at 2.2 oz. Each was about half an inch thick and nearly the size of my palm. They were individually wrapped and sat in fluted paper cups.

My dark chocolate version was almond and caramel, while the milk chocolate version was pecan and caramel, but the dark also comes in pecan and the milk comes in almond.

The dark chocolate almond and caramel Piggy Back was lovely! The almonds brought a great roasted nuttiness that was strong enough to stand up to the sweetness of the caramel and chocolate. They added a great textural crunch and just a slight tinge of bitterness to balance all the sugar.

The generous layer of caramel was sticky and chewy and sweet, while the dark chocolate was on the sweet side for dark chocolate, with a smooth melt and a fruity, dusky finish. An OMG for an awesome mix of flavors and textures.

The milk chocolate pecan and caramel Piggy Back was more mild all around. Pecans are a more mild nut, and here they brought a softer crunch and a fattier nutty feel.

The lighter nut let the sweetness of the caramel come through more, and the milk chocolate had a nice caramel sweetness to it as well. I really liked this, but I liked the dark chocolate almond more, so an OM.

Benita’s Peanut Brittle (warning: website annoyingly plays music upon opening) had their big debut at Sweets and Snacks this year, where they snagged a primo spot in Innovation Alley. My box was a free sample from the Expo.

Benita’s is still a small company, so their brittle was all handmade. The packaging was wonderfully thoughtful. The gold, beribboned box contained a plastic bag of brittle and a golden twist tie for resealing the bag once you opened it.

It was a softer brittle than others – some bits of it shattered as normal brittle does, but most of it was chewy. The mix of cracking and chewy brittle plus peanuts made for an interesting texture.

The flavors were great as well. The brittle portion tasted of gold caramel and butterscotch with a great, buttery sweetness to the finish, while the peanuts were flavorful and roasty.

Between the chewiness and the peanuts + caramel flavors, it reminded me of a Snickers bar without the chocolate. I thought it was great and especially liked the buttery complexity of the treat. An OM.

I spent my weekend trying to win Duke basketball tickets by sleeping outside, so I’m turning things over to my ex-pat friend Neil for a couple of reviews. ~Rosa

This bar that I picked up in Switzerland has been tempting me ever since I bought it. Cailler is a Nestle brand with a long Swiss history, a fact I learned as I wrote this up (though it was probably on the wrapper. I was too excited to open it to read it).

I’m a sucker for caramel. And while I’m new to sea salt, I’m fairly convinced it’s a great addition to caramel. This bar came out as a thank-you treat for some friends, who happily agreed to play along with my photographing and note-taking.

It’d been a warm day here, and I knew we were waiting until after dinner to have the chocolate, so I let it hang out in the fridge for a while. This made the initial bar-breaking a bit challenging, but no more so than many off-the-shelf bars. Indeed, it was crunchy to the bite.

The chocolate was smooth and creamy, but in this instance it was definitely just a vehicle for the caramel. I tasted toffee, then sweet butter. It was like a really classy Heath bar! The caramel was sticky for us–it probably would’ve been more liquid if it had been at room temperature.

Fiona noted that the caramel and salt build, then there’s a chewy finish. I agreed that the salt took a while to emerge, but then it lingered pleasantly. I enjoyed the stickiness the caramel offered.

The pieces of the bar have kind of a high-tech look about them, and the shape makes breaking a bit challenging, but it’s visually appealing all the same.

Overall, a very enjoyable experience. OM for this!

These disks of Organic Stone Ground 70% Cacao Extra Dark Chocolate (what a mouthful!) caught my eye at Trader Joe’s. They looked suspiciously similar to Taza’s Mexicanos (previously reviewed here), and Trader Joe’s is known for unbranding and selling name-brand things at a discount.

The Trader Joe’s version was $3.99. Taza Mexicanos currently run just shy of $9 on Amazon but are only $4.50 on the Taza website. The size and shape of both versions are the same, and both contain two disks to a package.

Underneath the wrapper, the disks look pretty similar, with light wedge scoring that doesn’t quite reach the center. The Taza version is on my Flickr page, and the Trader Joe’s version is below.

The Trader Joe’s chocolate was described as “a traditional Mexican-style chocolate stone milled in small batches.” That’s a pretty good description of what Taza does.

Finally, the Trader Joe’s ingredients were just organic cocoa nibs and organic cane sugar. Looks just like Taza’s Cacao Puro to me. I’m going to go ahead and call it – they’re the same.

Mexican-style chocolate is a totally different texture sensation than American chocolates. The disks here snapped easily and cleanly along the scores, revealingly their granulated consistency.

The chocolate had a finely gritty texture that squeaked a little between my teeth but didn’t leave any sediment behind. It was sort of like what eating wet fine-grained sand is probably like, only far more delicious and pleasant.

It had an intoxicating woody scent. The flavors were cleanly sugary sweet and grassy with a fruity raisin flavor and ended with a slightly bitter/astringent cocoa bean finish.

With such simple ingredients, this was chocolate at its most pure! My only complaint was that the astringency lingered, so I kept breaking off more bits to try to wipe the astringency from my mouth. The disk disappeared more quickly that way!

The unadulterated flavors of this chocolate made it a great taste experience. An OM.

I got these Blommer Milk Chocolate Covered Grahams and Dark Chocolate Covered Grahams as free samples at Sweets and Snacks. Mine were individually wrapped (unfortunately, I ate them before I realized that I didn’t have photos of the packaging), though it seems like they’re sold by the box on their website.

Both treats were graham cookie squares covered in either milk or dark chocolate and decorated with little squiggles. The graham cookies had a nice crunch with a bit of grittiness from the crumbs. They had a lightly sweet graham cracker flavor, though I wish that graham flavor was stronger and toastier.

The milk chocolate was sweet with a slight fruitiness, and its sweetness intensified at the end. I enjoyed it enough to give it an O, but it was too sweet for my taste.

The dark chocolate was more to my taste. It had a great depth of chocolate flavor, with just a hint of sweetness that came through in the finish.

The more subtle sweetness of the dark chocolate let the graham flavor come through more. It gets an OM for a well-balanced mix of flavor and texture.

I’d buy the dark chocolate version as a nice teatime snack. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to purchase the milk chocolate version, I’d happily eat another if it were offered to me for free again.

Ira Glass had a great quote in his recent NY Times interview: “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.”

I agree with Ira (because we’re on a first name basis, of course) 100%. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying sweets – as long as you’re not eating yourself into a diabetic coma.

Skinny Cow isn’t as horrible about inducing chocolate shame as other brands have been, but the whole idea of diet candy is still pretty silly. Also what’s up with the name “Skinny Cow”? Are consumers the Cow that wants to be skinny?

The wrapper of this package of Dreamy Clusters, which I got as free samples at Sweets and Snacks, prominently noted that it has 120 calories. It also shows 5 clusters, which is exactly how many were in my pack.

The clusters were described as “crunchy crisps and creamy caramel drenched in milk chocolate.” Each lumpy cluster was between quarter and half-dollar-sized.

The crisps were indeed crunchy. I think they were rice, as rice flour was in the ingredients list, but they were far stiffer and more substantial than any rice crisps I’ve ever had before.

The caramel was chewy but not sticky. You can see from the photo that it had a little stretch but not much pull. It tasted darkly sweet and, though rather one note, was enjoyable enough.

The milk chocolate coating on the clusters was real milk chocolate with actual cocoa butter. Hooray! It was mild and generic tasting, with no notable caramel or dusky cream notes, but again, pleasant enough.

These presented a tasty mix of flavors and textures, like bite-sized 100 Grand bars (which I love). The extra crunchy crisps really elevated these to an OM rating. I think the marketing is dumb, and 5 per pack ain’t much, but portion control is the point here, I suppose.

Candy Blog’s Cybele reviewed the dark chocolate version of these over a year ago.

This little half ounce Vosges Habana bar was an A Southern Season find. These tiny bar formats are a nice size for a candy blogger on a budget – I get enough to get a taste, and while $3.25 is a lot for such a little bar, it’s still cheaper than their full-sized versions.

The Habana was “made with organic milk chocolate” and plantain chips. That chocolate was 45% cacao, so pretty high for a milk chocolate.

That “deep milk chocolate” had a thick melt. It was on the sweet side, with a light hint of cocoa powder flavor. The chocolate flavor was pretty pure, with no caramel notes.

The plantain chips were dispersed throughout the bar in small bits. They added a light crunch and the salty toasty starchiness of fried plantain chips.

This bar finished with a strong saltiness that danced on the delicious edge of being too salty. It makes me want to dip plantain chips in chocolate for a sweet and salty snack.

While it wasn’t quite as “ethereal” as the bar’s molding promised, it was a great mix of sweet and salty flavors and soft and crunchy textures. An OM.

Jelly Belly recently sent me several free samples of their new products, including a bag of Sunkist Fruit Gems. Wait a second, you may be thinking – what’s new about Sunkist Fruit Gems? Rosa, you took a picture of some back in 2007!

Turns out Fruit Gems are new again. Since Jelly Belly bought the Sunkist line, they revamped it to make it with all natural ingredients. Consequently, their colors are now far more muted without artificial help.

The all natural Fruit Gems come in orange, lemon, grapefruit, raspberry, and blueberry. My bag of 9 was missing the raspberry flavor. Any mathematicians out there want to report on the probability of that happening?

The Fruit Gems retained their original texture – a soft fruit-pate with a granulated sugar shell. It yielded instantly to my bite, and its exposed surfaces were perfectly smooth, with a glossy feel on my tongue.

Orange was mildly sweet with a mellow candied orange flavor that lacked any zesty bite or citrus sourness. Compared to the Sunkist Orange Slices, which I also got as free samples, it was rather muted in flavor.

Lemon had a bright citrus zestiness and a postively tangy lemon flavor. There was a slight bitterness to the finish that I really enjoyed, as it made the flavor feel more genuine.

Grapefruit was pink and tasted just like grapefruit with its characteristic pithiness. Here, too, the finish had an enjoyable bitterness to it.

Finally, the maroon gem was blueberry. Its flavor was more like blueberry jam or that blueberry-ish stuff that they’ll put on your pancakes at IHOP: blueberry-esque rather than like the fresh fruit. It had a deep red fruit flavor and some noticeable tannins.

I enjoyed the lemon and grapefruit flavored ones. Blueberry was decent, and orange was nice but could have been punchier. Overall, I think they still get an OM, though I should note these also come individually wrapped in bulk bins, so you can pick and choose your favorite flavors.

If you want a second opinion, you can read Cybele’s take on them on her site.