ZOMG, Candy!

The Cadbury Picnic is a UK bar composed of milk chocolate with toffee, wafer, peanuts, sultanas, and a crispy cereal centre. You can tell it’s British not only from the spelling of centre but also from the “toffee,” which in British vernacular is actually what we would call caramel. That is, cooked sugar that is still sticky and viscous rather than solid and crunchy.

In case you’re wondering, like I was when I first read the wrapper, sultanas are basically raisins made with a specific grape. Not that it mattered much in the case of this bar. The chocolate that coated it was way too blandly sweet and overpowered all the “Picnic” treats. The toffee/caramel ribbon that sat under the wafers (or was that supposed to be the crispy cereal centre? hard to tell) could barely be tasted, and the peanuts that studded the bar were unroasted, a wasted flavor opportunity.

Overall, the bar was at least texturally interesting. It was a shame that so much went into this bar, so little actually managed to flavor it. A disappointing O.

I’m always on the prowl for candies I’ve never tried before, and when I saw the Lee’s Chocolate Mint bar on the shelf at Randall’s, I snapped it up, along with a Jaffa Bar, which I haven’t opened yet. I’d never heard of Lee’s, a Scottish based food maker, before, so I was eager to see what they had to offer.

The Chocolate Mint bar is billed as “a delicious mint creme fondant covered in real dark chocolate.” Immediately upon unwrapping the bar, my nose was invaded by a super strong, minty scent that reminded me of a York Peppermint Pattie. Unlike a York, however, the mint filling was hard - so hard that it was nearly impossible to break in half, a fact my friends all commented on when they tried to break apart the remainder of the bar to share it amongst themselves. With enough muscle, the bar does snap and cleanly cleave like a piece of toffee, except that toffee is brittle and much easier to break. Once it gets in your mouth, the fondant softens and becomes chewy in a grainy sort of way.

The mint fondant isn’t nearly as strong as it smells. Instead, it’s super sweet with a minty feel but without much actual mint flavor. The finish is sweet, and the fondant got stuck in my molars. The layer of “real dark chocolate” that coats the bar is thin, bland, and rather grainy. It might as well be fake, as there’s so little of it and it’s of such poor quality.

I’ll stick with York Peppermint Patties for now. Like the York, the Lee’s is quite low in fat (3 g total, 1.5 g saturated) and pretty reasonable calorie-wise (230 for the whole bar, which is so hard that you’ll be forced to eat it slowly), probably because the bar is mostly sugar. It gets just an O, but it was good enough to make me want to try the rest of the Lee’s line, though I do fear for my teeth a bit.

Here in the U.S., the Kit Kat is manufactured under Hershey’s. Elsewhere in the world, Kit Kat is made by Nestle. My Kit Kat Hazelnut Cream was given to me by my friend Katie, who bought it for me while in Egypt last Christmas, so it’s made by Nestle. And because it’s probably manufactured in the U.K., I’ve filed is as European rather than African.

The Hazelnut Cream is a Kit Kat of the Big Kat (in the U.S.) or Chunky (everywhere else) variety. That is, rather than being four small “fingers,” it’s one giant stick. The chocolate around the wafers is extremely thick. In fact, there’s about as much chocolate as there is wafer. I found the milk chocolate to be creamy and sweet without being cloying, unlike the Hershey’s Kit Kats you can buy here. For mass-produced candy bar chocolate, it was pretty nice.

Despite it’s name, there was little hazelnut or cream to this bar. It had a sweet nutty tinge that’s far from the in-your-face hazelnut approach taken by Ferrerro. The light nuttiness served the bar well, but there was still room for more hazelnut taste to come through.

I personally don’t like the Chunky/Big Kat bars because I think they’re too big and hard to chomp down on. This would be wonderful in the smaller, standard Kit Kat form, I think. The hazelnut flavor could stand up better with less chocolate to overshadow it. An OM from me.

I saw a box of Michel Cluizel’s Champignon truffles at Cafe Moka in the Houston airport but didn’t buy them because they were so pricey. It was a choice I regretted. Thankfully, Viva Chocolato opened in Austin, and they carry lots of truffles by Michel Cluizel, including Les Champignons. Hooray! I bought one of the Champignons and a 99 Cacaoforte (the first and fourth in the lineup).

Les Champignons (French for The Mushrooms, by the way) are gorgeous and adorable. The cap is made of chocolate and filled with a crunchy toffee-like almond nougatine. It’s sweet and delicious. The stem is made of a soft, sticky, and super chewy caramel surrounded by white and dark chocolate. The caramel itself is not terribly sweet and instead tastes strongly of butter. They get an enthusiastic OMG, with a letter off for being so pricey.

I was nervous about trying the 99 Cacaoforte because they are made of 99% cacao. I’ve tasted a 100% cacao bar from La Maison du Chocolat (it was bitter, creamy, and good, but I could only handle a tiny bit at a time), and I’ve eaten raw cacao nibs before. Neither were entirely pleasant tasting adventures, so I was afraid the 99 Cacaoforte would be too much for my palate to handle.

The truffle was super dark, of course, but surprisingly enough, I didn’t find it bitter at all. It certainly wasn’t sweet, but it was far more palatable than the pure cacao I’ve tasted. The ganache was super smooth, thick, and almost paste-like. It had no grain, but it wasn’t exactly creamy, probably because there should be no milk or cream added to the ganache. It tasted of smooth, pure cacao, and it was splendid. I found it sophisticated, intense, and ZOMG!-worthy. Next time I come across one of these, I’m definitely splurging again, as it’s worth every penny.

Edit: According to Sera, I was misinformed about the nature of the Cacaoforte. The enrobing is 99% Cacao, but the filling is a ganache made with the 99%, meaning that there is cream in there.

I bought the Toffee Crisp at the same time that I bought the Coffee Crisp, but I tasted them several weeks apart. When I dug the Toffee Crisp out of my drawer and unwrapped it, I misread it as Coffee and wondered why it didn’t taste at all like coffee. Funnily enough, that what I thought about the actual Coffee Crisp.

Thankfully, the Toffee Crisp was much better than its coffee counterpart. It’s very sweet milk chocolate with rice crisps and a ribbon of caramel. The chocolate is what I would call the standard British candy bar chocolate that’s sweet and lacking the sour tinge that Hershey’s has. The rice crisps are soft and are lighter and less dense than those of a Crunch bar - they reminded me of actual Rice Krispies in terms of their airiness - and they’re all mixed in with a chocolate cream so that the bar is soft and almost crumbly in a really nice way. This stands in contrast to the 100 Grand and the Nestle Lion, which both just cover their rice crisps in chocolate.

When I think toffee, I first think of the crunchy kind that you’d find in a 5th Avenue or Skor bar. I can accept that English toffee can refer to a soft type of caramel, but then I expect a darker caramel, maybe more molasses-flavored than sugary. The toffee of the Toffee Crisp was pretty standardly unremarkable. It’s nicely sweet but otherwise has no personality.

Overall, I give this bar an OM. It’s good, and I love the soft texture, but I liked the Lion better.

I think it’s time to update my favorite candies page, as I’ve found a wonderful replacement for my 100 Grand love: the Nestle Lion.

I bought the Nestle Lion from The Candy Store in San Francisco. I’ve since seen it in Austin at Central Market (where it cost half as much as it did at The Candy Store, by the way). It caught my eye because it was a chocolate bar in the international section that I had never heard of, and there were no indications on the wrapper as to what it was, exactly. One of the proprietors of The Candy Store was able to tell me what was inside; I don’t remember how she described it, but it was enough for me to want to buy it.

And now to end the suspense of what a Nestle Lion is: A wafer cookie (the kind with layers of thin wafer and cream) covered with caramel and rice crisps, all enrobed in milk chocolate. Or sheer deliciousness in candy bar form.

The thin strip of caramel was sweet and chewy but not sticky, so it didn’t get caught in my teeth. The rice crisps were extra puffy, giving the bar a great lightness that I loved. I thought the Lion was a better version of a 100 Grand because the wafer cookie and the extra puffy crisps make the Lion a less dense and more texturally pleasing bar. I also liked that the Lion had less caramel than the 100 Grand, as I get annoyed when I have to somehow surreptitiously get all that 100 Grand caramel out of the nooks and crannies of my teeth (though I’m sure for some, that’s a selling point).

I really enjoyed the Nestle Lion, even though it was still a little sweet for my taste. It was one of those bars that I had to give away the rest of, lest I ate it all myself. An OMG from me. If the caramel was a little duskier or if it came in dark chocolate, there would be no question that it would earn a ZOMG. But because I could bear to give it away, I knew the Lion fell short of my highest rating.

My friend Laura spent a semester abroad in Denmark and was kind enough to bring me back a box of Mini Froer by Carletti. Froer is Danish for frog, and Mini Froer are chocolate frog truffles. I love how Harry Potter-ish these guys are. I wonder if J.K. Rowling had visited Denmark before she wrote them into her books.

The mini froer assortment I got had four varieties: cream, mint, orange, and toffee.

The “lys med oragetroffel”, or milk with orange truffle, had a nice orange flavor. It was subtle and zesty (as in orange rind zest, not full of life zest) instead of being sweet and super citrusy or juicy, and I liked that unusual rind taste. The milk chocolate froggy shell was sweet with a slight sourness, and the filling was very soft - just short of flowing. I’d give it an OM.

“Lys med toffee” was milk chocolate with a toffee truffle filling. I think of toffee as the brittle, hard stuff. This toffee was almost like a caramel but without any stickiness. It had a nice, dark complexity, making the toffee flavor my favorite of the bunch. An OM bordering on OMG because the chocolate wasn’t of spectacular quality.

The two dark chocolate truffles were “mork med creme” and “mork med mint”, which the box translated as bitter with cream and bitter with mint. These two contained an opaque white liquid center instead of the ganache-like center of the two milk frogs. The mint flavoring was very mild, while the creme had some sort of weird aftertaste that was almost minty. In fact, I thought the creme was the mint until I tasted the real mint one (which was truly minty) and realized that it was creme after all. I didn’t like these two as much as the milk chocolate versions of the frog because the filling flavor wasn’t exactly pleasant in either case, so they get just an O.

I loved the adorable little frog designs, and the box they came in had a nice flip up lid. You can’t tell from the photo, but the frogs that adorn the lid are actually embossed on there. Still, these appear to be a fairly common candy in Denmark, like something you’d pick up at a drugstore rather than at a boutique, and I think they’re a great little treat for their price range.

When I was told that a sample Galaxy dark bar was on its way to me in the mail, I never expected the 125 g (4.4 oz) behemoth that finally arrived. It was ginormous!

The bar’s wrapper reminded me of Dove chocolates. A quick Googling revealed that Galaxy and Dove are actually the same company. It’s Dove in the US and Galaxy in the UK. I felt like a sham of a candy reviewer for not knowing that already, but at least I noticed the packaging similarities.

Though it’s supposed to be the same product as a Dove chocolate bar, I found the Galaxy Dark to be inferior to my memory of the Dove Dark. The Galaxy was smooth and creamy with a slightly brittle snap, but I think Dove bars are even creamier than the Galaxy, have a firmer snap, and have a nicer, smoother melt. So I’d say the bars aren’t identical, even if they’re by the same brand.

I liked the presentation of the Galaxy bar. Instead of boring straight-edged segments, the rectangular segments of the Galaxy have wavy edges with a small stylistic G on each one. The back of the wrapper promises that the Galaxy dark is “not at all bitter,” and they live up to that promise. Unfortunately, I found the bar to be not at all interesting as well. It was serviceable chocolate, but bland and boring. I ate four rectangles before I gave up on tasting anything of note.

Overall, the Galaxy bar is serviceable for snacking but not for savoring. If I’m going to indulge in chocolate, I want something that I can savor and really enjoy, not a piece of chocolate that I eat just for the sake of eating chocolate, so this bar deserves an O in my book. Those who are used to milk chocolate and are trying to train themselves to like dark may enjoy this bar. I’m giving the rest of mine away.

I found the British Cadbury Crunchie (BUY!) at Coco Moka in Houston’s airport.

The wrapper promised “milk chocolate with a golden honeycomb centre,” so I expected that it would be something similar to the Violet Crumble, and I was right. However, I liked the Cadbury Crunchie more. The honeycomb center (or centre) of the Cadbury Crunchie was darker and had a more complex burnt sugar flavor. It was also less styrofoamy than the Violet Crumble, so it was less dry on the tongue.

Despite being better than the Violet Crumble, the Cadbury Crunchie still falls far short of the chocolate/honeycomb perfection attained by the Dark Sponge of Economy Candy because its honeycomb center is that fake foamy thing. My first two bites made me want to give it an OMG, but a third bite put me in sweetness overload, so I demoted its ranking to an OM. Perhaps if I’d tasted the treat sized version (BUY!), I would’ve let it keep that higher rating. Even the nice touch of the decorated bottom couldn’t change the fact that the sweet milk chocolate plus the dense and sweet honeycomb adds up to an overly cloying bar.

I thought I’d stumbled across a great candy find when I found this among other international bars at Coco Moka in Houston’s airport. Then I started seeing it everywhere and realized that it wasn’t so special after all. Apparently there was a successful petition to bring them to the US, though I can’t imagine why. I know there are plenty of better tasting UK candy bars out there.

The wrapper describes the Coffee Crisp as “wafers with coffee creme center”. Upon unwrapping the bar, I was inundated by a strong smell of chocolate, bitter coffee, and wafer. The bar itself is humongous. It’s big, thick, and dense.

For all its strong coffee smell, I couldn’t taste any coffee. I pretty much tasted just wafers and poor quality chocolate. There was also a faint lingering bitterness that was very slight. If you’re going to call your bar a Coffee Crisp, shouldn’t it taste like coffee? Instead, this is pretty much all crisp, and greasy, yicky crisp at that. An O.

Cybele and Sera basically agreed with me. I know they didn’t sign that petition.