ZOMG, Candy!

I’ve got some more Hedonist goodies to review, courtesy of free samples from Zahra and Jennie. Today we’ve got their Pecan Cranberry Bark, and I’ll cover their Spring Tea Truffle Collection on Friday.

The Pecan Cranberry Bark is described on their website as, “shards of semi-sweet chocolate (55%) swirled with white chocolate and sprinkled with dried cranberries and candied pecans.” The bark was quite pretty, with its white chocolate swirls studded with red jewels of cranberry. It’s a visual treat.

The semi-sweet chocolate was nice and snappy. It tasted deeply of cocoa with a sweet and mild finish.

The candied pecans were my favorite component of the bark. They were coated in a crispy caramelized sugar glaze, and they added a nice, occasional crunchy sweetness. The pecans, along with the sweet cranberries, paired nicely with the chocolate.

The standalone chocolate was a little sweet for my taste, but it was nicely tempered by the pecans and lightly tart cranberries. I picked out the most highly studded bits, and my boyfriend happily ate the rest. An OM.

I received several fun-sized bags of Caramel Apple Sugar Babies last Halloween in my NCA goodie bag. I thought they were a new product, but apparently they’ve been around for a while, as Candy Blog and Candy Addict both reviewed them back in 2007.

The wrapper called them “milk caramels with apple candy coating.” To me, they were like a chewy version of caramel apple lollipops (which I love).

They had a shiny panned shell in a cheerful shade of bright green. The shell was slightly crumbly, like that of jelly beans. It tasted of sweetly tart green apples, with a lovely brightness.

The caramel centers tasted of burnt brown sugar. They developed a grainy chewiness at the end as they melted away. At first, the caramel melded nicely with the apple coating, but as soon as the apple coating disappeared, the sweetness of the caramel became totally dominant.

They’re far from gourmet treats, and after a hand/fun pack-ful, the sweetness becomes overpowering, but I found them tastily addictive. An OM.

Lindt’s “A Touch of Sea Salt” bar has been on the market for a while: Chocablog covered it way back in August 2008, and Cybele wrote about it last October. I finally picked one up last week because it was on sale at good old Wegmans.

The package design is simple - a balanced Lindt square with a visible sprinkle of coarse salt and the curiously (carelessly?) capitalized note, “with Fleur de sel Sea salt crystals”. I love the blaze of blue in the background. A bit reminiscent of a PowerPoint slide, yes, but also pretty!

The chocolate itself looks like standard dark Lindt squares, with Lindt Excellence’s characteristic deep sheen and sharp snap. Unlike in the Salazon bars, there were no visible grains of salt. Unsurprisingly, the taste of salt was also far more mild in the Lindt bar.

The chocolate had a dark, thick, and glossy melt. It tasted deeply of cocoa but was sweeter than I remembered dark Lindt bars being. A glance at the back of the package showed that it had just a minimum of 47% cocoa solids, which put the relative sweetness in context.

The salt really was just a touch - a few grains here and there. When the fleur de sel did flash on my palate, it brought out a nice sweet and sourness to the chocolate (in a fruity way rather than a cheap Chinese takeout way).

I think this is a fine addition to the Lindt line and a great bar for everyday snacking. It wasn’t as complex as the Salazon line, but I found it quite admirable for a mass market bar. An OM.

Hershey’s Zero bar’s claim to fame is its white coating. Specifically, it’s “caramel, peanut and almond nougat covered with white fudge.”

Mine came free, courtesy of Munchies Sweets and Treats.  It was a bit too abundantly full of caramel, I guess, as my bar’s trademark white coating was streaked with it.

The bottom layer of nougat was faintly sweet chocolate with strong almond extract notes. Every once in a while, I hit an actual peanut, which introduced a bit more nuttiness, but the almond extract was the predominant player.

The nougat was covered with a stripe of sweet and serviceable caramel. The white fudge coating was milky and overly sweet.

Overall, I found this bar to be too sweet, and its flavors weren’t distinctive enough. I needed to eat it slowly and carefully to pick out the different flavors, as they got all mushed together and masked by the sweet. An O.

I think Nestle deserves a prize for making a candy with a name that’s so much fun to say: Sluggles. Sluggles sluggles sluggles sluggles. And so friendly sounding! I wonder if that’s why the Snuggie caught on more than the Slanket, because the former was way more fun to say than the latter?

Tangent aside, these are a fairly new addition to the Nestle/Wonka line. I bought them at the same time as the Puckerooms, and both were released together as Wonka’s inaugural gummies.

Sluggles came in four flavors - orange, lemon, strawberry, and grape - and four shapes. I hereby dub them almost-snail, worm, stepped-on, and standard-slug. Like the Puckerooms, all the flavors came in all the shapes.

The gummies were soft and immensely sproingy, a textural combination that I find ideal for maximal chomping addictiveness.

Orange was blandly sweet with a zesty citrus aftertaste. Lemon managed a brightly zest lemon flavor but was more muted than I would’ve liked.

Strawberry and grape were both bland. The formal was floral and sweet, while the latter was mostly sweet with a grape-y finish.

Compared to the Puckerooms, these gummies were rather disappointingly mild. I loved the texture, but I wanted punchier flavors.

At least the shapes are fun, and sluggles is still fun to say. An O.

And finally, here are Cybele’s review and Sera’s take.

According to its entry on Hershey’s website, the Zagnut has been around for ~80 years now (I think Hershey’s needs to update their mathing). Wikipedia says that it used to be owned by the Clark Company, though how Hershey’s ended up with Zagnut and Necco ended up with the Clark Bar, I don’t know. Cybele didn’t know either.

I do know that I found it tasty, and like the Clark Bar, it made me wonder how I’d never had one before. Mine came in a gifted sample box from Munchies Sweets and Treats, but I do believe I’ve seem then in Wegmans, housed in the retro candy display.

The bar was described as “crunchy peanut butter - toasted coconut.” It had the flaky layered center of a Clark Bar, plus an outer layer of what looked like compressed nuts.

The golden bar was super crisp. As I bit into it, there was a lovely crunch, and flakes well, flaked off. I also noticed tiny bits of peanuts in the texture.

It tasted mostly of peanuts/peanut butter with a touch of coconut to the finish. Some of it got lodged in my molars a tad, like brittle, but it wasn’t nearly as bad a teeth situation as you get with Butterfingers.

I loved the texture, with its mix of flaky and crispy, and the nutty/coconutty flavors were nice as well. I’m definitely a newly converted Zagnut fan. An OM.

When I was a kid, SweeTarts were my favorite non-chocolate candy. I loved them in the big coin-sized rolls; in the smaller, Smartie-like rolls; and, of course, in the little paper sleeves of 3 SweeTarts each that are still ubiquitous players in Halloween and Kiddie mixes.

It somehow totally escaped my notice that my favorite brand of compressed sugar candies has since been expanded to include gummies. I picked up a bag of heart-shaped SweeTart gummies in a post-Valentine’s Day sale.

The gummies came in classic SweeTart shades of purple, pink and purple+pink. It was two hearts melding to form one. D’awww/gag. While the shapes weren’t nearly as creative as other gummies in the Wonka line, they were cute and served their Valentine’s Day role well.

The chew was firm but not stiff. In other words, they didn’t immediately yield to my bite, but they didn’t put up much fuss either. Tiny grains of superfine sugar coated the gummies, adding a bit of textural grain (while also creating a mess when I spilled the bag).

To me, the two colors tasted the same: super grapey, with dark tannins. They tasted almost exactly like purple SweeTarts, except perhaps a tad sweeter and thus rounder.

I’d like to see them in a wider array of flavors, as a whole bag of identically themed gummies gets boring after a while. Still, I managed to snack through the ~70 gummi bag on my own, though it took a couple of weeks and quite a few episodes of House. An O.

These Caramel Almond Sticks are the last of my free samples from Charles Chocolates. Sad, as I really enjoyed munching my way through their wares!

The sticks are their “Fleur de Sel Caramel, enrobed… in 65% bittersweet chocolate and coated… in toasted almonds.” I loved Charles Chocolates’s Fleur de Sel caramel chocolates, so I had high hopes for these - and they really delivered!

The pack of 9 sticks came packaged in a little cellophane bag with a pretty gold bow. Each stick was about pinky finger-sized, covered in dark chocolate, and rolled in chopped almonds.

The caramels were buttery soft but also chewy. They stuck around my molars a bit, but I can forgive them because they were so decadently buttery flavored as well.

As you can see, the almonds had a tendency to fall off. They brought a bit of grit to the texture of the sticks, and I wish they were even more roasty flavored. If the website hadn’t said so, I wouldn’t have guessed that they were toasted.

The chocolate flavor was pretty dominated by the buttery caramel and the nutty almonds. I was able to notice its nice cocoa notes.

The caramel is really the star here. It’s so decadent and delicious and addictive. I just wish the nuts were a tad toastier. Still, I chomped and chewed my way through these at a frightening pace. They get a hearty OMG.

Charles Chocolates’s Teance Tea Collection, another free sample that I received, was absolutely gorgeous - little square tiles of slate grey adorned with traditional Chinese calligraphy. I have no idea how they did it, but I love the look. I also wish I knew more of the characters; second from the right is “cha” or tea, but that’s the only one I recognized.

I was a bit nervous about the tea aspect. I’ve had Asian tea-flavored chocolates in the past and was not a fan. Fortunately, these were nothing like matcha chocolate - they were far better.

Each tile had a super thin outer layer of chocolate that crunched when I bit into it. It made me think of crunching footsteps in the snow - an instant and satisfying give. The ganache within was cool and creamy with a flawless texture and well-infused flavors.

Formosa Baochong was described as “a premium Taiwanese tea with strong flavors that contrast well with chocolate.” It tasted dark and deep with notes of clove and nutmeg. The spice flavors came across nicely but weren’t overwhelming, making for a well-balanced truffle.

Special Jasmine was billed as “a delicately fragrant floral tea.” It was the only one of the set that actually tasted like my conception of how tea tastes.

It tasted just like jasmine tea, with a lightly bitter and almost astringent bite, and made me think of going out to dim sum with my parents. The finish was a little sweet for my taste - my throat burned a bit - but it was still enjoyable.

Osmanthus is apparently “a floral tea often used in Asian pastries with a very distinctive flavor.” In truffle form, it starts out tasting of chocolate and then gives way to a unique fruity flavor.

I get citrus and banana notes, but it doesn’t taste exactly like either. I can’t quite put my finger on what it tastes of. It’s definitely distinctive and quite intriguing.

Lichee was described as “a traditional Asian fruit with flavors greatly enhanced by chocolate.” The lichee (or lychee, as I’m used to spelling it) flavor was spot on, with all of the fruit’s soft floral flavors. I don’t think the lichee flavor is exactly enhanced by the chocolate or that the two are destined flavor match, but the flavor combo is nice enough.

Charcoal Fired Oolong was “custom roasted Taiwan oolong over traditional bamboo baskets over a charcoal fire to medium dark.” It tasted brightly sweet and fruity at first before it took a darker turn, with a hint of smoky undertone. The brightness was present throughout, including in the finish, which was just wonderful.

Generally, I find drinking fancy teas unsatisfying because the tea always smells so much better than it tastes. Charles Chocolates managed to make tea truffles that taste like tea smells. The oolong, osmanthus, and baochong were my favorites, but I enjoyed all of them. An OM.

Cybele from Candy Blog called Charles Chocolates’s Orange Twigs a signature item, which is perhaps why they included them in the box of free samples that they sent me. Charles Chocolates calls them “delicate milk chocolate ganache with a hint of fresh orange… coated in a thin layer of 65% bittersweet chocolate and then finished with a sprinkling of confectioner’s sugar.”

The orange twigs come in a clear cylinder, and the twigs themselves are also cylindrical. It’s outer dark chocolate layer was quite thin delicate. The inner filling has a soft ganache-like melt but had a bit of a grit to it.

It tasted very sweet and very bright and very, very orange-y. The orange completely dominated whatever chocolate went into the twigs. The finish was also overly sweet, and the powdered sugar coating certainly didn’t help temper things.

I love citrus-flavored sweets, and I love chocolate, but the combination of chocolate and orange has never really done it for me. While the orange twigs were well flavored and well made, I found them too sweet for my liking. An O from me, with the caveat that my roommates did finish the tube.