ZOMG, Candy!

I got this Twix Java in my Sweets and Snacks Expo press pack. It’s not a new bar; instead, it’s been on and off the market as a limited edition since at least 2007.

I, unfortunately, had never been lucky enough to catch it in the wild in any of its previous incarnations, so this was my first time trying it. My packaging made no mention of limited-edition-ness. Perhaps that means it’s here to stay?

The wrapper describes it as “chocolate cookies bars; coffee caramel; milk chocolate.” The back of the wrapper proudly proclaims it to be made with Mars’s real chocolate.

It’s like a regular Twix bar, only the cookie is chocolate and the caramel is coffee tinged. If you’re not familiar with Twix, they come in “fingers”, with a bottom layer of cookie and a top layer of caramel, with the whole thing covered in milk chocolate.

The caramel was sticky yet smooth with a candied coffee flavor. It had a beautiful pull.

The coffee flavor was dry and roasty, with burnt caramel and cocoa notes. As the flavor progressed, it got darker. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the coffee flavor.

The chocolate cookie was soft and dry, and it crumbled rather than crunched. The milk chocolate coating was just so-so, sweet without any distinction.

I give this an OM. I wish the cookie were just a tad crunchier, but otherwise, I thought it was a great mix of flavors and textures. In fact, I like it better than regular Twix, as it’s less sweet and more interesting.

The new Milky Way Simply Caramel bar was included as a free sample in my Sweets and Snacks press pack delivery. They officially launched in June of this year as “a decadent blend of Milky Way Bar’s pure smooth caramel covered completely in Mars’ real milk chocolate.”

It’s far easier to launch a new confection under a familiar brand than it is to build a new brand from the ground up. Thus, while the Milky Way Simply Caramel is a pretty significant departure from the original (I would argue that a Milky Way’s defining characteristic is its chocolatey, malty nougat), it makes sense from a marketing standpoint.

While the Milky Way Simply Caramel looked fairly standard on the outside, the inside was an oozy, decadent looking caramel mess. This was not a treat you’d want to give to small children, unless you want them getting caramel everywhere.

The outer shell was made of a snappy chocolate that turned sweet and sour in my mouth. Hooray American mass-produced chocolate!

The caramel inside was sticky, thick, and chewy. It was sweet and bright with a buttery creaminess. I prefer my caramel with dark, complex, scorched sugar flavors, so it wasn’t really my style. I have to admit, though, that it was luxuriously sticky-sweet.

My beef with this bar was basically what I have with most mass-produced checkout aisle/vending machine bars: too sweet and too one note. I prefer the extra malty hit of regular Milky Ways.

Still, it wasn’t bad, and it’s totally harmless unless you’re susceptible to sugar shock. I think I’d like these best in fun size form. An O.

If you’d like to try one of these for yourself, stay tuned! More to come tomorrow…

My May trip to Italy meant a layover in Frankfurt, which in turn meant that I got to buy lots of Duty Free Ritter Sport. In fact, I managed to leave Europe with not one but two sets of mini Ritter Sport assortments.

The below Schokowurfel set had 6 varieties (Sorten?): Creme Coco, Mandel Split, Caramel Crisp, Crocant, Cappuccino, and Edelnougat. I’ll cover the first three today and hit the next three on Wednesday.

These tiny Ritter Sports were individually wrapped and each just one square big. They’re slightly larger than the square segments of a regular Ritter Sport bar. The size difference is especially noticeable in their height.

It wasn’t until after I’d eaten them all that I realized that I photographed one upside down. Oops.

Creme Coco came in a white wrapper. It was milk chocolate with a white coconut cream filling. The filling contained dried flakes of coconut that were crisp and just shy of crunchy.

The chocolate was soft and sweet and nutty. The two flavors played off each other beautifully, with the dusky sweet balancing out the crispy nutty coconut. I thought it was a lovely mix of flavor and texture. An OM.

It was pretty easy to guess at a translation for Creme Coco. Mandel Split left me lost with no clue what to expect.

It turned out to be milk chocolate on the outside with a white chocolate filling with a few peanut bits mixed in. The peanuts were quite flavorful, but I’ve never been a big fan of peanuts.

I respected the high quality of the ingredients that went into the Mandel Split, but I didn’t find it very exciting or special. To me, it just tasted like nice chocolate and peanuts. An O.

Finally for today, Caramel Crisp was easily comprehensible. It was milk chocolate with golden brown caramel-flavored filling.

At first I thought the filling contained rice crisps, but careful excavation revealed them to be thin flakes of unidentified crispiness. They had a nice complexity that made me think they could be honeycomb, or at least honeycomb flavored.

I really enjoyed the filling to this chocolate. It had nice caramelized/burnt sugar notes that I love in real caramel, but it had the solid texture of a grainy ganache. That plus the intriguingly delicious crisps earned this an OM.

Cybele reviewed this set several years ago on Candy Blog. Looks like the assortment has changed a little since then. Come back on Wednesday for the other half!

I recently had the chance to visit Cornell for big kid science camp. The drive from Rochester to Ithaca is a gorgeous wind through the Finger Lakes region, and I stopped at a cidery along the way. It was there that I picked up this Berkshire Bark bar.

The blurb on the back of the box: “Berkshire Bark is handmade… Premium quality Belgian dark and milk chocolate holds together pretzels, homemade sea salt caramel, and natural peanut butter.”

I appreciated the artisan nature of the bar, which contains only natural ingredients and no preservatives. And it sounded like a delicious combination – pretzels and salted caramel and chocolate? Yes, please!

Unfortunately, I found the execution to be less than stellar. The chocolate was way too sweet, so sweet that it burned my throat. It was also quite soft, almost fudge-like in texture, and it melted in my fingers (you can see some of my fingerprints on the bar in the below photo).

And that sea salt caramel that sounded so delicious? It was not at all caramel-like in texture. Instead, it was grainy and lacked depth to its flavor. It reminded me of my caramel-flavored calcium chews.

I did enjoy the addition of the pretzels. Their crispiness and starchy flavor worked well with the sweet chocolate. The nuttiness from the peanut butter was also quite nice.

The bar was a nice mix of salty, crunchy, and creamy, but it was unreasonably sweet, and the caramel was disappointing. If they could ratchet down the sweetness and up the caramel-flavor of the caramel, this bar would be a show-stopper. As it is, an O.

This Cadbury Soft English Toffee bar caught my eye in the candy aisle at Wegman’s because of the soft English toffee part. In England, toffee is what we’d call caramel.

In the case of this bar, the soft English toffee refers to a smooth, flowing caramel. It’s sweet and sticky, with a gorgeous golden hue.

The bar is segmented into square pillows, each stamped with the Cadbury logo. I think each pillow is supposed to completely contain the English toffee filling, but some of my breaks oozed.

The milk chocolate is thick and cloying, with a slight grain as it melts. It tastes dusky, with buttery notes and a throat-burning sweetness.

The caramel filling tasted strongly of butterscotch. Together with the sweet milk chocolate, this bar was a total sugar bomb.

Cadbury’s Soft English Toffee bar was crazy sweet and intensely decadent. It was too sweet for my taste, but some friends of mine enjoyed it and quickly gobbled it up. An O.

Gail Ambrosius (yes, that’s her real name) is a chocolatier with an eponymous shop in Madison, Wisconsin. There, she makes amazing chocolates (with amazing descriptions; her copy writer is definitely earning his/her keep), mostly with single-origin chocolates from South and Central America.

I was offered the chance to try some free samples, and boy was I glad that I took that offer! Today, I’ll cover the more normal ones from her Classic and Tea collections, and next Monday, we’ll hit up the Adventurous Collection.

Lucille’s Vanilla was the only unadorned chocolate of the bunch, a simple dark chocolate shell with a chocolate ganache inside. The truffle guide that came with the box said it would taste “like a rich spoonful of homemade chocolate pudding.”

The outer chocolate shell had a pleasantly sharp snap, while the ganache was creamy with a luscious, thick melt.

That ganache was the perfect embodiment of chocolate flavor. It was thick and rich and decadent, and it had a lingering finish of pure cocoa. Isn’t it amazing when something so simple can be so delicious?

Raspberry was topped with a sprinkle of cacao nibs. The guide says that it’s a combination of 36% milk chocolate, 65% dark chocolate, and raspberry puree.

The raspberry gave the ganache a sticky, pasty texture, while the cacao nib topping added a nice crunch. The filling tasted super bright and was bursting with fresh raspberry flavor that paired well with its chocolate shell. It was very sweet, but because it was a natural fruity sweet, it was desirable rather than off-putting.

Cognac wore a cap of candied ginger. It tasted of fruity booze with a spicy ginger finish. The ginger flavor is strong and easily identifiable, while remaining understated so as to be harmonious with the chocolate.

Cointreau was originally topped with candied orange peel, but mine fell off in transit, so mine looks like it has a couple of sprinkles of chunky sugar or something. What little was left of the candied peel added a slight grain to this truffle’s taste experience.

It tasted brightly of orange. Such a strong citrus presence would be overwhelming if paired with a lesser chocolate, but the strong dark chocolate shell tempers the citrus flavor quite nicely.

Earl Grey had a pretty little sprinkle of lavender buds on top. The actual Earl Grey tea flavor was mild and just brought a light floral/lavender undertone to the chocolate.

Caramel Sprinkled with Grey Salt was a square of caramel dipped in chocolate and topped with a few grains of fleur de sel. It’s a sweet that’s now made by many confectioners. I now know that Gail Ambrosius makes one of the best versions.

The caramel was wonderfully complex with deep molasses notes. It was smooth and buttery on the tongue if I let it melt and chewy but not teeth-sticky if I chomped it. The sea salt crunched a bit when I got a big grain, and it really set off the sweet complexity of the caramel.

Gail Ambrosius’s truffles were exquisite. The Lucille’s Vanilla, Raspberry, and Caramel were my favorites (yes, that’s half of the ones I just wrote about, which just further underscores how delicious these were) and get ZOMG!s.

The Cognac gets an OMG, while the Cointreau and Earl Grey get Os mostly because I don’t really like floral flavors and have never been much for orange and chocolate combos, and they therefore got overshadowed by their truffle buddies.

Come back on Monday for Gail’s adventurous collection!

On Monday, I covered Le Caramel’s Caramel Cream and Caramel Topping (and sort of their Caramel Syrup). Today, I get to write about their new Salted Butter Caramel candies and the new mystery product that they’ve been hyping on their Facebook page. For the record, I got permission to spill the beans!

The Salted Butter Caramels that I got were hand-wrapped in bits of wax paper. Le Caramel just invested in a wrapping machine, so when these babies become widely available, your packaging mileage may vary.

Each rectangle of caramel was about 2 inches long. They tasted super rich and buttery, with a round caramel flavor. The saltiness is noticeable in the finish and really makes the caramel flavor pop and linger.

While it tasted wonderful, I had trouble with the chew. It was very teeth-sticky and worked its way into my teeth – or rather, the space between my gums and my mouth, so that eventually there was nothing left to chew because it had all migrated away from my molars.

To be fair, the Le Caramel brochure that I got touted “the classic way to enjoy caramel: just unwrap and let the caramel slowly melt in your mouth to reveal its wonderful taste.”

So it’s kind of my fault that I tired out my jaw because I was impatient. And letting the caramel melt is a lovely taste experience. But you’ve been warned – the caramel candies aren’t best appreciated through chewing. An OM if you’re patient and eat it the recommended way. An O if you’re not.

And now, the big reveal (unless Le Caramel beat me to it in the time between when I wrote this review and when it posted): Caramel Cream with Chocolate.

The mystery ingredient of chocolate was quite sensible and not altogether unexpected. While the just-caramel caramels smelled of butterscotch, this smells intensely of pure cocoa and dark, almost scorched toffee. It’s brooding and complex and intriguing.

The Caramel Cream with Chocolate is still thick and caramel-like in texture, though it’s slightly less sticky and prone to dripping crazy long strands.

It tastes of deep cocoa notes with a lingering chocolate finish. While the caramel influence is clear in the texture, it’s less pronounced in the flavor, mostly coming through as a rich, buttery-ness.

It gets an OMG for being the best chocolate sauce I’ve ever had. I’ve been told it should be ready for sale within a month or so.

Le Caramel’s products are clearly well made with care and attention. At $12/13 a container (if you’re lucky, you can find it a bit cheaper on Woot), they’re more expensive than a bag of Milk Maid Caramels or a squeeze bottle of “caramel” that’s probably mostly high fructose corn syrup, but I think they’re pretty reasonably priced for an artisinal product that’s full of flavor and decadence.

Le Caramel is a new homegrown candy company run by a husband and wife team. They’ve turned up before on Wine Woot to rave reviews, and I got the chance to sample their line-up for free, including sneak peaks of some new products that they’re in the process of rolling out.

I’m covering their current products that are now available for purchase. You’ll have to wait until Wednesday to see what the sneak peak products are, though they may debut on the Le Caramel Facebook page before then.

First up, their Caramel Cream made with Salted Butter. Press notes say that the “rich caramel cream is a blend of butter, sugar, creme fraiche, and just a hint of salt…[cooked]…in a copper kettle imported from France.”

It’s kind of ridiculously luscious looking (I think the below photo may be the food porn-iest picture I’ve ever posted). The caramel is crazy thick. It pours smoothly, yet the drizzle goes on and on. And it smells amazing, like a Werther’s Original on steroids.

The flavor of the butter definitely comes through, along with some deep notes of butterscotch and a sweetness that reminded me of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. There’s a definitely saltiness to it to accent the flavor, and the dark finish is almost bitter (in a good way!).

The Caramel Topping made with Salted Butter was a thicker, stickier, and saltier version of the Caramel Cream (the two had the same ingredients list).

If you look carefully in the below picture, you can see the air bubbles in the Caramel Topping. I think they happen because the more viscous Topping takes longer to settle back into itself.

The Topping had stronger notes of butterscotch and a more pronounced saltiness. Unlike the perfectly smooth cream, I could feel the occasional grain on my tongue. Each one really made the caramel stand out.

I tried these two caramels plain and drizzled over lightly fried plantains. They were excellent both ways and especially dangerous the first way. Eating it straight promotes indulgently rapid consumption and a resulting sugar overload.

I can’t wait to try them with crepes! And cookies, and apples, and ice cream… They both get OMGs. I really hope my roommates help me finish of the jars, mostly so that I don’t end up eating it all.

Le Caramel also makes a liquid Caramel Syrup that they recommend be poured onto desserts or into coffee. Believe it or not, I don’t eat dessert that often (I get enough sweets’ calories from candy), and I haven’t had coffee in years, so I’ve yet to try the Syrup.

I can, however, report that it smells wonderful – clear, sweet Werther’s Original/butterscotch/toffee scent to the hilt – and my roommates seem to have been enjoying it. I left out the full bottle to share a few days ago, and it’s already down to the label line.

Anyone want to invent a cocktail recipe for me, to put that syrup to good use?

If you want a chance for a free sample of your own, Le Caramel is giving away one free sampler pack a month on their Facebook page. And come back Wednesday to check out my reviews of their new products!

Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews used to be a mostly regional treat. When Just Born (most famous for their Peeps) bought them in 2003, they greatly expanded where it was sold. I found my bags at a dollar store here in Rochester.

Peanut Chews are peanuts in caramel and coated in a thin layer of dark or milk “chocolate”. Not much chocolate is actually in those layers – the ingredients list for both types have cocoa powder but also hydrogenated palm kernel oil.

Still, both chews were pleasant enough. The Milk Chocolatey bar’s “chocolate” flavor was barely noticeable and mostly imparted a light sweetness.

The caramel inside came across as rather dry because it was so chock full of peanuts, but it also had a pleasant, lasting chewiness. The caramel took a few chews to dissolve, but it didn’t get annoyingly stuck in my teeth.

In addition to being sweet and peanutty, the milk’s filling was also very salty. Too salty, in my opinion. Still, the bar wasn’t bad, like a Snickers without the nougat.

The dark version had the same chewy caramel and peanut filling, but it wasn’t as salty, and the “chocolate” coating wasn’t as sweet. I initially thought the sweeter milk coating just made the filling seem saltier by comparison, but then I checked the nutrition panel.

The milk version had 90 mg/sodium per 3 mini-bar serving, while the dark version had only 55 mg/sodium for the same serving size. I’m not sure why they made the milk version so much saltier, but I much preferred the better balanced dark chews.

Considering the fact that I’m not a big fan of peanutty sweets, I rather enjoyed these, and my friends did as well. They’re not a fine gourmet good, but they make for a nice treat. An O.

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.