ZOMG, Candy!

I share Cybele from Candy Blog’s view that 100 calorie packs are a rip-off when it comes to candy but can be sensible in the case of other snacks to help prevent mindless overeating. Little Debbie’s 100 calorie Nutty Bars do not clearly fall in either category. On the one hand, you don’t really save that many calories from limiting yourself to eating just one of the regular Nutty Bars (155 calories each, but they’re wrapped in pairs). On the other hand, the 100 calorie portioned Nutty Bars and the regular Nutty Bars both come 12 to a box and cost the same, so at least you’re not paying extra for the pre-portioned packaging.

I have a special fondness for Nutty Bars because they’re one of my dad’s favorite snacks for fishing, so they were (and probably still are) always around the house. I agreed to review the samples sent by the manufacturer partly out of nostalgia. If you’re unfamiliar with Nutty Bars, they’re wafers alternated with peanut butter and covered in chocolate. They’re shelved with cookies and other baked goods, but they’re also nearly a candy bar (maybe if the chocolate coating was a bit thicker). The 100 calorie Singles are basically a scaled down version of the more caloric and more delicious originals. As far as I can tell based on memory, the Singles are the same dimensions as the originals, but the Singles bar is much, much lighter - 19g compared to the original’s 28g.

The lost weight and calories have come at the expense of the peanut butter and chocolate flavoring. The peanut butter flavor is present, but it’s quite light and a little too sweet, while the chocolate coating is barely noticeable and slightly greasy to the touch. The chocolate and peanut butter do complement the light, crisp wafers quite nicely. Though I miss the dense crunch of the original Nutty Bars, the overall light, airiness of the slimmed down version has its own appeal.

As a chocolate bar or cookie, these guys are too light on flavor to merit more than an O. As a sensible and affordable snack for dieters, maybe to help stave off chocolate or peanut butter cravings, however, I give them an OM for tasting pretty good, all things considered. I’m going to recommend them to my dad. Here are other takes from Chow.com, Chocoblog, and Sugar Savvy.

Choxie is Target’s house brand of chocolate. While Target purports to sell stylish clothes for less, Choxie promises fancy chocolate for cheap. The back of the box sums up their philosophy nicely: “crafted with the finest and purest ingredients, it’s intended for the most sophisticated of chocolate palates. we suggest you keep it hidden from mere amateurs.” Sorry, Choxie, but you can’t fool me with your fake trendiness and refusal to use capital letters. But I do like the bright and vaguely retro packaging. Great color scheme!

The key lime pie truffle bar is “key lime-flavored white chocolate and graham biscotti bits enrobed in dark chocolate.” What I got was a way too sweet bar with a strong limey finish. I swear I tasted grains of sugar in the filling along with the scattered chunks of graham cracker.

The graham “biscotti” (I guess that’s fancier-sounding than graham cracker) bits were just crumbs. I think the bar could have benefited from slightly larger bits of the graham to make the texture more interesting and to balance out the sweet white chocolate.

The filling was too sugary, and the dark chocolate enrobing was too bland or too weak to balance it out. My bar had bloomed, which was unfortunate, and it gave the chocolate a greasy feel and an unappetizing look (though bloomed chocolate is perfectly safe to eat). The dark chocolate didn’t have a great melt - it was nowhere near as smooth or as creamy as the Dagoba and Theo bars - and the snap was rather weak and brittle.

Some of my friends liked the flavor combination (many of them thought it was lemon) but found fault with the texture. Others were not fans of the citrus addition and thought it was too weird. It did fairly well in the taste ratings: 9th place out of 13 with a score 3.17/5, placing it higher than many fancier, more expensive bars. From me, an O. I may have been too hard on Choxie because I was tasting it alongside other, nicer bars, so I haven’t completely written off the brand yet. I’d like to try some of their other truffle bars and see if they can redeem themselves.

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.

An extremely generous box of samples arrived from Emily’s Chocolates (BUY on Amazon!) while I was out of town for Thanksgiving break, so I didn’t get them until yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to taste everything in there, but I did try the cookies, and they were most definitely worth the wait. In fact, they were so good that I’ve bumped today’s news story to share this review.

The sandwich cookies come in mint cream and peanut butter cream. The peanut butter cream cookies come in a similar container, only it’s orange, and it’s snowman had a top hat instead of earmuffs. Isn’t it funny how we now associate orange with peanut butter, all thanks to Reese’s? The packaging is pretty, cute, and festive, making these cookies a great candidate for a hostess gift or a way to suck up to teachers.

Both flavors of cookies are like dark chocolate-covered Oreos with generously thick layers of peanut butter or mint cream. The dark chocolate covering is thick, rich, and delectable. Here’s a shot taken with a flash that shows off how hefty the layers of chocolate and cream are, though it makes the chocolate look lighter than it really is.

The cookies are a great blend of textures - smooth dark chocolate, crunchy chocolate cookie, and creamy filling. The mint cream cookie smelled strongly of mint and chocolate and packed a wallop of mint flavor. I loved it. The mint flavor was strong, but not too strong, leaving the cookie well balanced. The finish was of just chocolate, which I think works well, as a lingering, sugary mint taste isn’t always pleasant. Flavor-wise, the cookie is reminiscent of a Thin Mint, but better - it’s more texturally interesting, the chocolate is of better quality, and there’s more of everything! An enthusiastic ZOMG! for the Dark Chocolate Covered Mint Cream Sandwich Cookies.

The peanut butter cream cookie smelled slightly of peanut butter, and it’s peanut butter taste was present but mild. The finish was pretty much all chocolate, just like that of the mint version. I would have preferred a stronger and saltier peanut butter flavor, though the overall cookie was still delicious. An OMG for the Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cream Sandwich Cookies.

Emily’s also sent me their limited edition boxes of their dark chocolate covered nuts and fruits, a big box of their milk chocolate covered macadamia nuts (apparently still in stock on Amazon as of 11/26), and an adorable dark chocolate-covered cashew-filled snowman. I’m excited to taste those as well, though I think I may save the macadamia nuts to bring home for my folks for Christmas.

What surprised me the most about the Emily’s Chocolates line was how affordable all the products were. They look like they would cost much more than they actually do. I think they’d make great gifts, especially since all the holiday boxes already look like they’re wrapped. If you order by December 10th, you’ll get free shipping on orders over $40. I’ll try to have the rest of my package (minus the macadamia nuts) tasted and the reviews as soon as possible so y’all can take advantage of that offer.

Emily’s Chocolates reminded me that this week is National Cookie Week. I’ve missed Monday (oops; this week has been hectic), but there’s plenty more Cookie Week left! And Emily’s Chocolates’ cookies look goooood. Free shipping on orders over $30 before November 23rd.

They sent me some samples (review to come later), but I didn’t get them before I left school for Thanksgiving break. Hopefully they’ll be waiting for me when I get back. I can’t wait to try them!

In gum news, Stride gum (BUY!) is giving away a Dodge Caliber with a trunk full of 2,160 packs of gum. With the way Stride gum lasts a long time, that could keep you chewing for a looonng time. To enter, visit www.stridegum.com and play their dodgeball flash game.

Is there anyone who doesn’t like s’mores? To me, there are few things better than this simple treat of gooey marshmallow, crunchy graham cracker, and sweet, melted chocolate. It’s oozy, it’s sticky, it’s messy, and it’s delicious.

Because I love s’mores, I was super excited to try Sweet Sweet Confections‘ s’mores bars that the company sent. Handmade graham crackers and marshmallows dipped in chocolate? What’s not to love?

While the idea is great, I’m afraid I found fault with Sweet Sweet Confections’ execution of their concept.

For starters, the packaging does not hold up well. While the bars look gorgeous on their website, they arrived all smushed together, even in their padded mailer. I should note that these bars were first mailed to a Well Fed editor, who then mailed them to me. However, Dom on Chocablog had the same issue, and Michelle on Candy Addict’s photo also looks nothing like the advertised version. I think these bars need something a little sturdier than a cellophane bag. When I tried to open it at the top, the whole bag split apart, like cellophane is wont to do, which was super annoying, as it meant I no longer had a bag to keep the bars in.

The bars themselves are slightly smaller than credit card-sized. Taste-wise, they were good but not great. I expected the graham cracker to be crunchy like, well, a graham cracker. Instead it was soft and crumbly, like a cookie or a really dense cake. While I prefer a more cinnamon/honey tinge to my graham crackers, I enjoyed the graham “cracker” layer. The chocolate coating was good and smelled incredibly chocolatey. It wasn’t high end chocolate or anything like that, but it was real chocolate, and it did it’s job. My biggest beef was with the marshmallow. Marshmallows should be either fluffy and soft or oozy and sticky, not dense and chewy. While eating this bar was far cleaner than eating a real s’more, the marshmallow’s texture just left something lacking.

I was impressed by the ingredients of the s’mores bar. With the exception of invertase as the final chocolate ingredient, I can pronounce and identify everything that went into these bars. I definitely believe that they’re handmade since the ingredient list is so preservative and additive free.

I found these bars to be good, but I wouldn’t pay $4 for the pouch of three. The different flavors and textures balanced well, but the bars were a little too sweet (though my tastes skew towards the dark chocolate end). A couple of my friends tried the bars and really liked them, but they also agreed that $4 for three bars was too much. If the bars were a little more high end - nicer packaging, nicer presentation, and better chocolate - they would be worth shelling out even more than $4 for because they could then be billed as a gourmet treat. In the state that the s’mores bars currently are in, I’d rather spend my $4 on a bag of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, and a nice bar of dark chocolate and make my own s’mores. Only an O, I’m afraid.

From my personal experience, Twix (BUY!) is not a polarizing candy bar. Few can find fault with its blend of creamy chocolate, crunchy cookie, and oozy caramel. Consequently, few can resist polishing off both bars in a pack of Twix.

With Twix PB, the balance of tastes and textures is off, and I had no problem stopping my Twix PB consumption after a bite or two. According to the Wikipedia article on Twix, Twix PB is a relatively new development. I’d thought it was the same as the Peanut Butter Twix, just with a different wrapper and supposedly trendier name (the packaging looks like it was designed to appeal to a teenaged candy consumer), but they’re actually different. The Twix PB has a chocolate cookie, while the Peanut Butter Twix had the butter cookie of the original.

The butter cookie is my favorite part of the original Twix. I find that it has just the right touch of sweetness and a wonderfully sandy texture. The chocolate cookie in the Twix PB was disappointing all around. The texture was off, somehow, and it didn’t taste like chocolate. In fact, it didn’t taste like much of anything. Cookies aren’t supposed to be bland!

The rest of the bar was okay. The chocolate was your standard Mars coating; not bad, but nothing to crow about. The peanut butter was good, and it’s saltiness paired nicely with the sweet chocolate. But that tasteless, mal-textured cookie just ruined the whole bar from me. That bite you see missing in the picture is the only bite I took. I shared the rest with my friends, and none of them liked it enough to want to finish the bar either. When people don’t want you even when you’re free, you deserve no more than an O.

After reading that Twix article on Wikipedia, I really want to try some of those other Twix flavors, especially the fudge and the dark chocolate. Cybele on Candy Blog got to try the soon-to-be released Java Twix. I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those when they finally come out.

I’m kicking myself for somehow neglecting to take a picture of these guys whole, outside of the wrapper. A shame because these Cocoa Deli pops look much better than they taste - like cute little fudgsicles! I liked that the popsicle stick was made of plastic, a nice detail.

The wrappers definitely try to play up the Belgian chocolate angle. The term “Belgian chocolate” carries some cachet with it, but this candy showed that Belgian does not always equal good.

According to the wrapper, the Belgian milk chocolate fudge popsicle (what a mouthful!) is Belgian milk chocolate filled with layers of chocolate truffle (23%), chocolate truffle (14%), and cocoa pieces (0.8%). That last percentage confused me. I thought the percentages were cocoa percentages in the types of chocolate truffle, but the cocoa pieces percentage seems to refer to the percentage of popsicle compilation.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter, as the popsicle (by the way, that’s what the chocolate is referred to as on the nutrition facts panel. Serving size: One popsicle) tastes pretty much the same all the way through. A careful examination shows a thin layer of darker chocolate truffle to distinguish the two types visually, but it all tastes the same to me. It’s super rich and creamy (and also really high in saturated fat) with a soft chocolate filling in a similarly soft chocolate shell. I couldn’t taste or feel any cocao nibs in the popsicle, but 0.8% is tiny, so I guess that’s understandable. The whole thing basically just tasted of sweet and of chocolate and was overwhelmingly cloying.

The Belgian chocolate caramel crunch truffle popsicle was also too rich and too sweet. The wrapper describes it as layers of chocolate truffle (13%) containing butter toffee pieces (1%) and cocoa cookie (5%) and a caramel flavor truffle (19%).

The caramel layer is lighter in color than the chocolate truffle of the fudge pop. It smells slightly duskier but doesn’t taste like caramel at all. No burnt sugar notes, just an overwhelmingly rich sweetness. Spherical little balls of cookie stud the truffle. They’re light golden brown in color and don’t look or taste like they’re made of chocolate, even though the wrapper says that it’s a cocoa cookie. Finally, there are tiny grains of toffee in the thin upper layer of chocolate truffle, but I had to really look for them to be able to identify them. I don’t think the casual popsicle eater would have noticed their presence.

These things cost only $1 a pop, and you get what you pay for. They’re cute, but they’re way too rich and don’t taste very good, unless you like to inundate your tastebuds with sugar. An O.

A week or so ago, I went to Ikea (BUY) with my friend Cassie, who needed cheap furniture for her new apartment. I love poking around Ikea and checking out all the cute, clever, and weird things they sell.

I got a soft-serve frozen yogurt at the cafe near the exit (well, Cassie bought it for me because she had a mini-meltdown and took a break to buy a soda. Ikea can be overwhelmingly large sometimes.) that turned out to be a weirdly translucent cream color. It tasted funny to me, but I usually don’t eat frozen yogurt (the Commons soft serve is ice cream), so maybe fro-yo is supposed to taste…off.

I also picked up two kinds of Swedish cookies: Ballerinas and Gilles. Yes, I realize that cookies are not candy, but they feature chocolate, and that’s good enough for me. After all, Cybele at Candy Blog writes about Pocky (BUY) all the time, and that’s technically not candy too.

The Ballerinas, as you can see from the wrapper, are “cookies with a chocolate hazelnut cream filling.” The cream filling is sandwiched between a solid round chocolate cookie and a O-shaped vanilla cookie, making the Ballerina quite aesthetically pleasing. I had high hopes for these because I’ve loved Nutella ever since my middle school French teacher introduced me to its deliciousness. And by love Nutella I mean I often stand before the giant jars of Nutella at Costco and daydream about how awesome it would be to eat it out of those ginormous jars by the pawful, like Winnie the Pooh going at a pot of hunny.

Back to the Ballerinas. The filling is fluffier than Nutella, with a consistency more like whipped frosting than peanut butter, but it still retains a strong hazelnut flavor, which was wonderful. I wish the cookies were similarly delicious; they turned out to be rather dull and bland in comparison. Think about the difference between an Oreo cookie and a generic store brand cookie. While it’s possible that too-strong cookies could overpower the Ballerina cream filling, I think there was still plenty of room for more flavor. If there weren’t starving children in the world, I’d go through the roll and just lick the filling off all the cookies. That, however, is wasteful and unladylike, so I will instead wonder if Nabisco will ever make an Oreo with a hazelnut filling.

The Gille Double Chocolate Crisps were a decadent delight. They’re also horribly unhealthy because the world is unfair, but you should buy them and eat them anyway. You deserve it. Two thin, crisp cookies sandwich a generous portion of rich, yet sweet dark chocolate. The cookies were just sweet enough to compliment the chocolate without overwhelming it, like an extremely mild oatmeal cookie, and the cookie-to-chocolate ratio was excellent. Clotide on Chocolate and Zucchini posted a plea for a recipe to reproduce these, and it looks like her commenters responded, so you can try to bake these at home and save yourself a trip through Ikea.

If I have a chance to go back to Ikea, I’d like to buy some of the marshmallow petit four-looking things they keep in freezers in the food section. Have any of y’all tried those treats before?

Edit, 09/25/2007 - an O for the Ballerinas and an OMG for the Gilles.

Kristen on one of Sugar Savvy’s sister sites in the Well-Fed Network, Kids Cuisine, got to these Didits before I did, but I thought I’d share my take on the Chocolate-Vanilla Sundae Bars. Her review gives a great description of exactly what the Didits brand is about. Each serving of the sundae bars (two small bars) contains just 90 calories, 1 gram of saturated fat, and 30% of the recommended daily dose of calcium.

I can understand why Kristen and her kids didn’t like this. From the picture on the wrapper, I expected a chocolate cookie topped with vanilla marshmallow and enrobed in milk chocolate. What’s inside is decidedly different and therefore disappointing. However, I still found it pretty tasty.

The chocolate cookie is chocolatey, chewy, and cookie-esque. Those who have had energy bars/meal replacement bars like those made by Slimfast or Atkins Advantage will recognize the cookie-meets-taffy texture. The “vanilla marshmallow” top is marshmallow-esque - it’s kind of foamy like marshmallows look, but it’s gooey and oozy instead of fluffy. I’d liken it to a corn-syrupy, inferior imitation of a melted marshmallow. The milk chocolate coating tastes like the coating you’d find on a candy bar, which makes sense, as Kid Didits are manufactured by a division of Mars.

At 90 calories per serving, I think these make a good portion-controlled snack. I sometimes eat energy bars in two sittings because their caloric content can get pretty high, so these Didits would be great as a mini energy bar. To compare the Didit sundae bars to sundaes or candy bars, however, is to set them up to disappoint.