ZOMG, Candy!

More Asian candy, including one actually bought in Asia. Oooh!

Japanese Money Chocolate

This chocolate bar was given to me by my suitemate’s Japanese friends who came all the way from Japan to visit her. I have no clue what it’s called; I’ve chosen to dub it Japanese Money Chocolate because it came wrapped up to look like a piece of Japanese paper money and had a fake paperboard piece inside as well. I didn’t get a picture of it before I unwrapped it, but here’s a terrible shot of the wrapper, if you want to take a look.

The bar was quite prettily imprinted with playing card suits. Why, I don’t know, but why not? It was darker and smokier tasting than what I expected, and it was filled with rice crispies, giving it a nice toastiness. It looks rather greasy in the photo (and it was greasy in person), but the chocolate was actually pretty nice, smooth and not at all oily. I ate the whole bar (about the size of a credit card) in one sitting. An OM.

Sanrio Bubble Gum

This bubble gum found me via my friend Cassie, who bought them on a Sanrio store shopping spree. Aren’t the wrappers adorable? I tasted the green one: Chibimaru kiwi fruit. The gum also comes in other flavors (raspberry, lemon, orange), which I didn’t taste.

The gum came in three attached but breakable segments and was snow white. I expected it to be green like the wrapper or like kiwis, but whatever. It was lightly sweet and fruity with a velvety texture, almost fuzzy on my tongue. An interesting textural sensation with a nice, light flavor. I’d give this gum an O. The flavor lasted for an annoying short time, and because the gum came from the Sanrio store, it was probably overpriced.

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 it weird that I got really excited to see this gum that tastes like chicken? It was bizarre enough to be intriguing, and I was already imagining how I could casually brag about my brave willingness to try chicken-flavored gum.

Upon closer inspection however, disappointment. Cinnamon. Yummy, but in this context, boring. Cassie was disappointed to, as she bought it for me because she knew that I would be adventurous enough to try chicken flavored gum. Chicken gum is novel and interesting. Cinnamon gum is banal. False advertising! Fine print! Another candy packaging foul!

The little box contained 8 pieces of Chiclet shaped gum, with a characteristically hard sugar shell around the actual gum. The gum was super strong! It was almost eye-wateringly spicy and tingly, and the tingling sensation lingers. I chewed a single piece, which yielded a ridiculously minuscule amount of actual gum, but I didn’t dare pop more pieces in my mouth. If that lone, tiny piece could set my taste buds on fire, two or three pieces would probably be unbearable.

As far as gum goes, it’s pretty good cinnamon-flavored gum, and those who really like spicy, cinnamon candies would probably like its strong flavor. However, because each piece yields such a tiny amount of gum and because the advertising is deliberately misleading, it warrants only an O in my book. I’ll stick with buying just normal cinnamon gum.

Here’s where I let my personal life creep into my candy blog, as promised in my opening post. I’m so excited about today’s home opener! Go Bulldogs! Yay football!

Let’s make this candy related: We’re playing Cornell, aka the Big Red. Big Red is also the name of a cinnamon gum that I hated as a kid because it was so spicy. Now that I’m old enough to appreciate cinnamon gum, I wonder if I’d like it… Must buy Big Red gum for a taste test soon.

Ta da! Everything in life can be tied to candy!

update: We won, as expected. Final score, not so expected: 51-12.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I got quite the 5 gum package from Wrigley (BUY!) via BzzAgent. The BzzGuide booklet that came with it was far more elaborate that I expected. Some excerpts:

• “Comes in stick form, which is the most popular.”
• “Because of its distinct design, you can open the pack with just one hand…”
• “Each flavor of 5 has a different set of ingredients referred to as ’sensates.’… These flavor ingredients stimulate nerve endings in the mouth that signal to the brain that there’s a cooling, tingling, or warming feeling. It’s the same nerve that signals when there’s an actual temperature difference, so… a ’sensate’ … fires the same nerve endings that triggers the perception of coolness.”
• And my personal favorite: “Play RFC with friends… Rain puts out Flare, Flare melts Cobalt, and Cobalt freezes Rain. You can find it on 5gum.com…”

Goodness, Wrigley’s marketing people! Overkill much? You have to admit though, their marketing people sure earned their keep. And the packaging design is pretty slick. Apparently there are little 5s on the package that glow under black lights, and, sure enough, I can open it with just one hand. I also like the added touch of the embossed 5s on the foil wrapper. Snazzy all over!

To recap thus far, the packaging is cool, the names are corny, and the marketing is… thorough and eager. But how does it taste?

Pretty good. Not amazing, but serviceable. An OM, mostly because I’m a sucker for the package design. The flavor does last for a long time. A piece of Cobalt (peppermint) that I popped before lecture had about half an hour of flavor and over an hour of cooling ’sensate’ power. Unfortunately, in the last half hour of just sensate, the gum got rather unbearable. Aside from continuing to make my mouth minty and cool, it was like any piece of Wrigley’s stick gum that’s lost its flavor - rubbery in taste and texture - which was distracting. Up until that point, though, it was decent gum, if not revelatory.

Flare (cinnamon) was not cinnamon-y enough for my taste, but it did earn bonus points for its long-lasting flavor and resilient heat ’sensates.’ When I paid attention and sought it out, I did notice a little artificial sweetener aftertaste, but the flavor and ’sensates’ are pretty effective at masking that unpleasantness.

Rain (spearmint) was surprising good. I don’t usually chew spearmint gum, but I’ve smelled it before, so I thought I had an idea of how it should taste. Rain was sweeter than I expected. It also had the weakest ’sensates’ of the bunch. While the wrapper promised a tingling spearmint, I got more mint than tingle. Still, I enjoyed it and its lovely pale green color.

While stick gum may be the most popular, I prefer smaller, softer pieces of gum like Orbit, which is also owned by Wrigley’s. When Orbit loses its flavor, it’s still soft and can still be texturally pleasing to chew. 5 got too stiff and yicky after extensive chewing.

Still, if you like stick gum or like looking trendy, 5 gum should be a good buy. Just pulling out the packaging will probably draw you attention. You’ll have to feel silly talking about ’sensates’ and Flare, Cobalt, and Rain as flavors, but hey, it looks cool!

And you don’t even have to buy the gum to try it, as I am giving away a pack of Cobalt and a pack of Rain. I also have three Buy 1 Get 1 Free coupons. Leave a comment here or in the previous 5 gum post with your email address (only I can see it) by tomorrow, September 22. If several people enter, I’ll do a drawing. If not so many people enter, everybody wins!

EDIT: This contest is now closed.

I got this pretty sweet package in the mail from BzzAgent for their new 5 gum promotion.

It’s enough gum to keep me chewing for a while, so I thought I’d share it with the rest of the world. I’ve opened the Flare (cinnamon) already, but I’ll give away the Cobalt (peppermint), Rain (spearmint), and the Buy 1 Get 1 Free coupons. Just leave a comment with your email address (Only I will be able to see it, and I promise not to send you spam) by Saturday, September 22. If several people enter, I’ll do a drawing. If not that many people enter, then everyone wins! Unless you live outside of the U.S., in which case I can’t afford to mail you gum. Leslie is an exception to this rule, because she is awesome.

I’ll try to have a review of this gum up next week. Right now, I’m chewing a piece of Flare (I feel like such an idiot, calling my gum Flare flavored), and it’s pretty good. I’ve been chewing for a while, and the flavor is still going strong.

I personally rather like the ad campaign that Stride (BUY!) has been running. The commercials I’ve seen revolve around the company and those that sell it going out of business because the flavor lasts so long that people don’t need to buy new packs.

The packaging is like that of Dentyne’s soft gum, which makes sense because they’re made by the same company. It’s clever. You can finish the bottom flap’s worth of gum, tear it off, and still reseal the rest of your pack in the top half’s notch.

The Forever Fruit flavor smells delicious - sweet and citrus-y and quite appetizing. If only it tasted as good as it smells! It’s rather generically fruity, and that generic flavor isn’t bad; it’s just nothing to crow about. After a bit, the fruity flavor degrades into a faint artificial sweetness that lasts for a long time. I chewed my way through the movie Superbad, and the flavor made it pretty much the whole way through the movie. That long-lasting flavor, however, isn’t exactly one that’s enjoyable for an extended period of time.

I’d like to try the other flavors of Stride that maybe won’t taste so much of aspartame. It also comes in sweet peppermint, winterblue (which I assume is wintergreen), and spearmint, but alas, no cinnamon yet. For my fruit flavored soft gum needs, I’ll stick to Orbit (I particularly like their raspberry mint).

“First it’s candy…Then it’s gum!” is the Razzles (BUY!) tagline. And indeed, it starts out as candy and ends up as gum. Unfortunately, it is not a very tasty incarnation of either food group.

The Tropical Razzles flavors, according to the wrapper, are pineapple, strawberry-banana, tropical punch, tangerine, and kiwi-lime. All that matters is that they all taste and feel like a Flintstones vitamin. They’re grainy with that weird undertaste that reminds me a little of the taste of blood. Mmm. Blood.

The flavors don’t last very long in the candy form, and the gum form just tastes oddly generically sweet. The texture of the gum is also too stiff to be a pleasant chew.

The Razzle transition from candy to gum is bizarre. It breaks apart, then resolidifies itself. Kinda cool. If only it were also palatable.

I am Asian, so you will be reading about a lot of Asian candy. Consider this part I of an open-ended series.

Lotte Cafe Coffee chewing gum

This gum tasted like weak coffee with too much sugar and cream. The flavor didn’t last very long, and once it was gone, the gum took on an unpleasant taste and texture. I was not a fan, but my mother, who likes her coffee weak with lots of sugar and cream, loved it. Go figure.

Meiji Apollo strawberry/chocolate thingies BUY

These little cones are adorable and delicious. It may be hard to tell from the picture, but they’re about the size of a peanut, sans shell. The pink top is strawberry (I think it may be flavored white chocolate), while the brown bottom is milk chocolate. The texture is wonderfully creamy, and the sweet strawberries ‘n’ cream smell is incredible. I’m a dark chocolate lover and usually find milk and white chocolate to be too sweet for my taste. These candies are on the sweet side, but I don’t find them offensive or cloying at all. Interestingly enough, they may be named after NASA’s Apollo command module.

Ramune Soda Fizzy Candy BUY

I polished these guys off at the restaurant, so I apologize for the poor photo from Amazon.com. The candies are snow white in color and look kind of like pills. Size-wise, they’re like fat Tart N Tinys. Taste-wise, they taste like Ramune soda, which can be found at any Asian grocery store. Ramune soda bottles have a very distinct shape. The bottles are stoppered with marbles. To open the soda, you break the seal and push the marble into the bottle’s uniquely shaped neck, where it rattles around while you drink the soda. The fizzy candy makers have tried to emulate the bottle’s shape with their plastic container, a design note that I appreciate.

Ramune soda (and, by correlation, ramune soda candy) is supposed to be lemonade flavored. I find the taste to be more of a generically crisp citrus flavor, which is quite enjoyable, if unremarkable. The fizzy part of the candies is far less noticeable than that of the Jones Soda candies, but the Ramunes taste much better and have no lingering aftertaste. The citrus flavor isn’t that strong, but it doesn’t have to compete with an overpoweringly sweet sugar flavor, so the citrus really comes through. The compressed sugar Ramunes are also slightly softer than the Jones candies, somewhere between a Sweet Tart and a Smartie.

I would definitely buy the Apollo candies again, and the Ramune candies are maybe worth another taste in the future. As for the coffee gum, I’ve given the rest of the pack to my mother. Good riddance.

Edit 09/05: The Apollo strawberry candies are worth a ZOMG!, the Ramune candies an OM, and the gum just an O.