ZOMG, Candy!

My father really wanted to go to the Grand Canyon while we were on the West Coast this past winter. I wasn’t a huge fan of losing two days of trip time driving to see a big hole in the ground, but at least I got a package of prickly pear candy from Desert Gatherings out of it.

The prickly pear candy was an unexpectedly soft jelly candy, even softer than a fruit gem, and had no stickiness whatsoever. I was amazing at how giving the texture was. The granulated sugar that coated the prickly pear candy came in large, rather damp grains.

I couldn’t figure out how to precisely describe the taste of the prickly pear fruit. It’s lightly fruity, with a little bit of a berry quality to it. That makes sense, I guess, since prickly pear candy is made from prickly pear berries.

The candy was super sweet, but in a natural, fruity way rather than an artificial, gaggingly sweet manner. As good as it was, I believe it merits an O because once the novelty factor is gone, there’s really no reason to seek it out. I don’t see myself buying it again, but I wouldn’t turn it down if I were offered a piece.

Yes But No But Yes has a list of 5 Gummi Candies that shouldn’t be. I bet eating that strawberry flavored gummi bacon is a mindboggling experience.

In completely unrelated news, this following blurb from my chocolate calendar made me laugh out loud: “In August 2006, Darmin Garcia fell into a vat of molten chocolate goo and was trapped for more than two hours. He was almost chest deep in chocolate, the dark variety.” I think I would’ve attempted to eat my way out.

Speaking of my chocolate calendar, the winner of my chocolate calendar giveaway will be announced Tuesday, and the calendar itself will be mailed out, well, as soon as it arrives in my PO Box. It should have arrived by now, but the campus post office is seriously deluged with people receiving the textbooks that they bought online, so hopefully it’s there, waiting to be processed.

Back in October, my residential college had a fall festival. One of the events was Fear Factor, where contestant had to eat Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, a chili lollipop, snot on a stick (really fat pretzel sticks dipped in white chocolate dyed a nauseating shade of green), and gummy body parts, including teeth, tongues, and these, Googly Eyes. The Googly Eye I stole was cherry flavored.

The people on the packaging have some freaky looking eyes. I can see little kids grabbing two of these, sticking them on their faces, and scaring their little brothers and sisters. The packaging also reveals that these are made by the Foreign Candy Company! I have a special fondness for them, as they made the French Bon Bons I used to sell for French Club and National French Honor Society back in high school and middle school. And by sell, I mean I ended up eating half my bag myself and had to buy them myself because they were so deliciously addictive. I miss Bon Bons…

Sadly, the Gummy Googly Eyes were neither delicious nor addictive. In fact, I couldn’t even finish the one I had. The gummy was very soft, which could have been nice, except that it was also rather foamy and spongy. It also tasted bad: lightly, generically sweet, with no cherry that I could taste. The unflavorful taste combined with the terrible mouthfeel of the texture earned this an O.

I got these adorable Gummy Jingle Buddies from a dining hall at school that had them out for holiday cupcake decorating. They’re billed as “fruit flavored finger puppets” and come in at least four shapes (from what I can tell): penguin, snowman, Rudolph, and Santa. I managed to grab the latter two.

I can’t get over how cute these are! I love the attention to detail, from the stripes on Rudolph’s scarf to Santa’s eyebrows and tongue (though Santa’s eyes are a bit wonky, giving him a rather crazed expression when combined with the stuck out tongue).The delicate details make me wonder if some of the decorating may have been done by hand. The decorative accents are made of sugar and taste like those hard cake decorations you can buy.

The gummy of the Jingle Buddies is super stiff, almost like a hard rubber in texture. You can sort of see the shadow on the bottom of Rudolph where the hole for your finger goes. They do, in fact, make adequate finger puppets because the gummy is so stiff, but that also means that the Jingle Buddies have an unpleasant chew when you eat them. Flavorwise, they’re nice and lightly fruity, but eating them is like chewing on rubber. I’d buy them for decorating holiday treats and gingerbread houses, but they don’t make for great snacking. An O.

I find it so weird that some candy companies feel the need to add adjectives to their flavors. It’s not blue raspberry flavored; it’s ragin’ blue raspberry. Of course, now that I’ve pointed that out, I can’t think of any other examples, but they’re out there! I know they are.

The Hubba Bubba Sour Gummi Tape (BUY!) is a play on their Bubble Tape (BUY!). Aha! That’s where stupid adjective modifiers are popular: Gushing Grape, Lightning Lemonade, Snappy Strawberry, etc. Like Bubble Tape, Gummi Tape comes in a six-foot roll in a plastic dispenser.

I haven’t had Bubble Tape in at least a decade, so I don’t remember how effective the dispenser was for gum, but it doesn’t work very well for the Gummi Tape. It’s serrated edge is too dull for tearing the gummi against, scotch tape style, and closing the dispenser on the tape bypasses the serrated edge and also doesn’t cut the gummi. You have to clamp the dispenser shut, squeeze hard, and pull hard to have any hope of cutting the Gummi Tape so that you can share it. Of course, while you’re doing this, the sugar coating gets everywhere. I found it easier just to bite pieces right off. Boorish, maybe, but Gummi Tape isn’t exactly haute cuisine.

Gummi Tape is similar to the sour belts you can buy out of bulk candy bins, only it’s a little thicker and firmer. The texture was reminiscent of a flattened Sour Patch Kid, so not too bad in the sticks-in-your-teeth-department. The taste was your standard artificially sweetened blue raspberry candy (not one of my favorite flavors, by the way) and not terribly sour. Nothing exceptional or surprising there.

I like gummis, and I liked this enough to be willing to try it in other flavors. Right now it looks like it only comes in Ragin’ Blue Raspberry and Shocking Strawberry, which Cybele reviewed (I laughed inside when I read that she had the same issues with the sugary mess). If they made it in apple or something citrusy, I’d give it another shot.

This only gets an O because Au’somes did the concept way better with their Fruit Juice String. Cybele has a review of that as well (I bought a roll of Fruit Juice String from a sketchy convenience store in Austin before I started this blog, polished it off on the drive home and alas! have yet to come across another one). Here’s the Au’somes website, which distressingly does not mention the Fruit Juice String, but it’s still in their nutrition info pdf, so I hope it’s still being made.

As promised, more Asian candies!

Juice hard candy

I don’t what these guys are actually called - the wrapper just says Juice and has some pictures of fruit on it - but I love them. I realize that’s not very helpful if you want to try to find them yourself, and I apologize. All I remember is that they came in a red bag that was square and rather flat, and I bought it at Asia Market in Austin.

The flavor is difficult to describe; I’d call it a light, citrusy fruit punch that’s the perfect amount of sweet. The texture is perfect, as it’s crunchable and cleaves cleanly if you choose to chomp on it, but it melts beautifully in your mouth if you choose to savor it. Though I’m usually a hard candy chomper, I always try to force myself to savor these because they’re so good, and I usually succeed. An OMG on the ZOMG! scale.

Coco Coll

This coconut milk candy has the look and mouthfeel of a Werther’s Original (BUY!), and it melts and cleaves in the same way. While I have negative to ambivalent feelings towards coconut itself, I love coconut milk, and I love this candy. It’s lightly sweet and milky, with just the hint of coconut essence. Another OMG, if only because it’s managed to undo a lifetime of Mounds induced coconut-candy prejudice. And isn’t the wrapper gorgeous?

Li Hing Sour Patch Kids (BUY!)

These are courtesy of Catherine, my chocolate-hating (!) suitemate from Hawaii, who brought them from, you guessed it, Hawaii. I adore Sour Patch Kids (BUY!), so I was excited to see how the Hawaiian version would stack up.

Visually, the Li Hing version is already at a disadvantage. While regular Sour Patch Kids are bright, glittery, and covered in sugar, these guys are darker and kind of slimy. They’re also not shaped like regular Sour Patch Kids, but I prefer the Li Hing as they make me think of long-haired girls in hula skirts.

The texture is also not that of a real Sour Patch Kid. It’s much too firm, like Dots, and got horribly stuck in my teeth. The Li Hing Hula Girls also aren’t bright and fruity like real Sour Patch Kids, and as far as I can tell, they’re not sour. So basically these candies neither look nor feel nor taste like Sour Patch Kids, which makes me think that the Aloha Gourmet company may be treading on copyright issues, but they seem to be a rather small company, and I certainly don’t want to get them in trouble.

The Li Hing part of the candy is the rather unattractive brown coating (you can kind of see it in first the picture). The taste reminded me of the salty-sweet Asian plum candies my parents love so much, and lo and behold, Wikipedia says that li hing mui is a salty, dried plum (while I speak Mandarin, the name didn’t register because it’s in Cantonese). I don’t mind the li hing taste because I ate it as a kid, but I agree that it’s an acquired taste that not everyone would enjoy.

I think these Li Hing Sour Patch Hula Girls suffer because of the underlying gummi rather than the Li Hing flavor. A quick search shows that other companies seem to make versions using actual Sour Patch Kids, which would probably taste much better and be more texturally pleasing. I like the Li Hing flavor enough to want to try the other kinds of Li Hing coated gummis that I never knew existed. I give these an O for the execution, but I think a version with real Sour Patch Kids or other gummis would warrant an OM. The only logical next step would be to go to Hawaii and taste for myself - for the sake of this blog, of course.

I work in the entomology division of my university’s natural history museum, so when I came across these cute bug-themed candies, I just had to buy them for my boss.

These Bug City Candy Tarts (BUY) are compressed sugar candies that taste like SweeTarts without the tart and with a heavier aftertaste of sugar. The cartoony bug shapes of the candy are quite cute. The reusable bug jar is a nifty marketing tagline, but my boss informed me that any jar can be used to keep bugs in. Even jars without airholes should let enough air in to keep most bugs alive for several weeks.

My boss hasn’t unwrapped these Gooey Yummy Gummy Bugs yet, so I don’t know how they taste. Frankly, they’re a little too realistic looking, and I think the combination of the gummi texture with the grub shape may be more than I can handle.

I thought these Black Forest Fun Bugs Gummies (BUY) were a super cute spin on the gummi bug genre - instead of gummy worms, these are insect shaped gummies with a juicy center.

The gummi part was slightly soft; more Trolli than Haribo. The juicy center was a pleasantly sweet ooze that was a bit runnier and not as sticky as the goo that you’d get inside a Gusher. In my bag, the green gummies had a blue ooze, the yellow gummies had a green ooze, and the dark red gummies had an orange ooze.

The only gummi/ooze flavor combination that didn’t work for me was the yellow gummi with the green ooze. It just didn’t taste good. Otherwise, it’s pretty difficult to distinguish the different flavors and colors because the ooze and gummi blends together. They’re all rather generically sweet and fruity, and I had to eat mine very carefully to try to taste the separate components, and even then I wasn’t that successful. I think the orange ooze was actually orange flavored and the red gummy was strawberry, but my mind may have been fooled into believing that they tasted different. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. These are just fun gummi treats and shouldn’t be dissected as though they’re gourmet delicacies.