ZOMG, Candy!

I receive press release emails fairly frequently. The one that I got from Das foods was more eye-catching then most. Read for yourself:

“What’s your flava?  Man Bait, Naughty Ginger, Fab-O-Pom or Caramel Me Happy? They may sound like names you’d have if you worked for an “escort” service, but they are not. Instead, they’re the inspired flavors of Das Foods’ chic and unique new brand of delicious lollipops that will launch nationally next week at the All Candy Expo in Chicago, May 19-21.”

I gave these babies a test drive on my drive from New Haven to Rochester. They definitely helped keep me awake with their extreme lollipop flavor novelty. That’s also why the remaining photos are courtesy of Das, as I couldn’t photograph them while on the road. As an added bonus, I tasted them without access to the press release materials (quoted below in italics), so I didn’t know what I was eating while I ate it.

Fab-O-Pom: “A pomegranate and orange lolli that’s good and good for you.  It’s a sweet and tangy fusion of heart-healthy real pomegranate extract and fragrant orange oil with tiny pieces of orange zest.”

The lolli is a pale, translucent salmon flecked with bits of brown. It smells strongly of orange. The flavor is deep citrus, like a blood orange, while the finish has a bit of a bite to it, probably due to the pomegranate component. The brown flecks eventually wind up studding the surface as the lolli melts. They taste like bits of fruit leather or candied orange peel. I like this, despite the two air bubbles it contained. An OM.

Caramel Me Happy: “A caramel and lavender lolli made with caramelized cane sugar and indulgent chewy Das Salty Caramel mixed with real lavender extract and tiny crystals of Fleur De Sel sea salt for a trendy, delicious sweet and salty treat.”

This smells just like a salted caramel. It’s reminiscent of a deeper, more complex butterscotch candy with burnt sugar notes. The lollipop itself is not perfectly smooth; rather, it’s very finely textured. I enjoy the salted caramel flavor, but I’m a bit thrown by the mismatch between texture and taste. I wish I could chew this lollipop! I’d much rather have a Das salted caramel, so an O.

Naughty Ginger: “A ginger and lemon lolli that’s sweet, tangy and tantalizingly spicy all at once.  Small bits of wickedly spicy candied ginger are complemented by all-natural lemon extract.  And the ginger works double time; it tastes great AND soothes an upset stomach!”

Whoo boy is the ginger smell strong! This lolli is super, super gingery and super, super spicy. I got in a few licks, just enough to note the strong ginger flavor with a very light, sweet undertone of lemon, but couldn’t keep eating it because it was just too spicy for me. It left my mouth tingling. I’m a ginger wuss, so this guy wasn’t for me, but I bet ginger enthusiasts would appreciate it. A –.

Man Bait: “A maple bacon lolli that’s a fiercely delicious combination of real smoky bacon bits and delicious maple syrup providing an all-at-once savory and sweet sensation.”

Like the Naughty Ginger, this lollipop was too much flavor for me to handle. It smells like maple syrup with a hint of meat undertone. That’s pretty much how it tastes as well. It’s pretty sweet from the strong maple sugar flavor, and that plus the smoky meatiness from the bacon bits and the lollipop nature/hard candy texture does not compute in my brain. I felt a bit ill and couldn’t keep eating it. A – from me.

Out of all four lollipops, Fab-O-Pom is the only one that I would want to eat again. They are all, however, a fine flavor effort. They taste exactly as promised, and the flavors are strong, vibrant, and concentrated. While the ginger and bacon pops weren’t for me, ginger and bacon enthusiasts would enjoy them, making those the pops a great novelty gift. And at $0.50 a pop (har har), they’re an affordable gift as well.

In addition to Monday’s Junior Mints Deluxe, Tootsie Roll also sent me a case of their Tootsie Pop Drops. I have a special fondness for Tootsie Pops - I once got a bad case of the flu when I was a kid, and my mom bought me a whole bag of Tootsie Pops to entice me to get better. These days, I’m less into Tootsie Pops, but I still enjoy them.

Tootsie Pop Drops are billed as Tootsie Pops without the stick, and that’s pretty much what they are, only they’re smaller than Tootsie Pops without sticks would actually be. They’re little hard candies, about cough drop sized, with a “chewy Tootsie Roll center.” The come in standard Tootsie Pop flavors: chocolate, cherry, blue raspberry, orange, and grape. The first bag I opened had no cherry ones, which is why there are no red drops in the photo below. Incidentally, I’m a big fan of the semi-recent addition of lemon-lime Tootsie Pops and a bit sad that lemon-lime didn’t make it into the Tootsie Pop Drops.

I feel like I’m too inured to Tootsie Pops to really discuss their flavors. Chocolate is a weird pseudo-chocolate, kind of like Tootsie Rolls taste like a weird-pseudo chocolate, but I’m so used to it that I’ll eat it anyway. Orange is sweet and citrusy and my favorite of the bunch, and grape and blue raspberry are just there. I’ll eat them in the Pop Drop form, mostly because they’re in the bag, but I skip them when I pick out Tootsie Pops.

The drops are so small that they’re easy to crunch up, mixing the hard candy shell with the chewy Tootsie Roll innards. I’m an impatient hard candy cruncher, so I liked the Tootsie Pops specifically because they forced you to let the candy melt. While the Pop Drops lose that feature, they are nicely portable and portioned.

These get an O from me, but a nice one. I’m the type who won’t turn down a Tootsie Pop if I come across one in a Kiddie Mix or something, but I won’t seek them out to buy (though that’s mostly because I have so much candy that I only buy candy I’ve never before had).

I love Altoid’s Sours, and I will eat them until my tongue goes numb. When I saw that Walgreen’s sold a knock-off version called Zip Sours for $1 a tin, about half to a third the cost of Altoid’s Sours, I decided to give them a try. After all, they were cheap, so there wasn’t much to lose.

The Zip Sours came in “black cherry” and “orange splash”. Never mind that one of the halved oranges on the “orange splash” tin looks more like a grapefruit.

I found the Zip Sours to be lacking in both zip and sour. Orange splash had a bright, citrusy flavor and presented a reasonable imitation of Altoid’s Tangerine Sours, just without the sour part. My orange splash sours were also a bit damp, despite the foil seal under the Zip Sour tin lid. I should note, however, that I find the same issue cropping up with Altoid Sours, where the candies tend to stick and clump a bit due to dampness.

Black cherry was less yummy, as it carried a dark, medicinal tinge to it, though at least my black cherry candies were nice and dry, as hard candies should be. Still, flavor-wise, I didn’t care for them.

The Zip Sours tins are slightly smaller than those of the Altoid’s Sours, but I still think you get more candy for your money. I give black cherry an O and orange splash an OM. While they aren’t that sour, the orange splash flavor was nice, and I ate so many of them in a row that my mouth eventually went numb. Apparently there’s some sour there after all; it’s just not that noticeable to the palate.

Today we continue Monday’s review of British hard candies with a lemon sherbet drop and the rosy apple.

Lemon Sherbet Drop

My lemon sherbet drop wasn’t exactly a hard candy anymore. I think mine had just been sitting in the bulk bin for a bit too long and suffered by softening. It tasted pretty much just like a standard lemon drop, but it also had a light fizziness to it, which was quite nice. I wish lemon drops came with that nice fizziness. An OM.

Rosy Apple

I loved the rosy apple mostly because it looks like a mini bouncy ball, the kind that comes out of those little vending machines for a quarter. The candy was super dense and hard with a slow melt and a mellow red apple flavor rather than a sour granny smith taste. Another OM, though I probably would’ve given it just an O had they not been so pretty.

British boiled sweets have interested me since I first read a Harry Potter book. Clearly the Fizzing Whizbees and acid pops imagined by J.K. Rowling had some root in muggle candy. Specifically British muggle candy. Today, I present part I of a two part series on British boiled sweets (aka hard candies).

Acid Drops

I had no idea what to expect from the acid drops I bought. Do they taste like battery acid? Citric acid? Not really like acid at all? In fact, the opaque butterscotch-sized disks tasted lightly of a ctirus sweetness. The best word I can come up with to describe these is clean. They’re cleansing and refreshing, like a light sorbet. If you’ve ever had a Chinese popsicle called a xue bing, they taste just like that. An OM.

Lime and chocolate

Lime and chocolate? It sounds like a strange flavor combination, but these guys were pretty ubiquitous in the British bulk candy places that I visited, and they’re made by several generic brands. I thought they tasted like the hard candy version of a lime and chocolate Tootsie Roll mash-up. The lime was brightly sweet and citrusy while the chocolate was more of a light cocoa. My lime and chocolate may have been lingering in the bulk bin for too long, for when I crunched it, it turned chewy, in the way that old hard candies can get. Overall, not a bad candy, but not something I missed or would ever crave. An O.

More reviews from the ginormous box of Russian candy sent by my friend Leslie nearly a year ago. Don’t worry; the tasting was done back when they were more fresh out of the box (though I still have a few remnants of her box left).

Candy “Korovka”(Little Cow)

What I called “Cow Caramel,” this was caramel-flavored candy that tastes of mildly sweet caramel but has the texture of something completely different. It was grainy and broke up in my mouth, almost like a fudge, but not as creamy. The taste/texture disparity threw me a bit, and I found it overly sweet. An O.

“Ptich’ya slast” (Bird’s Enjoyment) and “Raiskaya Penka” (Heavenly Song)

This candy was WEIRD! It had a spongy marshmallow center surrounded by chocolate shell. The texture of marshmallow is terrible! The red version (left) had a weird aftertaste - definitely not of vanilla - that made me feel ill. Like nauseated ill. There were these weird sugar granules between chocolate and marshmallow that didn’t help matters. I don’t know if those were supposed to be there or if they were a product of the various temperature changes this candy went through.

The brown-checked version (right) was slightly better. The texture of the marshmallow was less spongy, but it still fell short of being pillowy. Thankfully, this had no weird aftertaste and no sugar grains, but I still didn’t enjoy it. Another O.

Mocha Hard Candies

These individually wrapped lovely hard candies had gorgeous light and dark brown swirls, like a Cream Saver. The coffee taste was strong and definitely present, but it wasn’t at all bitter. Also like a Cream Saver, the candy had a light, creamy finish. It cleaved cleanly, which of course meant I was chomping it to death. I’m not a big fan of coffee flavored candy, but my mother is, and she’d love this. An OM.

Another Asian treat sent as a free review sample by Asian Food Grocer. I was given free reign to pick what I wanted. In addition to pineapple Hi-Chew, I asked for Flower’s Kiss Candy because I was intrigued by the name. Would the Flower’s Kiss Candy taste like flowers? Thankfully, nope.

The Flower’s Kiss Candy turned out to be a sweet, fruity hard candy. Though it comes in a large assortment of prettily decorated wrappers, they’re all the same - a bumpy pink/red hard candy. It dissolved smoothly but also crunched up nicely and cleaved cleanly, a plus for me since I’m impatient and chomp on my hard candies.

Flavorwise, the Flower’s Kiss Candies reminded me of the Asian Juice candy I’ve previously reviewed. It’s lightly sweet and fruit-punchy, with an almost floral peach high note to its flavor. If it makes any sense, this particular candy’s peach flavor makes me think of fat pink Asian calligraphy peaches rather than the usual yellow/red peaches. An OM from me. I’m glad I asked for these from Asian Food Grocer; I’d seen it on the shelves of Asian grocery stores before but had never dared buy it in case it tasted like flowers. Yay for free samples!

My friends Nana and Justin have been living and teaching English in Korea for I think a year and a half now? I’ve been following their adventures in Asia through their blog, in which they’ve done a great job of chronicling the different cuisines they’ve had the opportunity to try.  They also ran a few features involving themselves drinking weird stuff. They were kind enough to send me a package of candy, and though there were no weird drinks, there was the weirdly named “Crunch Ball Crispy Candy.”

Methinks the name lost something in translation. The bag made the candy look like peanut flavored hard candy. The crunch part could refer to the hard candy, and the ball clearly refers to the shape… but what makes it crispy? I usually associate crispy with chips and fried things, not candy. Hmm…

It turns out that these candies are basically little balls of peanut brittle. Heavy on the brittle, light on the peanut, which is great for me, as I hate getting bits of peanuts stuck in my teeth (which is also why I’m not a big fan of nuts in candy in general). They cleave just like traditional brittle does, and like traditional brittle, it sort of gets packed in the molars. The peanut bits are pretty small, but they definitely bring their nuttiness to the ball. The prominence of the brittle makes these fairly sweet but not so sweet that I couldn’t eat more than one in a row.

Flavorwise and texturewise and conveniencewise, these guys are great, and they get an OMG from me. Thanks, Nana and Justin!

Nestle Choco Milo

A tiny cube of chocolate cookie - the densest, crunchiest tiny cube of chocolate cookie I’ve ever had. It was super hard, and it only got away with being so nearly impossible to crunch because it was about 1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm. Though tiny, the Choco Milo is delicious. Its chocolate flavor is reminiscent of that of hot cocoa, and it strikes a perfect bittersweet balance. OMG. Unfortunately, I grabbed this one out of a dish at a party of an acquaintance and have no idea where to find more.

Kasugai hard candy

Kusugai (BUY!) makes a lot of great Asian candies; their gummies are especially popular and deliciously faithful to their fruits’ taste. From my first quick glance at the wrapper of these Kasugai hard candies, I expected these to be a mix of individually wrapped candies of different flavors. A pineapple here, an apple there, a… bell pepper? Wait. There are vegetables on the wrapper too! My Chinese reading skills are nearly nonexistent, but I do recognize the second character as one that usually means “vegetable”.

These pleasantly light and sweet candies were all the same color - orange - and all the same difficult to pin down flavor. I definitely tasted pineapple; the bell pepper, not so much. I’d describe these as V8 Splash (BUY!) flavored candy. Again, they were pleasant enough, but not something I’d want to eat again and again. Just an O, but a positive one.

Mikakuto Tokuno Japanese Milk Candy

I didn’t know what these were called but managed to stumble across them on Amazon (BUY!). The cow and barn motif (which I find adorable, by the way) match up, so I think it’s safe to assume they’re the same candy.

I think I’ve yet to meet an Asian milk candy (BUY!) I didn’t like. To me, they’re all pretty much the same. They’ve all been a milky, creamy vanilla, but such a delicious vanilla, with that extra bit of vanilla essence oomph that elevates it to the next level. That oomph is difficult to describe. It’s like the difference between generic vanilla ice cream and the best homemade vanilla ice cream (oh Blue Bell, why haven’t you made it to New England yet?) you’ve ever had. Which makes this way better than a vanilla Tootsie Roll. In this particular brand of milk candy, the vanilla flavor is more that of vanilla extract than vanilla bean, but it still works! An OM.

I’ve been wanting to try Zotz (BUY!) ever since I read about them on Candy Addict. As is the case with most retro candies, they’re rarely as good as their reviews claim they are. Nostalgia is a powerful force for inducing bias. But, while Zotz are no candy revelation, they were still pretty good and definitely worth their pretty cheap price. I bought a bunch when I was at Economy Candy, where they were 12 for $0.75 (they come in strings of 4, and I think those were 3 for $0.75), if I remember correctly.

Economy Candy had them in cherry, watermelon, and green apple. Some pictures on Amazon seem to suggest a lemon flavor that may be floating around somewhere, but I think if lemon existed, Economy Candy would’ve had them.

The watermelon was sweet and fruity - different from the usual Jolly Rancher hard candy-style of watermelon flavor, but good.

The cherry Zotz was darker than the watermelon, both in color and in taste. Interestingly enough, as you can see from the picture, it was more pink than red. Like the watermelon, the cherry was different from the usual Jolly Rancher hard candy-style flavor. Unlike the watermelon, it wasn’t exactly pleasantly different. I can’t put my finger on why; no cough drop cherry taste issues or anything like that. I’m not a huge fan of red candies, so that may have been part of it.

The apple was a smooth and creamy green apple taste that was a dead ringer for the Jones Soda Candy that I tried a while back. The apple Zotz was better than the Jones Soda Candy due to its creaminess and its awesome fizz factor.

Zotz are all very smooth in taste and texture and contain an ample amount of fizz. The fizz is supposed to be sour, but I found it not so much sour as “burns your throat”. But in a good way, believe it or not. Unlike the Jones Soda Candy, the Zotz fizz is really in your face (or on your tongue, I guess) and leaves you foaming in the mouth. It’s a pretty awesome mouthfeel experience. I loved giving these to my friends, not telling them what Zotz are, and watching their surprised but pleased reactions to the fizz.

The candy itself doesn’t taste extraordinarily good, but the fizz component elevates Zotz to an OM.