ZOMG, Candy!

These Brookside Dark Chocolate candies were free samples that I picked up at Sweets and Snacks. I got mini bags of their Dark Chocolate Acai with Blueberry, Dark Chocolate Pomegranate, and Dark Chocolate Goji with Raspberry, which I’ve previously reviewed.

All of these were little discs of flat jelly candies coated in dark chocolate. Some of those jelly discs were placed back to back to make full spheres, while others were left as little half spheres.

Dark Chocolate Acai with Blueberry may be the same product as Trader Joe’s Powerberries, which I’ve also previously reviewed. If they are the same, I was wrong about the Powerberries being abnormally-shaped Brookside candies, as the Brookside candies were similarly variable in size.

The dark chocolate coating was slightly grainy with a mild sweetness. Their centers had a mellow blueberry flavor that was jammy, like blueberry preserves.

While the fruitiness was nicely light and sweet, it wasn’t bright enough to cut through the sweetness of the chocolate. This was my least favorite of the three Brookside products, so an O.

Dark Chocolate Pomegranate’s center tasted more of cranberry juice than pomegranate. Like the Goji with Raspberry, its bright fruity sweetness really nicely cut through the chocolate, making it a harmonious flavor pairing.

I think the Goji with Raspberry are my favorite Brookside flavor, but the Pomegranate ones come in a close second. They’re just a tad more tannic. An OM.

Buddy Fruits was one of my saviors at Sweets and Snacks. After entire days of gorging on candy samples, their fruit pouches of blended fruit (basically apple+other fruits sauce in portable format) were a health preserver in a sea of sugar and salt.

In addition to free samples of their blended fruit pouches, which I ate while I at the Expo, I also got free samples of their Fruit Bites – little pouches of fruit gummis that were all natural, preservative free, and made only from fruit.

All of my Fruit Bites came in resealable, single-flavor 1 oz pouches. The Bites were soft with an instant give and no bounciness, similar to fruit pate but without the grain.

They reminded me of fruit leather, only in moist, gummified form. The colors were similar to those of fruit leather as well, deep purple-blacks and orange-browns that were clearly natural rather than due to artificial colors.

It meant that they didn’t make for super glam photos. I was nearly done with the photoshoot when I realized that the Bites were molded to look like their mascot’s face.

Pomegranate & Acai’s pouch contained 7 slices of apples and a pomegranate (I’m doubtful that’s a whole pomegranate, but it would be silly to say that it contained 48 arils or something). It tasted intensely of bright, sweet apple, and finished with a tannic edge of pomegranate juice, though if you told me it was cranberry, I would’ve believed you.

Raspberry’s pouch had 16 raspberries and 7 apple slices. The apple flavor here was less noticeable here – the seedy flavor of fresh raspberries dominated, which I enjoyed.

Banana had 10 slices of banana and 7 apples. It smelled strongly of overripe banana and tasted liked it smelled before yielding to the sweet intensity of the apples.

This was my least favorite. Though the banana flavor was genuine, it was almost too much so. I don’t like overripe bananas, and the Banana Bites just made me think of that half-mushed banana you dig out of the bottom of your backpack because you forgot you shoved it in there last week.

Apple’s pouch claimed 10 slices of apple. It packed a concentrated punch of apple cider sweetness into each little Bite.

Finally, orange (8 orange slices and 7 apple slices) was my favorite. It started off tasting just like a glass of orange juice before yielding to the bitter edge of zest and orange oil. I’m not sure how much little kids would like it, but I appreciated its complex capture of a real orange’s flavor nuances.

I was super impressed at how intense each Bite was. I felt satisfied eating just a few at a time because they packed so much flavor. Apple and orange were my favorites and get OMs and  Raspberry and Pomegranate & Acai get Os.

Banana gets an O as well – I didn’t like it, but I respect what it was going for, and I think people who really like bananas probably would like the Banana Bite as well.

Jelly Belly was promoting their new line of Snapple-flavored jelly beans at Sweets and Snacks. I picked up several free little sample bags while there and later got a larger free bag in the mail from the folks at Jelly Belly.

The five flavors are fruit punch, kiwi strawberry, mango madness, cranberry raspberry, and pink lemonade. While my bag had all five flavors mixed together, they also come in little bottle-shaped single-flavor containers.

Fruit Punch was dark purple. It started with notes of plum, then became slightly tart before mellowing out. I was pleasantly surprised at how it had a distinctively non-Hawaiian Punch flavor.

Kiwi Strawberry was a mottled pink. It started with the spot-on flavor of strawberry, then took on grassier notes of kiwi. This is one of my go-to Snapple flavors, so I know it well. The jelly bean version was more nuanced than the drink!

Mango Madness was orange. It started with a seedy-mango flavor that then took on some slight tartness. It then become sugary sweet and finished with a plasticky note that I wasn’t a fan of.

Cranberry Raspberry was a dark maroon/red. It tasted like lightly sweetened cranberry juice and had a slight raspberry seediness to the finish. That seedy factor ain’t my thing, but it was a nice representation of what you’d expect cranberry raspberry to be.

Finally, pink lemonade was a translucent pink with no mottles. It had a nice mild lemon flavor to start with a bit of tartness and just a hint of zest around the edge before finishing with a cane sugar sweetness.

These were a nice assortment of flavors with the high quality that you’d expect from Jelly Belly. Nothing too exotic or unexpected, but a solid spin-off/brand partnership. An O.

Cybele reviewed these back in April, if you want a second opinion.

Jelly Belly recently sent me several free samples of their new products, including a bag of Sunkist Fruit Gems. Wait a second, you may be thinking – what’s new about Sunkist Fruit Gems? Rosa, you took a picture of some back in 2007!

Turns out Fruit Gems are new again. Since Jelly Belly bought the Sunkist line, they revamped it to make it with all natural ingredients. Consequently, their colors are now far more muted without artificial help.

The all natural Fruit Gems come in orange, lemon, grapefruit, raspberry, and blueberry. My bag of 9 was missing the raspberry flavor. Any mathematicians out there want to report on the probability of that happening?

The Fruit Gems retained their original texture – a soft fruit-pate with a granulated sugar shell. It yielded instantly to my bite, and its exposed surfaces were perfectly smooth, with a glossy feel on my tongue.

Orange was mildly sweet with a mellow candied orange flavor that lacked any zesty bite or citrus sourness. Compared to the Sunkist Orange Slices, which I also got as free samples, it was rather muted in flavor.

Lemon had a bright citrus zestiness and a postively tangy lemon flavor. There was a slight bitterness to the finish that I really enjoyed, as it made the flavor feel more genuine.

Grapefruit was pink and tasted just like grapefruit with its characteristic pithiness. Here, too, the finish had an enjoyable bitterness to it.

Finally, the maroon gem was blueberry. Its flavor was more like blueberry jam or that blueberry-ish stuff that they’ll put on your pancakes at IHOP: blueberry-esque rather than like the fresh fruit. It had a deep red fruit flavor and some noticeable tannins.

I enjoyed the lemon and grapefruit flavored ones. Blueberry was decent, and orange was nice but could have been punchier. Overall, I think they still get an OM, though I should note these also come individually wrapped in bulk bins, so you can pick and choose your favorite flavors.

If you want a second opinion, you can read Cybele’s take on them on her site.

This week I’ll be reviewing some candies that I picked up at a local Hispanic grocery store. First up are Ricolino’s Moritas Sour Gummies, which the bag describes as “pectin gummies with artificial blackberry and strawberry flavors [sic] sugar dots.”

At first glance, they looked like standard raspberry/blackberry gummi candies, though these were strawberry rather than raspberry. In fact, I found them to be better than other versions that I’ve had!

The sugar dots on the outside were what made these stand out. They were little balls of compressed sugar that crumbled into a burst of bright fruity, slightly sour flavor into my mouth. They carried all the flavor punch.

The soft jelly center had the instant give of fruit pate and a perfectly smooth texture. There was no chewy sproing that the gummi descriptor led me to expect.

The dark black/purple ones reminded me of currant flavors but without any tannic bite. The red ones had a lighter, more floral note and was like a sour strawberry.

These were nicely flavorful and tart. I’d buy them again if I needed a sweet pick-me-up. An OM.

Three words: bacon jelly beans.

Oh I’m sorry, you wanted more than that? Okay. I got a free sampler box of David’s Signature Beyond Gourmet Jelly Beans (available online from Amazon/Oregon Trail Foods), and it included a bacon flavor. Which I will review last to make sure you keep reading.

The David behind the beans is the David Klein who invented Jelly Belly beans but sold his share of the company before they got big. Like their Jelly Belly counterparts, the Beyond Gourmet beans are packed with flavor in the shell and the jelly center.

I’m going off my Jelly Belly memory here, as I didn’t have any handy for a direct comparison, but I think the Beyond Gourmet beans were softer in texture.

I could easily squish them between my fingers. As I chewed them, the jelly center consolidated into a soft, grainy mush that was vibrant and full of flavor.

Black cherry was sweet and brightly fruity with just a hint of tartness and not a whiff of medicinal notes.

Blueberry did an incredible job of capturing the essence of real blueberries, like blueberry yogurt without the dairy notes and with the tartness turned up.

Coconut was sweet to start, then took on the light creaminess of coconut milk. I didn’t get any nuttiness, but the flavor was pleasant enough, though I felt it was too mild and faded into sugary sweetness too quickly.

Cranberry was sweet and juicy and tart and tangy. I actually would’ve pegged it as pomegranate, as it lacked the tannic bite of cranberry. Either way, it was enjoyably flavorful.

Ginger was incredibly strong and nicely captured ginger’s spicy bite. It was really true to form, like eating raw ginger, and I found it too intense to finish.

Grape went the familiar popsicle route but managed to keep it sweet and fruity but not medicinal (though rather artificial).

Green apple was lightly tart with a grassy note that danced on its edge and set it apart from the standard Jolly Rancher take on green apple.

Himalyan sea salt was a strange choice for a flavor and was weird in execution. It was mostly sweet with just a tinge of saltiness. I was too scared to embrace the oddness and didn’t try too hard to finish it.

Lemon started like a lemon drop with a bright sourness. Then, it took on a edge of zestiness with just a smidge of pithy bitterness. It was wonderfully complex and my favorite of the bunch.

Orange punch tasted just like orange soda. The flavor was spot on, artificial sweetness and all.

Peach tasted like a peach gummi ring rather than the real fruit. It was intense and fruity, if rather artificial.

Pomegranate had a mild floral sweetness, then became tart and tangy with a tannic edge. It had an effervescence to the flavor (not actual bubbles) that was awesome.

Root beer was intense: strong and genuinely sassafrassy with a bitter edge. It was too much for me, but real root beer lovers would enjoy it.

Strawberry was neither mild nor floral. It had an intensity to its flavor, like strawberry jam with an herbal, grassy note to the finish.

Vanilla bean was true to its namesake, mildly sweet with airy vanilla essence overtones.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for: bacon was salty, smoky, and meaty with a maple syrup sweetness. The flavor was right but the jelly bean texture combined with the taste of bacon was too weird. I couldn’t finish it due to the cognitive dissonance.

Overall, these beans are great! I can’t reiterate enough how vibrant and intense the flavors were – so much tastiness in such small packages!

I could’ve done without the bacon and Himalayan sea salt, but they were attention-getting in their novelty. I’m glad I tasted them, so they don’t merit the — rating, but once in a lifetime is enough for me.

While ginger and root beer weren’t to my taste, they were faithful interpretations of those flavors and get Os, as do coconut and vanilla bean for their relative mildness. The rest of the beans (all the fruit flavored ones) get an OMG for their awesome intensity, and lemon earns that extra Z for a ZOMG!

After I reviewed Brookside‘s Dark Chocolate Goji with Raspberry, Joanne noted that Trader Joe’s had a candy called Powerberries that was similar. I saw a bag on my latest Trader Joe’s trip and picked it up to see how they compared.

The Powerberries looked similar enough to the Brookside’s from the outside – same stand-up pouch packaging, similar product images, and the same boast of being a “natural source of flavanol antioxidants”.

It was enough to make me wonder if they were made by the same manufacturer (Trader Joe’s does a lot of repackaging).

Once I opened the package, however, I noticed a few differences. Though both products were shiny panned chocolate shells around jelly discs, the Powerberries were irregularly sized.

While the Brookside Goji pieces nearly all contained two back to back discs as a center sphere, the Powerberries contained between one and three discs (though most also contained two).

In general, the chocolate layer on the Powerberries was thicker than that on the Brookside, though there was some interpiece variability in both bags. That chocolate had a nice deep cocoa duskiness to it with a little thickness and graininess to the melt.

The discs felt grainy against my tongue. They had an instant jelly give with no chewiness and tasted of strawberry preserves with a deeper blueberry finish.

I enjoyed these, but I preferred the Brookside Goji version. Those were brighter and tarter and really let the juice centers sing.

The fruit juice centers of the Powerberries were nice, but they didn’t pop as much, mostly because they had thicker layers of chocolate to fight against.

The Trader Joe’s Powerberries were $3.49 for 8 oz, while the Brookside Goji chocolates were $3.99 for 7 oz at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. At that slight price differential, I’d go with the Brookside Goji. Still, I enjoyed the Trader Joe’s, so they get an OM on their own merits.

Cybele and Sera have also reviewed these. Cybele and one of her commenters say that they’re the same as Brookside Acai with Blueberry. My guess is that Brookside sells the uniformly sized ones under their own brand, while Trader Joe’s gets the more erratically sized ones to sell.

I bought this bag of Brookside Dark Chocolate Goji with Raspberry at a Bed Bath & Beyond because I needed a few more dollars to use my coupon. It turned out to be a great unplanned addition to my shopping list.

The bag described them as “smooth dark chocolate surrounding a sweetened real fruit juice piece, made from a blend of goji berry juice, raspberry juice and other select fruit juices.” They were shiny chocolate balls with these little flat jelly candy centers.

The jelly centers were comprised of two little discs. The discs were pressed flat side to flat side, then surrounded by chocolate.

The discs had a slight graininess to them. Some of them yielded instantly when bitten, while others were a little chewier. They were like a cross between a gummi worm and a fruit gem.

The fruity flavor of the discs was quite bright and intense. I’d place it as a mix of strawberry jam and cranberry juice. The flavor intensified as the chew went on.

The chocolate coating was nice but nothing to write home amount. It was slightly grainy with deep cocoa flavors. The melt could have been smoother, but it was an otherwise fine foil for the fruity centers.

These were winners solely based on the intense and tasty fruity flavor of the centers. I’d really like to try more of their line. An OM.

A Belgian friend of mine in Rochester was kind enough to remember me on his latest trip back to his homeland. He brought me back a box of Belgian Pates de Fruits from Duc d’O (also available online!)

Pates de fruits, also known as fruit jellies and fruit pate, are much better than gummi candies. They’re usually made from no more than pureed fruit, sugar, and gelatin. The real fruit part is what makes them special.

The entirety of this box was made from pureed apricots plus “flavours” and “colouring”. Interestingly enough, none of these were apricot flavored. Instead, they were, from left to right in the below photo, raspberry, pear, orange, strawberry, and grape.

All of the fruit pieces were made of two half jellies stuck together and rolled in granulated sugar. The pates had a soft, immediate give, while the sugar sand added a hearty grit and crunch.

Pear was golden and pear shaped. It had a great seediness and tasted quite genuinely of Bartlett pear flavor with a slightly sweet and sour finish.

Strawberry was a little red triangle. It was mild and sweet with a lightly floral flavor and reminded me of strawberry preserves.

Raspberry was hard to distinguish from the strawberry. It was slightly darker and had a more mottled surface. It lacked any seedy astringency, though it had deeper red fruit notes than the strawberry did.

Grape looked like a golden version of raspberry. It tasted more like raspberry than the raspberry did, as it had a seedy finish. It tasted of raisins with a vibrant, fruity, slightly sour finish.

Finally, orange was a golden, puckered ball. It started with an initial hit of zesty citrus almost sourness but then mellowed out into a milder, muted orange marmalade flavor.

I wish pates de fruits were more prevalent in the U.S. They’re great, concentrated bites of real fruit flavor, a refreshing departure from the usual fare of artificially flavored and sweetened gummi bears and worms. An OM.

I recently got an assortment of free samples of Swedish candies courtesy of Ingrid’s Candy Shop. They’re based in the EU, but they’ll ship worldwide, in case you want to try any of these Swedish goodies for yourself.

The Swedish Berries Candies were little dollops of red and purple berry-shaped gummi/jelly candies. Their chew was sticky and stubborn and lodged in the nooks and crannies of my teeth.

Red tasted of bright cherry fruitiness. The concentrated fruit flavor intensified as the candy was chewed.

Purple was some sort of currant flavor, I think. It had a deeper seediness with a hint of bitter edge – just a tinge of tannic complexity.

These had nicely strong fruit flavors that were juicy in their intensity. My only complaint would be that they left me picking at my teeth afterwards. An OM.

The Gelehallon was described as “raspberry gele with sprinkled sugar on top.”  It looked similar to the Berries Candies, in that it was a vaguely gumdrop-shaped jelly, but it was quite different in several ways.

For starters, the texture was completely different. Instead of being sticky and chewy, it was sproingy and slickly smooth. That smoothness was somewhat broken up by the crunchy grittiness of its sugar coating.

The flavor was that of a mellow, floral strawberry and brightened by the slightly sour sweetness of the sugar granules. It was nice but unexciting.

The fun texture really made this treat. An O for the pleasure of squeaking and bouncing it between my teeth.