ZOMG, Candy!

I can’t recall ever having worked with Jelly Belly before, so I was quite surprised to find a free sample tin of their new Sunkist Citrus Mix in my PO Box. I’m not exactly sure how they found me (probably via a PR company that I’ve worked with on another candy), or my address, but there are more frightening invasions of privacy than Jelly Belly knowing my PO Box address, especially if it means surprise deliveries of free Jelly Bellies.

I was immediately taken in by the beautiful tin that these beans came in. I’m used to eating my Jelly Bellies out of plastic branded bags since I buy them from bulk bins. The tin is slightly smaller than that of Altoid’s Sours. Its made of burnished metal, and its clear plastic lid is adorned with a Japanese-y drawing of a blossoming branch. It’s absolutely lovely and a total keeper. My only issue is that the script and font are a significant departure from the Jelly Belly logo and font, which confuses their brand image.

The flavors are Sunkist Lime, Sunkist Pink Grapefruit, Sunkist Orange, Sunkist Lemon, and Sunkist Tangerine. I wish I had easy access to a candy store that sells Jelly Bellies (being a carless out of state college student, I don’t) so that I could compare these to Jelly Belly’s usual Lime, Pink Grapefruit, Orange, Lemon, and Tangerine flavors. Even though the press release claims that they’re new, my guess is that they’re the same; Jelly Belly is just using the Sunkist name to push these beans, which are “made with real juices, purees, and citrus oils.”

The press release claims that the flavors are “so authentic that even the aroma of citrus peel comes through each bite.” As expected from Jelly Belly, the flavors are indeed authentic. Lime has that zesty astringency that makes caparinhas so tasty, while lemon has a sweeter, brighter tartness. Like Cybele did in her review, I didn’t realize that the mix contained both tangerine and orange. They look the same to me, so only one made it into the shot. While I can tell the tangerine and the orange apart by taste, I don’t know which is which. One is sweet and round while the other has more of an orange zest kick to it.

The pink grapefruit was my favorite, not because grapefruit is such a wondrous citrus flavor, though it is, but because Jelly Belly did such a great job of capturing the unique taste of grapefruit. The bean not only tasted like grapefruit but also tasted like grapefruit smells, if that makes any sense at all.

I thought this was a great mix. Then again, I expected to love it, as citrus flavors are my favorite fruit flavors. I polished off most of the tin in one go as I typed this review, and now my tongue has taken on a light tingle, from all the acidity, I guess. An OMG.

Considering how many different flavor blends that they make, I was surprised to realize that I’d never reviewed any Mike and Ike candies on this site. Today, I shall rectify that oversight by covering their Lemonde Blends.

I’m already annoyed at the name. Shouldn’t it be a lemonade blend, as in a blend of different types of lemonade flavored Mike and Ikes? I understand what they were going for, that the candies themselves are flavored like lemonade blends, but it still bothers me. I can’t be too annoyed though, since JustBorn (same people who make Peeps, by the way) does donate a portion of proceeds to Alex’s Lemonade Stand, a charity that fights childhood cancer. Plus they’re all citrusy, and I love citrus candies.

According to the JustBorn website, these come in five flavors (thanks, Cybele, for pointing me to the website in your review; the flavors aren’t actually listed on the packaging). Clockwise from the top in the below picture, they are lemonade, tangerine lemonade, strawberry lemonade, lime lemonade (back in Texas, we call that a limeade), and raspberry lemonade. Like all Mike and Ikes, these are basically bullet-shaped jelly beans, with a sugar shell and a chewy interior.

Straight lemonade is bright, tart, and lemony while avoiding any reminiscence of floor cleaner. Tangerine lemonade has a lemony finish and is similarly citrusy, but it tastes a bit more round than the plain lemonade. Strawberry lemonade has a mellow strawberry flavor that’s more genuine than most strawberry flavored candies. Lime lemonade has a great zesty lime tang to it, and raspberry lemonade has a seedy finish that I usually find unpleasant in raspberry candies but can tolerate better in this, thanks to the lemonade finish.

I’m convinced that I could tell these guys apart in a blind taste test. However, I’m not sure I would know to recognize them as lemonade blends, though they do all finish on a sweetly sour note, making me think that these all taste like Snapple-fied versions of Mike and Ikes. Despite their lemonade finishes (or perhaps because of them), these never felt heavy or overly sweet. I enjoyed them so much that I may buy them again next time I see them, despite my ever-growing queue of candies waiting to be reviewed. An OMG.

Today brings the anxiously awaited conclusion to my review of Surf Sweets‘ product line that I began on Wednesday. First up (or is it fourth up?), their Gummy Swirls.

The Gummy Swirls were little gumdrop shaped gummis about the size of the first joint of my pinky finger. They came in two versions, pink/white swirled and orange/white swirled. Pink/white was strawberry, I believe, and its flavor was of lightly muted “red” candy. I’m not sure if the muting came from the white swirl or from the all-natural ingredients. A bit of each, perhaps? My guess is that orange/white was orange-flavored, except I didn’t find it to taste very orangey. Instead, I got more of a pear profile. The gummy itself was fairly firm and sproingy, while the sugar coating added a bit of textural grain.

Surf Sweets’ Gummy Worms were absolutely gorgeous, proving that one doesn’t need artificial colorings to make something look tasty. They came in red and yellow and red and lighter yellow/clear. Cherry and pineapple, maybe? The flavors weren’t terribly distinct, but they were nice and fruity. Appearances aside, however, there wasn’t much to separate these gummy worms from their artificially-flavored (and much cheaper) counterparts.

While the Gummy Worms were fairly run of the mill, I found the Super Sour Worms to be truly exceptional. Like Wednesday’s Fruity Bears, these were more like a fruit pate or a fruit gem, which may be why their moniker leaves out the word “gummy”. The sour sugar coating on these is mostly sweet and only lightly tart, but it’s just right.

The red and yellow one tastes of cherry – as I’ve written many times, I have difficulty differentiating red-flavored candies, but this one had a bit of a bite to it, so I’m going with cherry – with a sour finish of lemon. The orange and white one tasted like a lovely sweet yet tart orange. Either the white part was also orange flavored, or it was too lightly flavored to compete against the brightness of the orange.

The Super Sour Worms were my favorite of the Surf Sweets bunch. I couldn’t stop eating them, so they get a ZOMG! The Gummy Swirls and Gummy Worms, while good, weren’t exceptional, and, as I said on Wednesday, I’m too poor to shell out extra for all natural and organic when artificial and full-of-pesticides tastes pretty much exactly the same, so they get Os. If you’re not poor like me and care about what you put into your body, or your kids’ bodies, then the whole Surf Sweet lineup is probably perfect for ya – they taste all-natural, but in a good way, and you or your kids won’t miss unnatural flavorings/colorings one whit.

One of the biggest perks of my candy blogging hobby is getting free samples from candy retailers. When Surf Sweets offered to send me samples of their all-natural and organic candies, I eagerly agreed. They sent me a generous box of their complete line-up. We’ll cover half today, and the other half on Friday.

First up, a classic: Gummy Bears. Surf Sweets’ gummy bears are extra sproingy and firm. They come in pineapple, lemon, orange, and cherry, I think. Why only I think? Because Surf Sweets are made with all-natural ingredients, their flavors aren’t as artificially strong as other gummis. They’re more mild, so they’re harder to differentiate. The gummy bears were good and seemed quite genuinely fruity, but tastewise, there’s really nothing to distinguish them from normal gummy bears.

Their Fruity Bears were more distinctive and more fun. On the surface, they look like the gummy bears, just covered in sugar, but they’re quite different. They’re not even a gummy, which surprised me when I bit into my first one. Instead, the bears are more of a fruit pate, with a soft give to them. These come in five flavors: pineapple, lemon, orange, strawberry, and cherry. I’m more sure of these flavors because they were stronger. The strawberry and cherry barely differed in color, but their flavors were distinctive, with more of a bite to the cherry.

And last but not least for today, their Jelly Beans. These also come in the same color and flavor palate of the Fruity Bears: pineapple, lemon, orange, strawberry, and cherry. Texturally, these are different from most jelly beans. They have a softer (but still crunchy) shell with softly sproingy insides. Pineapple was my favorite flavor of the bunch – it really captures the essence of pineapple flavor with it’s core-y taste. The other four flavors are pretty standard and unexceptional.

Paradoxically, I found Surf Sweets to be at once muted and bright. They’re muted because they don’t use artificial flavors or colors, yet they’re bright because they taste so genuinely fruity. Think about the difference between a can of orange soda, a carton of orange juice, and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Orange soda will be super bright but artificial, orange juice would be the most muted, and fresh-squeezed orange juice falls in between. Surf Sweets are the candy equivalent of fresh-squeezed juice.

The Gummy Bears get an O (because I’m too poor to really care about eating only organic and natural), the Fruity Bears get an OMG (I adore fruit pate), and the Jelly Beans get an OM. Tune in on Friday for the rest of their line-up!

I have my last final exam of the semester today. A week ago, my friend Rita, already done with all her finals and term papers, packed up and went to England and Scotland. I’m quite jealous of her, both for being done so early and for getting to go to the UK, which I love. And not just because it has candies we don’t get in the U.S., like Chewits Fruities.

If you can’t make out the blurry writing, Chewits Fruities are “assorted fruit flavour jelly bean sweets”. Is calling something a jelly bean sweet redundant? Not in this case, as the Chewits Fruities aren’t exactly jelly beans. Instead, their candy shell is quite hard and cracks upon biting, much like the shell of a Skittle. The inside is sort of like that of a jelly bean, but it’s much springier. Basically, there’s a much bigger textural contrast between the inner and outer layers of the Chewits Fruities than there is in regular jelly beans.

They came in six flavors. Orange was orange, I think, but it did seem to have light peach notes. Light orange had more tang, so I’d call it tangerine. Yellow was flavorless, green tasted faintly of lime, pink was strawberry, I think, and red was a bright cherry.

Overall, texturally fun, but flavor-ly blah. I give them an O, though they may be worth picking up just to try their mix of textures. After all, even with the exchange rate, they’re a cheap check-out line impulse buy.

I give Rowntree’s Jelly Tots major props for cute packaging with built-in portion control. I only ever saw them in the UK in tiny bags, each including 146 calories, according to the little lower right nutrition corner. The “now with 25% fruit juice” is a bit worrying – what did they use to be made with? – but I’ll take it.

Jelly Tots are little button shaped springy jelly candies covered in sugar, and they come in five flavors. Or flavours. Blackcurrant tasted of dark berry with an almost bitter finish that may be too much for palates not used to blackcurrant flavored things. Lemon was rather bland, with only a slight citrus twinge. Lime was a bit more tangy than the lemon, but too sweet to be truly limey and exciting. Orange had a mild citrus finish but doesn’t warrant much more attention.

Strawberry was my favorite of the bunch. It had a strong mellow berry flavor with a strawberrilicious finish. Overall, Jelly Tots were cute and nicely portioned, but nothing worth stocking up on to fly back to the States. An O.

I stole an assortment of Boston Fruit Slices from my friend John, who got them in a giant food gift basket from some I-banking or consulting firm that was trying to recruit him. I wish being a psych major came with perks like that. The best I’ve gotten is Dunkin Donuts at our neuroscience lab meetings.

Boston Fruit Slices are pretty easy to find on Amazon.com, yet I don’t recall ever seeing them in stores. They’re a soft, sugar coated fruit pate/jelly type candy. I think they fall in that category of candy that people are inured to (Boston Fruit Slices have been around for a while) and will eat if they happen upon it but won’t go out of their way to buy. They’re okay but not exceptional.

I managed to find five flavors in John’s gift basket. Lemon was bright, sweet, and tangy. Orange tasted like a less tangy version of lemon, so much so that it didn’t really taste like orange anymore. What I thought was grape (the purplish red) may actually be raspberry because it carried a slight bitterness, though I could be wrong. Red was cherry, with a strong candied cherry finish. And last and least was watermelon (pink with a green rind), which was so artificially sweetly watermelon flavored that I couldn’t finish it.

I’d eat the lemon and the raspberry again, so they get OMs. The others get Os. If you’re looking for a cheap fruit jelly/pate fix, I suggest Sunkist Fruit Gems (now made by Jelly Belly) instead.

I received my box of Poifull from my friend Michael who bought them for me in Japan in a set of assorted mini boxes. I’ve never seen these guys in my local Asian supermarkets, but I’m definitely going to start looking for them now.

As you can see from the photo, they’re look like jelly beans or Mike and Ikes. And they sort of are, as they have a hard sugar shell with a jelly innard. But the insides of the Poifull were much bouncier than those of jelly beans. I wouldn’t be surprised if they squeaked between my teeth. The nexture was almost rubbery, which you may think would be unpleasant, but that wasn’t the case.

Poifull come in four colors and flavors. Purple was grape and tasted like a red grape. Pink was apple, in the sweet Fuji way as opposed to the sour Granny Smith way. Yellow was pineapple, which carried a wonderful acidic tang, and green was muscat, which is a kind of grape. Its flavor was noticeably different from the purple grape. The concept of Poifull was simple yet well executed, with vibrant fruit flavors that carried a wonderfully bright tang, earning them an OMG from me. My tiny box quickly disappeared, and while fruity/sour Jelly Bellies may make a good substitute until I can find more Poifulls, they just don’t bounce against your teeth like the Poifull do.

Speaking of Jelly Bellies, I had bought two small boxes of duty-free Jelly Bellies on my flight to England to give as hostess gifts. Though I saw them at John Lewis, a high-end U.K. department store, and sold with a Marks and Spencer’s stamp at, you guessed it, M&S, none of my Jelly Belly recipients had heard of them. It seems that Jelly Belly has a bit more work to do before they can crack the U.K. market, yet they already have a knock-off competitor in The Jelly Bean Factory’s Gourmet Beans.

These beans come in 36 flavours (to Jelly Belly’s official 50) and include many of Jelly Belly’s favorites (or favourites) like buttered popcorn, pink grapefruit, pina colada, and tangerine. There are also a few flavours that were less derivative, such as cranberry & apple, mint sorbet, and passion fruit.

I’m not going to review each individual flavor, as that would take forever, and the Jelly Bean Factory’s guide isn’t as clear as Jelly Belly’s sheets so it can be hard to tell what the different beans are. Overall, I found the Jelly Bean Factory’s beans to be inferior to the real deal. They were better than generic jelly beans, but the depths of the flavors in the shell and the jelly insides just don’t quite come up to snuff.

They do make a beautiful spectrum though. I bought these in a tube (as far as I can tell, these only come all mixed-up in a big bag or tub or tube) and had great fun sorting them by color. A few flavours stand out in my mind, so I’ll dwell on those.

Pink grapefruit was lovely, tart, and sweet. Grapefruit is too rarely used as fruit candy flavoring, I think. South Seas kiwi wasn’t as good as Jelly Belly’s kiwi. With Jelly Belly, you can almost taste the kiwi fuzz. With the Jelly Bean factory, I don’t know if I could have determined what flavor it was without looking.

Buttered popcorn in the Jelly Bean Factory mix was pretty good. I guess if you’re going to copy such an unusual and iconic flavor, you should make sure you do it right. I wonder if I could taste the difference between the Factory and the Jelly Belly in a blind taste test.

Licorice made me mad. It was actually a deep blue-purple rather than a genuine and opaque black, so I kept eating them thinking they would be a fruit flavor and spitting them out again. Mint sorbet was also strange, mostly because it stood in such shocking flavor contrast to everything else.

I’d buy these again if they came nicely separated by trays so I could really taste them carefully and know what I’m eating, though that would deny me the fun of sorting them by color. But the desire to retaste is fueled by curiosity rather than desire, so they get an O. When faced with a choice between these and Jelly Bellies, it’s Jelly Bellies all the way.

I recently had the pleasure of getting a candy sneak preview. Crown Candies sent me two boxes of their Borrachitos (Spanish for a little drunk, and a traditional Mexican treat, apparently). I got one each of their two available flavors: Tequila and Licor de Cafe.

Crown Candies imports these handmade candies from Mexico. They call them “gourmet caramel candies,” but, as I explained to David of Crown Candies, I find that a bit of a misnomer, as they aren’t actually caramels. Instead, they’re a soft jelly-like candy flavored with caramel (or dulce du leche, if you prefer) and liquor. The Tequila flavor is laced with Tequila (duh), and the Licor de Cafe with coffee liqueur (less intuitive if you’re unfamiliar with romance languages).

The borrachitos come inside a resealable plastic tub with paper dividers separating them from each other. That tub is then shrink-wrapped and packaged inside a box. The texture of the candy is hard to describe. It’s super soft and immediately gives way when you bite into it, yet there’s a slight chew to it, The white center is creamy and also soft. They’re covered in granulated sugar, presumably to keep them from sticking to each other and to add an extra touch of sweetness.

The Licor de Cafe had a lovely strong coffee liqueur flavor to it in addition to its caramel notes. I noticed an initial, barely perceptible mustiness to it, probably from the paper liner, but it wasn’t present enough for friends to notice when I shared the borrachitos. My band director proclaimed them to be “very good,” and he’s got a doctorate in music education (sorry; inside YUB joke).

The Tequila borrachitos (left three in below photo) were lighter in color than the Licor de Cafe flavored ones (right three below) – more golden than brown – and their mustiness was a little stronger, probably because they had a double-layered paper liner. David from Crown Candies assures me that they’ve stopped using the double layer and that they’re looking into plastic separators, so that should resolve that issue. He was so confident that he sent me a third box of borrachitos with the new packaging to taste, but I haven’t had a chance to get them yet because I’ve been out of town and without access to my PO box.

The Tequila borrachitos were also strong! They immediately taste of caramel, and then whoosh comes the alcohol flavor. I’m not hardcore enough to enjoy the Tequila flavor, but I think tequila lovers/hard liquor connoisseurs would enjoy it. The Licor de Cafe flavor was just right for me, with it’s slight but innocuous alcohol tinge. An O for the tequila. The Licor de Cafe isn’t something I would reach for as a casual snack, but I would indulge in a piece now and then and would offer it to company. It gets an OM. I wonder if Crown Candies has considered a chocolate liqueur version.

Borrachitos are available online from the Crown Candies website, and they’ll also be at the All Candy Expo in Chicago that’s going on next week.