ZOMG, Candy!

Is there anyone who doesn’t like s’mores? To me, there are few things better than this simple treat of gooey marshmallow, crunchy graham cracker, and sweet, melted chocolate. It’s oozy, it’s sticky, it’s messy, and it’s delicious.

Because I love s’mores, I was super excited to try Sweet Sweet Confections‘ s’mores bars that the company sent. Handmade graham crackers and marshmallows dipped in chocolate? What’s not to love?

While the idea is great, I’m afraid I found fault with Sweet Sweet Confections’ execution of their concept.

For starters, the packaging does not hold up well. While the bars look gorgeous on their website, they arrived all smushed together, even in their padded mailer. I should note that these bars were first mailed to a Well Fed editor, who then mailed them to me. However, Dom on Chocablog had the same issue, and Michelle on Candy Addict’s photo also looks nothing like the advertised version. I think these bars need something a little sturdier than a cellophane bag. When I tried to open it at the top, the whole bag split apart, like cellophane is wont to do, which was super annoying, as it meant I no longer had a bag to keep the bars in.

The bars themselves are slightly smaller than credit card-sized. Taste-wise, they were good but not great. I expected the graham cracker to be crunchy like, well, a graham cracker. Instead it was soft and crumbly, like a cookie or a really dense cake. While I prefer a more cinnamon/honey tinge to my graham crackers, I enjoyed the graham “cracker” layer. The chocolate coating was good and smelled incredibly chocolatey. It wasn’t high end chocolate or anything like that, but it was real chocolate, and it did it’s job. My biggest beef was with the marshmallow. Marshmallows should be either fluffy and soft or oozy and sticky, not dense and chewy. While eating this bar was far cleaner than eating a real s’more, the marshmallow’s texture just left something lacking.

I was impressed by the ingredients of the s’mores bar. With the exception of invertase as the final chocolate ingredient, I can pronounce and identify everything that went into these bars. I definitely believe that they’re handmade since the ingredient list is so preservative and additive free.

I found these bars to be good, but I wouldn’t pay $4 for the pouch of three. The different flavors and textures balanced well, but the bars were a little too sweet (though my tastes skew towards the dark chocolate end). A couple of my friends tried the bars and really liked them, but they also agreed that $4 for three bars was too much. If the bars were a little more high end - nicer packaging, nicer presentation, and better chocolate - they would be worth shelling out even more than $4 for because they could then be billed as a gourmet treat. In the state that the s’mores bars currently are in, I’d rather spend my $4 on a bag of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, and a nice bar of dark chocolate and make my own s’mores. Only an O, I’m afraid.

The final chapter of the 1/2 week of “chocolate marshmallow cup type candies” is the Mallo Cup (BUY!).

The Mallo Cup smells intensely of chocolate and coconut. Coconut? It doesn’t advertise coconut on the wrapper, but checking the list of ingredients reveals that the Mallo Cup does, in fact, contain coconut (incidentally, it also contains more corn syrup than sugar. Yikes!). I don’t mind that the coconut is there in the “whipped creme center”, but I think Mallo Cup should display the inclusion of coconut more prominently on the wrapper, as many people don’t like the taste of coconut. My second Mallo Cup went to waste when I happily bestowed it upon a friend to try, promising her that it was tasty. She took one bite and blanched - not a coconut fan.

I found the chocolate of the Mallo Cup way too sweet, and it’s coconut isn’t as nice and toasty as that of the Cup-o-Gold. I managed to finish one, but the sweetness made the thought of eating the second unbearable. The marshmallow filling (really whipped creme, I guess, but it was pretty similar to marshmallow), however, was quite nice, and wasn’t grainy like that of the Valomilk. The texture was perfect - fluffy, foamy, and sticky. The meant it wasn’t as messily oozy as the Valomilk was, though the Mallo Cup did drop little grains of chocolate that got embedded in my jeans.

My favorite part about the Mallo Cup was the inclusion of the cardboard “Play Money” voucher that the cups rested on. It just screams retro/nostalgia candy. Let’s do the math, shall we? If each package of Mallo Cup has 10 points, and 500 points earns you a $1 rebate, and I paid $0.75 at Economy Candy for my pack of Mallo Cups… 500 divided by 10 is 50, times $0.75 is $37.50… So if I spent $37.50, plus tax, on Mallo Cups, I could get a $1 rebate in the mail in 4-6 weeks. So I’m well on my way to becoming a millionaire!

I wonder if anyone bothers to send the “Play Money” in anymore. I also wonder what’s included in the catalog, and I love how you have to send away for it because they don’t have a website.

I’d give these an OM. I may buy them once more, but I think that would be enough Mallo Cup to last me a good while. Guess I’ll never get that $1 rebate.

Next on board for the 1/2 week of “chocolate marshmallow cup type candies” is the Cup-o-Gold (BUY!). Unlike the Valomilk, which came two cups per pack, the Cup-o-Gold is one giant cup.

The wrapper promises “creamy milk chocolate, toasted almonds, that hint of coconut, and the signature creamy center.” The chocolate of the Cup-o-Gold has a good snap to it. It’s a super sweet milk chocolate, but the overly sweet taste was redeemed by the promised hint of coconut and almonds that imparted a nice toasty-ness to the chocolate cap.

While I liked the nutty taste, there is such thing as too much of a good thing. There was way too much chocolate and not enough of the creme filling. In fact, there was so little of the creme filling that I couldn’t really taste it, and it was completely overwhelmed by the chocolate and coconut.

I usually don’t like coconut in my candy because I find the texture unpleasant. In the Cup-o-Gold, the last thing you’re left with is little bits of chewy coconut. Yet it works for this cup, possibly because the coconut is too finely chopped to feel funny against my teeth.

I liked this candy and would eat it again. I bought it at Economy Candy in New York City, so it’ll be a while before I get the chance to buy another, which is often enough for me. A tasty OM. OM+, in fact.

The rest of this week will be “chocolate marshmallow cup type candies” week. Let’s kick it off with the Valomilk!

I’ve wanted to try a Valomilk (BUY!) since I read about it in Steve Almond’s Candyfreak (BUY!). They’re made by a small family owned company and have probably survived largely on the power of nostalgia. The Valomilks are the most basic of the “chocolate marshmallow cup type candies” that I tried - they’re basically just a chocolate cup filled with marshmallow creme. That marshmallow creme has a tendency to ooze everywhere, making the Valomilk notoriously difficult to travel with.

My Valomilks were surprisingly unmessy, which I actually found a little disappointing after all the mess hype that I read about. When I opened them, only one of the two cups had leaked a tiny bit.

The chocolate was rather bland on its own, but it had a good snap to it. The marshmallow creme was quite sweet and had a sugary grit to it. The texture of the ooze was odd. In some places, it was liquid. In other places, it looked foamy like a marshmallow but was actually sticky.

It didn’t exactly flow, perhaps because the weather was on the chilly side when I ate it. The texture reminded me of a water/cornstarch mixture that goes from solid to liquid. As you can see, after I let my bite “sit” for a bit, the ooze got more liquidy.

I found this treat fun and unique, and I enjoyed trying it, but I don’t think I’d buy it again. It’s too one dimensional and sugary - an O.

I got super excited when I saw the Take 5 Marshmallow at Party City. The Take 5 (BUY!) is one of my favorite candies, as is the See’s Scotchmallow, so maybe the combination of the two would be candy perfection!

Sadly it was not a candy revelation. To the contrary, it was rather unremarkable and forgettable. The Take 5 Marshmallow just didn’t have that magic combination of sweet and salty that the original mastered so well. The marshmallow creme was intended to replace the caramel, but it did so unsuccessfully.

While the caramel imparted a burnt sweetness to complement the salty peanut butter, the marshmallow creme is too one-dimensionally sweet. And while the caramel brought a wonderfully moist and sticky chewiness to the bar to balance the dry stickiness of the peanut butter, the marshmallow was fluffy when it needed to be chewy and, as you can see in the photo, was as dry as the peanut butter.

I’m not surprised that this Limited Edition version didn’t make it into the regular line-up. The Chocolate Cookie Take 5 was released around the same time as the Marshmallow and still seems to be available.

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