ZOMG, Candy!

I love bulk bins because they let you buy exactly how much you want. I especially love them for candy because they let me buy just enough to taste for a review. The last time I was at a Wegman’s with bulk bins (my neighborhood one is too small to have a bulk bin section, but that’s a good thing, as it prevents me from gorging on malted milk balls and Albanese 12-flavor gummi bears on a too-regular basis), I picked out four Jelly Nougats by Brach’s.

Thank goodness I only spent about 50 cents on them.

I was naive enough to think that, because they had nougat in the name and because they were white in color, they would taste like actual nougat. And they were so colorful and artsy looking to boot!

Alas, they just tasted like blech. The jelly bits look like they should be fruity, and they kind of are, but not really. They mostly tasted of sproingy sweetness.

The nougat had a persistent chew that was soft and not at all sticky. It tasted a bit floral and fruity, but mostly it was just sugar overload like whoa. I don’t think it was the sweetness factor alone that made this a spit-out candy for me – rather, I think it was that the sugar lacked any other substantial flavor to back it. Sweet and fruity is okay. Sweet and more sweet is not. One of my roommates called it old people candy.

My roommates enjoyed it, though they agreed with me that it was cloying. I could smell the candies as they were eating them from several feet away, and the smell was lovely, bright, and fruity. Why couldn’t they taste like that too?

For me, it’s a –. Save your pennies for something else!

Up until now, my food-related experience with Etsy has been with the myriad mini food jewelry pieces you can find there; I had no idea you could buy actual food – and more importantly, candy – there!

Word of warning: It looks like there’s a sidebar link for candies on the Etsy homepage. It’s actually candLes; disappointing. You want to click on the link for Plants and Edibles.

Kettle Confections is an Etsy maker of Almond Nougats that’s been featured on Martha Stewart Weddings’s website (as of writing time, they’re #47 in this list). I was fortunate enough to receive a free sample of their original and coffee flavored almond nougats.

The nougats were cut into thumb-sized rectangles and wrapped in edible rice paper. The rice paper will dissolve in your mouth without affecting the flavor.

It sticks to the candy but not to the wrapper, making it a smart packaging choice by Kettle Confections (also smart that they noted that it was edible on the package; not everyone grew up eating White Rabbit candy as I did, so not everyone thinks nothing of popping “paper” right into my mouth along with the candy). Though one or two of my un-rice-papered ends stuck to the wrappers, I had no trouble unwrapping my nougats.

Maybe a little trouble would have been a good thing. These nougats were delicious and disappeared all too quickly!

Both flavors were generously packed with almonds. I’ve been on an almond kick lately – I baked three batches of macarons and Dorie Greenspan’s Chocolate Amaretti Torte when I was home for the holidays – so these arrived at a good time. The whole almonds were super fresh and nicely roasted and thus packed with delicious roasty-nutty flavors.

The nougat was just chewy enough to get my jaw going, but not so chewy that it stuck to my teeth. The textures of the crunchy nuts and chewy nougat played off each other well, creating a texturally varied and addictively interesting treat.

The original nougats were sweet and tasted of milk and vanilla, which balanced well with the stronger roasted almond nuttiness. The coffee nougats had a strong coffee flavor but not of strong coffee – it was more cafe au lait. There was a slightly bitter coffee bite, but the nougat still tasted strongly of milk.

I loved both flavors and managed to polish off half of my bag all on my own. I would’ve eaten the whole thing, but I put some out in the living room for my roommates, and they got snatched up pretty quickly.

I didn’t know that I was a white nougat person until I tried these OMG-worthy treats. I’m now inspired to try more white nougats. Kettle Confections has certainly set the bar high!

This Old Faithful bar was in the free box of candy samples sent from Munchies Sweets and Treats (full disclosure: they’re currently running a paid text link ad in my sidebar). I had been intrigued when I saw it while browsing through their online store. It had the look of a retro candy bar that’s been around for ages, yet I’d somehow never heard of it.

I was quite surprised to find that it was made by the same company that makes the Idaho Spud, as I enjoyed the Old Faithful enough to finish it all in one go, and the Idaho Spud I had to throw away because I found to be too nasty to finish.

The wrapper claimed an “original creme center”, which made me expect something, well, creamy, in the center. Instead, the bar turned out to be a pad of white nougat (the creme center) topped with a thick layer of peanut studded chocolate.

As you can sort of tell from my cross-section photo, the top layer of chocolate was surprisingly thick, about a centimeter. It was quite snappy, an indication of good tempering and not too low a cacao content. I actually rather enjoyed the chocolate – it didn’t have any tasting notes that stood up against the nuts and nougat, but it was solid quality, not too sweet, and totally palatable.

The nougat had a stiff chew and a plain sweetness to it. It added more in terms of texture than taste. I appreciated the bar’s generous use of whole peanuts, but I did wish that their nuttiness had been more pronounced. Roasting would have been appreciated!

All in all, a surprising solid product with a nice mix of tastes and textures that’s elevated by its use of decent (and real!) chocolate. It’s like a Snickers, but with less caramel and lots more chocolate. I appreciated it enough to eat it all in one go, and if I bought candy on impulse for snacking (I rarely do since I have soooo much of it stashed away for reviews that I may never write), I’d choose this over other checkout aisle offers. An OM.

You can read Cybele’s take on this bar here. I had no trouble with the peanuts in my bar, and I wonder if they’ve reformulated it since then, as my bar looks much more chocolate heavy than hers did.

This Cadbury Starbar’s been floating around in my tasting notebook since I had it last summer while I was in England. It was on my list of candy bars to try while there, thanks to a favorable Chocablog review.

The Starbar is “shot through with peanuts and caramel,” which made me think that it would be a Snickers-like bar. Well, not exactly.

The milk chocolate coating (14% of the bar) was greasy. Immediately under the chocolate was a circular layer of gooey, sweet, and sticky caramel. A few salty peanuts studded the nougat, but they were few and far between, not exactly “shot through” with peanuts.

I think there were also little wafer bits inside the sweet nougat center that weren’t advertised on the wrapper. I don’t know why not, as it’s a nice feature. It provides an enjoyable textural contrast that gives this bar an extra edge.

I was disappointed by the lack of peanuts but pleasantly surprised by the wafer bits. Not sublime, but pretty good for a mass-produced bar. An OM.

The Baby Ruth is one of those unexceptional bars that are always around but rarely noticed. So unexceptional, in fact, that reviews of it are rare in the candy blogosphere. Jim’s got one up on Chocolate Mission, but he’s a UK reviewer and probably doesn’t really know the cultural impact – or lack thereof – of the Baby Ruth in the US.

So why review the bar if it’s so inconsequential? Because with this review, I can fill a need. I’m sure many of you, while browsing the candy aisle or waiting at the checkout counter, would see a Baby Ruth and think, “Gee, I haven’t had one of those in ages. I can’t even remember how they taste. Maybe I should pick one up!” After this review, dear readers, you will know better. You’re not missing anything.

The outer coating of the Baby Ruth is a thin layer of a bland, unexceptional chocolate. I think it’s actually chocolate, but I could be wrong. It doesn’t taste like much at all.

Inside the chocolate is a mix of a bland, caramel-nougat type thing that is heavily studded with whole and half peanuts. The caramel-nougat type thing, like the chocolate, is bland. The peanuts have a good crunch, at least, but not much flavor.

Overall, the Baby Ruth just needs a big dose of oomph in the form of more flavor. More saltiness from the peanuts, more sweetness and burnt sugar notes from the caramel-nougat, and more chocolate taste from the chocolate. As it is, it gets a big goose egg of an O for being so boring.

The Topic is a UK bar comprised of “milk chocolate, hazelnuts, soft nougat, and smooth caramel centre.” Sounds good so far! The bar’s wrapper is rather simple and not at all modern looking, but it’s not quite retro. I like the kind of homey feel it gives.

The soft caramel of the bar strings out when bitten, like the cheese on a gooey slice of pizza. In case you can’t tell, that’s a good thing in my book. The nougat was sweet and soft and chock full of hazelnuts (according to the wrapper, they make up 15% of the bar) that made it marvelously nutty. As for the chocolate coating, it was real chocolate with lovely European milk chocolate dairy notes.

Overall, it was overly sweet – something I think would be unavoidable when combining chocolate and nougat and caramel – but still tasty. An OMG.

Here’s a candy that’ll have the 12 year-old boy in you giggling and elbowing your neighbor in the ribs: I found Nestle Nuts in Lidl, this weird discount/grocery store in Southport that had extremely cheap fruits and veg. How cheap? The day I went, they were in the midst of an “All fruits and veg are half off sale.” I had gone into Lidl on a hunt for miniature bags of Haribo, and I left with strawberries and cherries and beets and grapes and carrots. And a five-pack of Nestle Nuts.

I had high hope for the Nuts, which billed itself as milk chocolate (31%) with filling with caramel (22%) and hazelnuts (11%), which is why I chose to buy it even though it only came in a five pack. Well, that and the whole five pack was only a pound. Hooray for cheap presents for friends! As Ferrero’s bottom line has shown, chocolate + hazelnut = deliciousness. Usually, that is. The Nestle Nuts managed to screw up the winning recipe.

The chocolate coating was boring, blah milk chocolate. I’ve found that Nestle’s chocolate, as opposed to Cadbury with its nice dairy milkness, tends to be mediocre at best, and the Nuts was no exception. The not very thoroughly described “filling” was boring, blah nougat that tasted like nothing more than generic sweetness. And the caramel was, you guessed it, boring blah caramel with no notes of anything. It was pretty insipid and wasn’t even sticky.

Every once in a while, I came across a whole hazelnut hidden inside the Nuts. They were nice enough, crunchy and vaguely nutty, but the Nuts in no way, shape, or form took advantage of the full, roasty, nutty goodness that hazelnuts can bring. The sweetness of everything else in the bar overwhelmed any flavor the hazelnut had the potential to add.

For a boring, blah bar, a boring blah O. I’ve managed to get lucky with dollar (pound) store candy finds in the past, but in this case, you get what you pay for.

Mars Planets were a UK treat I had high hopes for mostly because they included what looked like malted milk balls, and I loooove malted milk balls. I could (and have) eaten malt powder straight and dry as a snack. I wonder if I should be ashamed of that… it seems rather akin to eating cookie dough straight off the log (haven’t done) or ice cream straight out of the tub (big fan of that one).

There are three types of Planets in the bag, soft, crispy, and chewy. Soft is the biggest, crispy is the middle size, and chewy is the smallest, so you can tell them apart by size before you bite into them. After they’re bitten in half, you can see that soft looks like it’s filled with nougat, crispy with crisp malt, and chewy with caramel. In reality, that’s mostly correct, but just wrong enough enough to disappoint.

Soft is filled with a chocolate nougat that’s pretty generically flavored and way too sweet. Chewy is filled with a nondescript caramel – no interesting burnt sugar or vanilla notes there, just overwhelming sweetness. And crispy, to my great dismay, didn’t taste like malted milk at all. I’d thought it was a Malteaser (Mars’s malted milk ball brand), but it tasted just like bland crispiness. No malt flavor whatsoever.

I commend Planets for their neat idea, but the execution was poor. All of the Planets were too sweet and too boring. An O. You can read Chocablog’s take on them here.

When I asked for UK candy recommendations, Justin suggested that I try the Cadbury Double Decker. I’m glad he did, as it was quite enjoyable. On my first day of “work” in lab, I popped into a post office to buy a notebook. Unlike in the US, UK post offices seem to be personal small businesses, and they’re usually attached to a larger shop. The one on the road where I’m staying was part of a mini-mart/convenience store, so I also grabbed a Double Decker, making it the first candy bar I bought in England.

I apologize for the deflated wrapper picture – I didn’t have any food to bring to my first day of lab since I’d just arrived in the country, and I got hungry and ate part of the bar before I could photograph it as a whole. I had intended to buy a second one, but England has yielded so many new candies and chocolates that I haven’t had a chance to yet.

The wrapper boasts of “milk chocolate with smooth, chewy nougatine and crisp, crunchy cereal filling,” a combination that, as far as I know, doesn’t have a US equivalent. The bar is called a Double Decker because it’s divided in half horizontally, like a double-decker bus. The top half is the nougat, while the bottom half is crisped rice and chocolate. And the whole bar is covered in Cadbury’s milk chocolate.

The nougat was pretty chewy, like the inside of a US Milky Way bar, only without any caramel. To put it another way, it was thicker and stickier than the nougat inside of a 3 Muskateers.  The crisped rice was basically what one would expect from crisped rice and chocolate (a pairing that’s hard to screw up), and with the nougat, it made for a great texture combination. Finally, the Cadbury chocolate made a positive contribution with its creamy dairy notes. So much better than Hershey’s! An OMG for the bar. If you want a British take on the Double Decker, check out Chocablog’s review.

Back in March, over spring break, a few friends and I visited Len Libby while we were in Maine. Because it’s not every day you’re within driving distance of a life-size chocolate moose. Meet Lenny (and a mama bear and her cub made from solid dark chocolate):

Though we’d dropped in just to see Lenny, and though I’d just tasted my chocolate fill at Haven’s Candies, I couldn’t leave one of Maine’s main chocolate stores without buying something. I walked out with a few chocolate eggs (remember, the visit was just before Easter) and two chocolates.

The right chocolate was (I think) a molasses chew. The nougaty filling was a bit on the stiff side, but that may have been due to the cold weather. Flavorwise, the chew was unexpectedly dark, with liqueur/rum notes and a light fruitiness. An OM.

The left chocolate was also some sort of chewy nougat thing, the name of which I can no longer remember because I didn’t bother to write it down. Oops. But it wasn’t that interesting. It was softer than the molasses chew with berry notes. An O.

I realize that reviews of seasonal Easter chocolate isn’t very helpful in July, but I’m pretty sure Len Libby makes non-egg versions of these chocolates. By the way, Len Libby sells a wide assortment of chocolate eggs; I just picked out three to buy and took tasting notes on two (the milk peanut butter wasn’t especially interesting).

I picked the milk and caramel marshmallow (right most, unwrapped) because I hoped it would be like the See’s Scotchmallow that I love so much. Sadly, it couldn’t compare. The sweetness of the milk chocolate overpowered everything. An O.

I chose the dark chocolate and coconut (bottom left) with trepidation. I’ve never liked Almond Joys or Mounds bars, so I wasn’t sure if I’d like this. Surprise! It was delicious. The nutty coconut flavor was fresh and paired wonderfully with the dark chocolate. And, unlike in lesser chocolate/coconut bars, the coconut was a smooth paste without that fake graininess that I can’t stand. An OMG.

So, Len Libbey is worth a visit if you’re in the area. If I remember correctly, they had free samples out; I was just too full from Haven’s to take advantage of them.