ZOMG, Candy!

The saga of my sweet-toothing my way through Chicago continues with Fannie May chocolates, who I would liken to Chicago’s version of See’s, except See’s is better.

At a Fannie May store, I picked out a selection of their chocolates and a few of their individually wrapped candies (review on those to come next week). Top down in columns, from left to right they are, as best as I can tell/remember: bittermint, some nougat thing, vanilla buttercream dark, no clue, buttercrisp, peanut butter, raspberry cream?, lemon buttercream, and a Trinidad. The salesguy assured me that there would be a comprehensive key online. There isn’t.

bittermint - this was a mint in the York Peppermint Pattie vein. The dark chocolate shell was quite thick, and the gooey mint innards had a strong mintiness tempered by a slight bitterness. The lightly bitter finish went nicely with the dark chocolate.

rectangular nougat thing - I have no idea what this is and couldn’t match it up to anything on their website. It was dark chocolate coating a chewy, nutty nougat log that tasted of maple, I thin.

vanilla buttercream dark - I’m not a big fan of buttercreams but let myself be talked into buying this one by Katie, who loves them. This was sweet and cloying but otherwise had a great vanilla flavor. If you have a higher sugar tolerance than I do, you’d probably like it.

buttercrisp - an almond buttercrisp in milk chocolate. I found it too be too hard to bite into and with a weird, not quite toffee-like texture (it didn’t cleave like toffee does).

peanut butter - a creamy peanut butter filling where the peanut butter was not nearly nutty or salty enough. The milk chocolate shell was slightly too thick for balance.

raspberry cream - I think that’s what this was. The chocolate shell was thicker than I expected, and the filling tasted strongly artificial with a slight cherry cordial winey-ness to it.

lemon buttercream - the center of this tasted like a lemon meringue pie. The lemon-ness was super bright.

Trinidad - I’ve managed to save the best for last: it’s a chocolate cream center with “pastel coating” and toasted coconut. The chocolate filling was smooth and creamy, and the coconut flavor was just right.  The only one I really enjoyed from the ones I picked.

I had wanted to buy some Mint Meltaways in my boxed assortment but the salesguy told me not to because their mintiness would overpower everything else. I managed to buy a little tray of 3 larger meltaways at a Walgreen’s instead. I tasted them after the Frangos that I so loved, and they paled in comparison.

The Mint Meltaways had a pastel green white chocolate coating that tasted too sweet and sugary. It gave the confection an unpleasantly greasy creaminess and a thick finish. The mint flavor was weaker than that of Frangos, and it was more artificial tasting.

Overall, I didn’t really enjoy Fannie May that much. I liked the bittermint and Trinidad, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to seek those out. An O for the chocolates described here. The individually wrapped chocolates I bought fared much better, and my review of those will publish on Monday.

My friend Leslie was kind enough to mail me a giant box full of Russian candy back in December, and I’ve since been slowly tasting my way through everything. Candy blogging, at least the way I do it, is a Sisyphean task, only I get to eat lots of sweets instead of pushing a boulder around. I know, I know. My life is so hard. Here’s the first of my long overdue, many-part series on Russian candies.

First up, a series of what Leslie calls “the heart and soul of Russian candy, with its fake chocolate glaze and weirdly-folded, artistic wrappers. There are several other varieties… Bizarrely, all of them come from different candy factories all over Russia. The wrappers are always the same color… and the artwork is always similar. Apparently there’s no trademarking going on.”

Red October’s Mishka Kosolapy/Pigeon-toed Mikey (the affectionate name for bear cub) - Dark “chocolate” covered crisp innards topped and bottomed with a stale wafer. I don’t know if they’re usually stale, as they’d been sitting around for a long time before I got to tasting them. The innards were made of a sugary, slightly chocolatey solidified paste of some sort that gave it a sweet finish.

Babaevskii’s Belochka/Squirrel - The same dark “chocolate” shell around a crumbly filling composed of chocolate and hazelnut (I think; it could have been pistachio) bits. Also a sweet finish.

Mikey in the North - The same dark “chocolate” shell and paste of Pigeon-toed Mikey. In this version, the wafers completely box in the filling, so the overall candy is both thicker (in crunch) and airier (in texture).

Overall, I ate one of each all at once, which was a bad idea. They’re super sweet, and the fillings don’t exactly melt away, so I felt ill afterwards. An O, but on the high side because they get bonus points for novelty.

Sunflower Kozinak

Excuse me a second as I try not to drool into my keyboard just reliving what it was like eating this stuff. It’s like peanut brittle but made with sunflower seeds. Lots and lots of sunflower seeds jammed in very little brittle made the thick bars hard to crunch through, but I still powered right through half the package. I wish it came in thin slabs like peanut brittle, if only to slow down my consumption of it. Simple, delicious, and ZOMG! worthy. I wish I had more and miss it so…

Nestle Nesquick Bar

Leslie calls this “a ubiquitous European candy bar marketed towards children.” It’s a sweet milk chocolate coating over a top layer of white, crunchy… something and sweet chocolate nougat. The mysterious top layer tastes like a wafer but doesn’t have the mouthfeel of one, while the nougat layer is like a more dense 3 Musketeers filling. It’s a little sweet for my taste, so I give it an OM.

I haven’t had much nougat experience in my life. It’s not a candy you usually come across as a kid, and neither my parents nor my friends are nougat eaters, so no one introduced me to it later in life. I bought a couple of pieces at Economy Candy and found them to be quite enjoyable.

The Ferrera Nougat bars were more money than I was willing to pay for an unknown and possibly detestable candy. Fortunately, Economy Candy also sold smaller individual pieces, perfectly sized for the roaming candy reviewer. I picked up one each of the available flavors, lemon and orange (they come in many more flavors, but the mini versions were more limited).

The lemon nougat had a bright, lightly lemony flavor, like a squirt of lemon juice was added to the nougat right before serving. It’s a more natural lemon flavor, as opposed to the artificial lemon flavor (which I also love) of Starbursts and Skittles and such. The orange taste was more subtly citrusy, like a little bit of orange zest was added to the mix. Like the lemon, it was a natural fruit flavor.

The texture was excellent, soft and chewy without sticking in my teeth, and the large almond pieces brought some nice variety to the chew. The finish was slightly too sweet in the lemon, but definitely still bearable, and the candy was quite enjoyable. My only beef was with the extremely thin wafer that sandwiched the nougat. It was completely bland and tasteless (though barely noticeable because it was so thin) and reminded me of a Chinese dessert that I hate (I think it’s called a Fu Long Bing). An OM in my book, only because I don’t find nougat particularly inspiring.

I’ve seen Charleston Chews (BUY) around grocery stores before, but only in big bags. I couldn’t figure out exactly what they were from the packaging, so I wasn’t ready to commit to buying a whole bag. Fortunately, I found this lone… bar? rod? roll?… version to try.

The Charleston Chew is a roll of vanilla nougat (the Tootsie Roll website says that they also come in chocolate and strawberry) covered in a thin layer of chocolate. The chocolate coating smelled of cheap, mass produced chocolate and tasted like it too. Then again, there’s something to be said for cheap, mass produced chocolate. Sometimes it can be transporting, like Proust’s madeleine. And from the retro look of the packaging, it seems that the Charleston Chew is dependent upon its ability to bring people back to their childhoods.

All in all, it’s not a bad bar. The vanilla nougat is soft and yielding, with a manageable amount of sticks-to-your-teeth-ness. Alas, I left the rest of this at home, so I will not be able to try the frozen version. If I could find the single rolls in chocolate and strawberry, I’d buy them to try them, but I wouldn’t bother buying an entire box or bag of them.

I remember buying regular 3 Musketeers bars (BUY) out of the vending machines in high school. I’d lift off the bottom layer of chocolate, eat that flat piece, and then scoop out the nougat center, leaving me with a nice chocolate trough. 3 Musketeers were never my favorite bar, as the milk chocolate and sweet chocolate nougat gets cloying quickly, but I enjoyed them from time to time.

The 3 Musketeers Mint with dark chocolate is a new bar from Mars. I assume it’s intended to compete with the York Peppermint Pattie. Well, York, you’ve got nothing to worry about. The 3 Musketeers Mint is nice and inoffensive, but it’s also uninspiring and unsensational.

I like the way the bar is portion controlled. It’s narrower than the normal 3 Musketeers, and it comes in two pieces for some reason. Perhaps it made for a better chocolate/mint ratio. Either way, it’s nice to easily be able to eat a single bar and save or share the second. I also like that the bar is dark chocolate because I like dark chocolate.

The bar smells sweetly of chocolate and lightly of mint. It’s a gorgeous bar, and the shiny and artfully swirled dark chocolate coating contrasts well with the fluffy and pristinely white mint nougat. The chocolate coating is fairly sweet, but not as stick-in-your-throat sweet as that of the regular 3 Musketeers. The mint nougat has the same texture as the chocolate nougat of the regular bar. The mint taste , like the smell, is not very strong, though it does have staying power. A few minutes after I finished the bar, I could still feel a light mintiness in the back of my throat. Like the bar itself, the lingering mint taste was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

I prefer the strong peppermint kick of the York Peppermint Pattie. The 3 Musketeers Mint is subtle and therefore a little boring. I don’t think it’ll be able to hone in on the Peppermint Pattie’s domination of the chocolate-mint market. After all, the 3 Musketeers big marketing grab is that it’s lower in fat than most chocolate bars, but the York Peppermint Pattie is similarly “healthier”. The taste of the 3 Musketeers Mint alone is simply not enough of a draw for me.

I’m not a big fan of nuts. Their texture is all weird, and they get stuck in your teeth. I’ll eat them in candy bars or brownies or covered in chocolate or even honey roasted, but I won’t actively enjoy them. I am also not a fan of super sweet things. For example, I like my chocolate dark and my coffee with a little bite to it.

The Cinnabon Cinnamon Pecan Roll is covered in pecans (duh) and is almost disgustingly sweet. I loved it. I hate that I loved it, but I loved it all the same. These guys are made by the company that makes GooGoo Clusters , which I read about in Candy Freak by Steve Almond (a must-read for any candy lover). Steve Almond called the GooGoos sugar bombs, which would make the cinnamon pecan roll a cinnamon sugar bomb.

The pecan roll is a cinnamon nougat center covered in caramel and heavily studded with seriously sugared-crusted pecans (you could barely taste the pecans underneath their sugar shells). It was hard to distinguish the individual components of the cinnamon sugar bomb, so the caramel and the sugar crust on the pecans may have also been cinnamon flavored. I wouldn’t be surprised, as the cinnamon smell was super strong and mouthwateringly incredible.

I took a bite of this and blanched at the super sweetness of it. The texture was pretty nice, if a tad on the stiff side. I don’t know if was supposed to be that stiff or if my pecan roll had been sitting on the store shelf for too long or something.The caramel covering was also hard, and it imparted a nice burnt sugar taste but no stickiness. At most, it made the pecan roll slightly chewy.

I felt a little gross after eating that first sugary bite, but I found myself taking another, and another. Then I hit upon the brilliant idea of popping the rest of the roll in the microwave. If I remember correctly, Steve Almond rhapsodized about eating a GooGoo hot off the line, so perhaps that somehow gave me a subconscious prod.

Here are my notes from my pecan roll tasting: “Microwave - OH MY HEAVENS - released the cinnamon scent, made it soft, nougat fluffy.” I had discovered cinnamon nirvana. The texture of the softened roll was much improved, the nougat almost pillowy. The heat made everything taste and smell even stronger of cinnamon and sugar. The cinnamon sugar bomb went atomic.

Usually, I don’t eat candy bars in one sitting, but I found the pecan roll irresistible and quickly polished it off. I immediately felt ill afterwards; drinking a glass of milk helped, but it still took a while for the cloying effect to wear off. I think it was the cinnamon that got me me. There must something about the smell of cinnamon sugar that triggers something in the taste buds. Hence the overwhelming success of Cinnabon.

As far as candy bars go, these bars aren’t that bad for you, though the 30 grams of sugar is excessive. Each bar has 250 calories and 11 grams of fat, but only 1.5 grams of that is saturated. Most of the fat is probably good for you unsaturated fat from the pecans. I think that’s better than most energy bars.

I would love to buy these again, but I shouldn’t. I’m a little frightened by their effect on me - death by sugar overdose following a cinnamon pecan roll binge would be a bad way to go. I think it’s best that I quit cold turkey lest I become truly addicted. It’s probably safe, however, for me to give the GooGoo clusters a taste. I’ve seen them at the grocery store before, and now I really want to try those too.