ZOMG, Candy!

When I was checking out, my Trader Joe’s cashier commented on this tub of their Dark Chocolate Rocky Road Squares. She said it was one of her favorites.

The tub contained 9.5 ounces of square tiles of dark chocolate studded “with marshmallows and peanuts.” The squares were irregularly sized, with some more rectangular than square.

The peanut pieces were yellow and most were no bigger than a quarter peanut. The white marshmallow bits were similarly sized and looked more like crisped rice to me.

The chocolate had a thick snap and a non-smooth melt. It was on the sweet side for dark chocolate with a dusky, sweet finish.

The peanuts brought a mild nuttiness, while the marshmallows added a hint of sweetness and a light grainy crunch. Again, they were basically like rice crisps rather than marshmallow.

I thought these were okay, but they’re far from my favorite thing that Trader Joe’s makes, and I won’t buy them again. The add-ins were too mild to make much of a flavor difference and got lost in the mix. An O.

This See’s Awesome Nut & Chew Bar was another mall stand buy. The 1.5 oz bar was described as “chewy nougat with almonds and honey covered in dark chocolate.”

The bulk of the rectangular bar was a log of chewy nougat covered with a dark chocolate hsell. The texture was great. It was chock full of crunchy whole almonds surrounded by a lightly sweet and chewy nougat.

The nougat had the amber undertone of honey, which nicely set off the crisp, fresh almonds. The dark chocolate shell was only lightly sweet and brought a great cocoa depth to the bar.

I loved this bar. The honey in the nougat added a delicious complexity while the almonds had a great crunchy nuttiness.

The chewy nougat and the crunchy almonds and the dusky chocolate also made for a great textural mix. It was a near perfect treat.

My only complaint was that the dark chocolate shell shattered and made a bit of a mess when I bit into the bar, but it’s a minor one. An OMG.

Again, here are Cybele and Sera’s takes.

I am no longer the mall shopping machine that I was when I was in middle school and high school. These days, I just don’t have the patience anymore and mostly shop online.

Thus, I had lived in Durham for nearly six months before I finally set foot in a mall for an Apple store errand. Lo and behold, the mall had a See’s stand! I picked up enough treats to make this week another See’s week.

The See’s Awesome Peanut Brittle Bar was a 1 oz. bar that they described as “crunchy peanut brittle drenched in milk chocolate.” It was a beautifully enrobed slab.

The brittle cleaved cleanly and was full of peanuts, some whole and some in pieces. When chewed, some of the brittle shards came together and got a bit stuck in my molars, but it was mostly a clean chomp.

It was salty and buttery with a hearty nuttiness thanks to the roasted peanuts. The milk chocolate added a light duskiness that was a great pairing with the salty sweet brittle.

I’m generally meh about peanuts, but I really enjoyed this treat. I love toffee that cleaves like this brittle did, and the flavors were great – predominantly that of roasted peanuts with a nice balance of salty and sweet. An OM.

If you want other opinions, Cybele and Sera both reviewed this on their sites long before I did. In my defense, I’ve never lived in a city with any sort of See’s shop before!

On Wednesday, I reviewed my free sample Harbor Sweets‘s Sand Castle Dark Chocolate and Caramel Bar. Today, I’m reviewing their Perennial Sweets, another free sample that I received.

The Perennial Sweets was a box of “dark chocolates inspired by the garden.” My box of 16 contained 4 Nantucket Baskets, 4 Topiary Toffees, and 8 Sweet Irises, each individually wrapped in gold foil.

The chocolates themselves reminded me of cameo jewelry due to their oval shapes and raised (really molded) decorations. As with the Sand Castle bar, I was impressed by the detail captured by the molding, as well as the lack of air bubbles in the chocolate.

The Nantucket Basket was a “rich, dark chocolate with dry roasted almonds” with a pretty basket of plants as its molding. The thick oval of chocolate was snappy with a smooth melt.

The chocolate carried a hint of cherry sweetness and was studded with whole almonds. While the almonds were nutty with a nice roasted flavor, they got bitter at their gritty end. I thought they were a tad too tannic.

Topiary Toffee had a potted tree decoration and was described as “rich, dark chocolate with almond butter crunch.”

It was also thick with a solid snap, and though the dark chocolate looked identical to that of the Nantucket Basket, I thought it tasted just a hair sweeter and had a thicker melt.

I expected the almond butter crunch to be dispersed throughout the treat as little nuggets. Instead, there was a big triangular slab of almond butter toffee hidden inside.

The toffee was simply lovely and paired well with the dusky, thick chocolate. It had the just-shy-of-burnt sugar taste that I love with just a hint of nuttiness. It cleaved cleanly, shattering into shards of deliciousness when bitten into.

Sweet Iris, “rich, dark chocolate with raspberry crunch,” was markedly thinner than the other two. Each Sweet Iris well held two chocolates while the Nantucket Basket and Topiary Toffee were one per well.

The Sweet Iris smelled extremely fruity. There was a light grit to the chocolate that I thought maybe came from raspberry seeds or bits of dehydrated raspberry but actually were bits of “lemon crunch,” according to the ingredients list.

The dark chocolate had a nice cocoa duskiness from the chocolate and a brightly sweet fruitiness. It was nice but a bit too artificially fruity sweet for my taste.

The Topiary Toffee was my favorite of the bunch and gets an OMG, while the other two get Os. They get high marks for prettiness, though. If I owned a bed and breakfast, I’d leave these on the pillows.

I saw this Lindt Excellence Black Currant bar at Cost Plus World Market and couldn’t resist picking it up, both because black currant is an unusual flavor to find in the U.S. and because I’d never seen it before, so I thought it was a new product.

Apparently, I’m a little behind the times, as Sera and Debby have both reviewed this before.

The Lindt Black Currant bar smelled like grape jam. The chocolate was thin and layered with flat slivered almonds that added a sharp crunch and just a hint of nuttiness.

I’m not sure how necessary those almonds were. I don’t feel like their flavor elevated the bar, and their textural addition disrupted the melt.

The chocolate had a bright fruitiness that really popped. It reminded me of a dark berry jam, some mix of blackberry or blueberry, perhaps.

The fruitiness was so powerful that it obscured much of the flavors of the chocolate. There was some cocoa flavor in the finish, at least.

I enjoyed the joyful flavor of the chocolate, but it wasn’t good enough to make me reach for more. I think I took issue with the almonds disturbing what could’ve been a lusciously smooth melt. An O.

Today I’m wrapping up my coverage of the Sanders chocolates that I bought in a hospital gift shop. In case you missed it, I reviewed their Milk Chocolate Sea Salt Caramel on Wednesday.

Today I’m covering the Peanut Butter Crispies (top) and Milk Chocolate Pecan Titan (bottom right).

Was it a coincidence that the Peanut Butter Crispies came in an orange wrapper? I wonder how often candy companies try to emulate Reeses’ orange wrapper when packaging their own peanut butter candies.

Like the Sea Salt Caramel, the chocolate here was fairly standard. The peanut butter center was nutty and dry, like a reconstituted powder. It tasted mild and natural, like freshly ground peanut butter.

The crispies were great. They were almost impossibly light, with a great puffy air crunch. It made the chocolate nearly irridescent!

My only complaint was that the treat needed just a hint more salt to really bring about that perfect marriage of sweet chocolate to nutty peanut butter. An OM.

Finally, the Milk Chocolate Pecan Titan. As best as I could tell from the image on the wrapper, it was basically a pecan turtle.

The sweet milk chocolate hid a creamy caramel with tiny bits of roasted pecans. The pecans here were mildly flavored and brought just a light nuttiness. I wished they had a stronger nuttiness.

The caramel here, too, was lacking oomph. It was somehow more mild here, perhaps without the salt of the Milk Chocolate Sea Salt Caramel to punch it up.

The treat was okay but paled in comparison to the other two. An O.

This bar of Ghirardelli Intense Dark Toffee Interlude was a free sample from the manufacturer to help them promote their Breast Cancer Awareness campaign.

The back of the box lovingly described it as, “luxuriously deep and velvety dark chocolate … infused with crunchy toffee and caramelized almonds delivering unrivaled chocolate intensity.” They’ve got some stellar copywriters!

Like most Ghirardelli bars, this was lightly scored into 8 squares, each embossed with their distinctive soaring eagle logo. The chocolate smelled lightly woodsy and smoky.

It was crammed full of generous bits of toffee and slivers of almond that were clearly visible in the break. The toffee pieces were about as thick as the chocolate itself.

The chocolate was indeed decadent, with a smooth matte melt. I got light coffee notes and a sweet and slightly sour finish.

The toffee was the obvious star here. It was crunchy and cleanly cleaving, with a great buttery sweetness. Occasional bits of almond snuck through as well, adding a tinge of nutty praline.

I found it to be an addictively indulgent mix of creamy and crunchy and buttery and nutty. An OM.

These Cranberry Bog Frogs have been lurking in my candy stash for a while now. I know I received them as a gift from someone, but alas, I can’t remember who gave them to me. If it was you, thanks!

The box calls them “sweetened dried cranberries and roasted cashews smothered with rich caramel and premium milk chocolate.” They sounded like a New England-y twist on caramel turtles. Perhaps hence the aquatic animal name?

There were three Frogs in my pack. Each was pleasantly starfish-lumpy shaped and decorated with a single dried cranberry. It had a few too many appendages to resemble a frog though – unless it’s the “WARNING! Pollution here!” kind of frog.

The milk chocolate coating was quite nice, with light hints of cocoa and malt. The caramel inside was sweet and creamy with a bit of butteriness. It was just sticky enough to prolong its chew and stuck to my teeth a bit.

The cashews added a bit of crunch, but, as they’re a fairly mild nut, their flavor contribution was minimal. The cranberries were great and added a vibrancy that brightened and highlighted the treat.

I thought these were a great mix of textures and flavors, and the addition of the cranberry was a nice, out of the ordinary twist.

I give them an OM, but with one caveat: there was a $3 price sticker on the box. I don’t think they were $1/Frog good,  but as an “I was traveling to cranberry country and thought of you” gift, you could easily do worse!

I received this box of Enstrom’s Milk Chocolate Almond Toffee as a free sample from the manufacturer. Apparently they’ve been making their toffee by hand for over 50 years!

The box’s description called it “the perfect blend of sweet cream butter, pure cane sugar, and California almonds, drenched in creamy milk chocolate and sprinkled with crushed almonds.” The box itself was quite pretty, a cream-colored lid with a deep chocolate-colored bottom.

The toffee came in giant slabs that were a bit unwieldy. It was covered in chocolate that was, in turn, covered in crushed almonds. The almonds were so thoroughly pulverized that they were practically almond dust, so breaking apart the thick slabs was a messy affair.

The toffee was thick – thick enough to have whole almonds fully embedded in it. It cleaved and crumbled cleanly with a pleasant crunch. And, importantly for toffee, it had a minimal “getting-stuck-in-your-molars” aspect.

The toffee was the star here, and it definitely shone. It was buttery and sweet with lovely caramel notes and tasted scorchy, just shy of burnt.

The almonds within the toffee added a wonderful nuttiness; I believe they were toasted to bring out their flavor. The chocolate was mild with a sweet sugar finish and minimal cocoa flavors, while the crushed almonds on top were so finely ground that they didn’t contribute much more nuttiness.

I love a good toffee, especially one that doesn’t leave me trying to discretely pick bits of candy out of my teeth. The flavors and texture were perfect here; my only complaint was that it was a bit messy to parcel out.

I brought this into work to share, and it quickly disappeared. A clear OMG winner.

On Monday, I covered the Angell Crisp bar. Today, I’ll review its darker (but still fair trade and organic) counterpart, the Dark Angell. It was comprised of “dark chocolate, rich cocoa, and [an] almond center.”

I’ll give it style points for the name, which conjures up an expectation of sinful deliciousness. Unfortunately, the bar fell short of my expectations.

My bar showed a hint of bloom, but it wasn’t enough to have a noticeable impact on the taste or texture. The thin dark chocolate shell was brighter and fruitier than the milk chocolate of the Angell Crisp, which actually made the dark chocolate seem sweeter. The dark also had diminished cocoa flavors compared the milk.

The filling was a mix of crushed almonds and a chocolate ganache that tasted like the same chocolate of the shell. The almonds were mostly smashed to gritty smithereens, though I did come across at least one slightly larger chunk (visible in the below photo) that managed to retain some toothiness.

The almonds lacked crunch. Instead, they were almost chewy, like they’d gone stale or simply taken on moisture. Perhaps the small bits had too high a surface area to volume ratio? They brought minimal nuttiness and instead served to dry out the bar and its mouthfeel.

I liked the chocolate component to this bar, but it went all wrong with the almonds. Those nuts were broken into too small pieces and lost everything that’s great about nuts in chocolate: the added flavor and crunch factor were gone. A missed opportunity and an O.