ZOMG, Candy!

These Espresso Pillows are yet another purchase from Trader Joe’s arsenal of candy, this time from the candy display near the checkout counter. I nearly missed them, despite their classy looking tins, and I’m glad I didn’t.

They’re billed as “crunchy toffeed espresso bits covered in dark chocolate”. I’m not sure where the pillow part fits in, exactly, as they’re neither pillow soft nor pillow shaped. Each “pillow” is somewhere between the size of a Tic Tac and a jelly bean.

The dark chocolate is sweet, though unremarkable. It does its job just fine, though, paring well with the toffee centers.

The espresso toffee has a great texture. It cleaves with a clean crunch, which gives way to a bitter coffee edge on buttery toffee sweetness.

These things are AWESOME to crunch on. They have the flavor profile of chocolate-covered espresso beans, but they lack the grit of actual beans. They’re addictively tasty, warranting a ZOMG! and a stop to pick up more next time I’m near a Trader Joe’s.

If you want a second opinion, check out Cybele’s Candy Blog take.

Chef Eric Clayton, the executive pastry chef and chocolatier for Derry Church Artisan Chocolates, emailed me about sending me some free samples of his chocolates. After checking out the gorgeous photos and sumptuous descriptions on their website, how could I resist? [Note: All text in quotes is taken from the website descriptions]

Their chocolates are named after different cities. I got an all dark assortment: the Cairo, London, New Orleans, Paris, Plymouth, Savannah, Tangier, and Veracruz. I’ll do the first four today, and the next four will be reviewed tomorrow.

The Cairo contains “a sweet date paste made from plump, succulent Medjool dates and a touch of expensive, thick, syruppy, aged balsamic vinegar.” That circle on top is “a small disk of jaggery cake (brown sugar & molasses) [that] adorns the triangle.”

I found the jaggery cake to bring a brown sugar overload. The chocolate ganache itself has a sour tinge to it from the balsamic vinegar. I found the date paste to be throat-burningly sweet. I respect the creative and interesting flavor combo, but it’s too sweet for me.

The London is a butter toffee sandwiched between “a deep, dark, brooding 70% European bittersweet chocolate” and then coated in “roasted crushed almond.” I had saved a piece of this to photograph for a cross section, but someone at work ate it before I could. I still haven’t tracked down the candy thief…

The toffee layer cleaves cleanly. It’s lovely and smooth, but sadly, there’s not much toffee/burnt sugar/butter flavor to it. Instead, the piece mostly tastes of the roasted almonds that it’s coated in.

The New Orleans is a bananas foster flavored truffle. Bananas foster is traditionally “made with sliced ripe bananas and a brown sugar/rum sauce.” In the truffle, “this entire delicious concoction is pureed smooth and blended into a smooth, creamy fine European milk chocolate ganache and then enrobed in a 70% bittersweet couverture.”

It seems sweet and tastes strongly of toffee and rum notes. The flavor of bitter cocoa run throughout, but it also carries a sweet finish. I didn’t get any banana notes, but that’s probably for the better, as I’m not a huge fan of banana-flavored candy.

Paris is a lovely, large, round, and bumpy dark chocolate rose-looking truffle. It’s homemade strawberry jam and a French white buttercream.

It’s a sticky soft cream that’s super fruity. The strawberry jam is extremely sweet, but it’s tasty and genuine! It’s a great flavor that goes well with the caramel note to the chocolate’s finish.

Derry Church’s chocolates are well made and lovely, with interesting flavor combinations. So far, the Cairo, London, and New Orleans get Os, while the Paris gets an OM. Stay tuned for Wednesday - I liked the latter half of the alphabet even more!

The continuation of Monday’s Mama’s Goodies nut brittle reviews:

Cashew Nut Crunch

This has the same thick brittle base as the pecan nut crunch. Cashews, however, are a much lighter flavored nut than pecans, and the cashews here are chopped up into tiny bits, so their flavor winds up totally overwhelmed by the brittle base. Still, the base is goooood. An O, mostly because the pecan incarnation is better.

Macadamia and Coconut Crunch

The brittle base here is sweeter and more toffee-like in texture. That is, it still cleaves but doesn’t quite dissolve into the same pseudo-caramel chew. As you can see, it’s got shredded coconut and whole macadamia nuts.

The flavors here are amazing. It’s just a hint of genuine, not at all artificial coconut flavor that pairs wonderfully with the rich and buttery essence of the macadamia nuts. And the brittle-ness negates the usually stringy texture of shredded coconut that is sometimes off-putting. An OMG.

Almond Nut Crunch

Almonds are a strong nut, and I think this is the nuttiest of the brittles. Again, the lovely brittle is fairly thick and cleaves like toffee, but this somehow avoids the turns-to-caramel-in-your-mouth thing. The almonds make the brittle duskier and darker, which is nice, but they also add a lightly bitter aftertaste. An OM.

Mama’s Goodies makes all-natural nut butter brittles inspired by Iranian recipes. I was fortunate enough to receive free samples of each of their five brittle flavors.

Today, we’ll cover sesame seed and pecan, and we’ll hit up the other three on Wednesday.

All of the brittles came sealed inside a shiny silver pouch, which was then inside paperboard pouch-boxes. I appreciated the inner pouches for keeping out excess moisture, but they were super hard to open and could’ve used little notches to help with tearing the bags open.

Sesame Seed Nut Crunch:

From the website: “Sesame seeds, revered in the Middle East for their flavor and health benefits, blended with pure honey, 100% maple syrup and real butter into a crunch [sic], culinary creation.”

This was a sweet, crunchy, and uber-buttery brittle that’s jam-packed with sesame seeds. The brittle is quite thin, just enough to encapsulate all the sesame seeds, so it snaps easily. It’s so buttery/greasy that it leaves a glossy sheen on everything that it touches. The seeds add a bitter finish that’s just a little bit too much bite for me. An O.

Pecan Nut Crunch

According to their website, this one’s rich buttery pecan nuts, plus the same spiel with the honey, syrup, butter, and typo.

The pecan brittle was significantly thicker than the sesame seed, giving it a more satisfying crunch. It crunches and cleaves like toffee on the first bite. Then, as you continue eating it, it turns into an almost caramel-like chew in the mouth. A scrumptious, super-buttery decadent caramel!

The pecans are good quality. They’re chopped into little bits, so they provide an initial burst of pecan flavor before the brittle/caramel takes over.

It’s delicious, though I would’ve preferred whole pecans. And it’s even greasier to the touch than its sesame seed counterpart. Still, that’s some super tasty-amazing-delicious caramel. An OM.

I bought this Lindt Croquant de Caramel bar in France. It’s “lait aux éclats de fin caramel”, or milk chocolate with caramel (toffee) bits/chips. I swear, French makes everything sound better.

Check out the description from the back of the box: “D’abord un plaisir pour les yeux avec sa belle teinte blonde ou l’on devine le caramel. Ensuite, vinet le plaisir de tous les sens: le fondant d’un chocolat au laut velouté marié au délicat croustillant des éclats de caramel blond.”

The bar smells lovely - sweet, dusky, thick, and caramel-y. The bar has a pleasant snap to it, surprising for a milk bar. It’s generously studded with crunchy toffee bits.

The milk chocolate (30% according to the back of the box) didn’t melt and coat the tongue like Lindt milk chocolate usually does. I wonder if it was a different formulation for this bar?

The toffee bits cleave cleanly under my teeth. They taste sweet and buttery, with honey highlights.

The milk chocolate and toffee is a bit sweeter than I tend to like my chocolate, but the combination does work well together. An OM.

Cybele from Candy Blog reviewed the U.S. version of this bar, called Lindt Toffee Crunch.

The remaining 6 of my Nestle Quality Street reviews, continued from Friday. In case you don’t want to click back, “Nestle’s Quality Street is a variety pack of cheapo chocolates that’s pretty ubiquitous in the UK.” Onward!

Orange Chocolate Crunch (bottom left) is a flat disk of orange flavored chocolate with little crunchy bits throughout. A poor knockoff of a Terry’s Chocolate Orange Segsation, if you will. Orange chocolate can go well when it’s made with care and decent ingredients. This has neither.

The Purple One (first row, 3rd from left) is unlabeled to create a sense of mystery, though an asterisk does warn that it may contain nuts. It turned out to be a milk chocolate shell containing a flowing, nearly liquid caramel and a hazelnutty paste. Creative in composition, at least comparatively, but meh with Quality Street’s cost-cutting execution.

At first thought, Vanilla Fudge (top right corner) sounds oxymoronic, but a quick googling reminds me that fudge need not be chocolate flavored. This piece tasted neither of vanilla nor of chocolate fudge. No good.

The Toffee Finger (second row, far left) is the same sticky, jaw-achingly chewy toffee of the toffee penny, just in stick form and covered in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The finger shape does make eating it a bit more manageable, so points for that, but it loses all of those points because of the terrible, barely-even-qualifies-as-chocolate-ness of the coating.

Toffee Deluxe was highlighted on the box as being new. It’s slightly darker than the other toffees and a bit more buttery, more like the Brach’s Milk Maid style of caramels we’re used to in the states.

And finally, the Orange Creme. Oh the orange cream - a bitter dark chocoalte coating over a white, grainy paste that’s “orange” flavored - never again, the orange cream.

It’s laughable how this assortment has the word “quality” in its name, as it’s anything but. It’s not horrible, spit-it-out chocolate, but it is bad, take-one-bite-and-you’re-done chocolate. The chocolate base of everything is just blah and blech. Save your money and go elsewhere. Nestle’s Quality Street has the dubious distinction of earning my very first – rating. Congratulations!

Jim from The Chocolate Mission, on the other hand, rather enjoyed these. Maybe it’s a British thing, as there must be a reason why they’re practically in institution there?

Nestle’s Quality Street is a variety pack of cheapo chocolates that’s pretty ubiquitous in the UK. There are 12 different kinds. The back of the box lists them all and asks, “What’s your favourite?” I only have notes on 9 of them (shrug), so we’ll do 3 today and 6 on Monday.

The Toffee Penny (2nd row, furthest right) is a flat, round piece of toffee in a copper wrapper (hence the penny moniker). It’s super sticky, jaw-achingly chewy, and not that exciting, flavorwise. Good toffee, like Walkers, has flavor nuance and complexity. This guy, not so much.

The Caramel Swirl (bottom row, 3rd from left) is a gooey, flowy caramel covered in blah chocolate. I wonder if its nubby shape is meant to evoke a Rollo. I don’t like Rollos much, and I didn’t care for this guy either.

Strawberry Delight (bottom right corner) is a dark chocolate with a terribly artificial cherry flavor. Even though I’m pretty bad at distinguishing between artificial red fruit flavors, I get more cherry medicine bite from this.

So there’s a start. We’ll do the other 6 that I have notes on tomorrow: toffee finger, the purple one (that’s actually what it’s called), orange chocolate crunch, orange creme, toffee deluxe, and vanilla fudge. No rating yet, as I want to keep you in suspense until Monday, but I think you can guess where this is going.

I cannot believe that I haven’t reviewed Walkers’ Nonsuch Toffee here yet. Walkers’ and licorice pencils were my mondo UK candy loves, and when I ordered my London-raised boyfriend several boxes of his favorite UK cereal as a special treat, I made sure to slip a few slabs of Walkers’ into my order. It’s bloody difficult to find in the U.S.

Walkers’ Nonsuch Toffee is usually sold in two ways - as individually wrapped pieces or as one big slab that you could theoretically break apart to eat. I say theoretically because it’s easier said than done. If the toffee is too soft, you can pull and pull and it just gets sticky and stringy and messy, like taffy or caramel. If it was too hard (I usually chilled it in the fridge), you could whack it against another hard surface and make it shatter, but that could also make a mess by leaving little shards of toffee everywhere, which would then melt… everywhere.

Only when you got lucky did the pieces actually tear. I usually ended up just picking up the whole slab and gnawing on it - terrible manners that usually led to overindulgence, but so, soooo good. Consequently, for me, the better choice was to buy the individually wrapped pieces. As an added bonus, those came in more flavors.

I preferred the treacle toffee to the regular. It had a darkness to the sweetness, a just-short-of bitter, medicinal tinge. Think molasses - gloriously complex, deep, and delicious. And chewy - sticks to your teeth, gets caught in every nook and cranny chewy. An OMG.

The Chocolate Toffee was only so-so. It had a more manageable chew and was basically like a super creamy Tootsie Roll. I wish I had one handy now for comparative purposes - I bet it would taste an awful lot like my calcium chew supplements. An O.

The milk chocolate eclair was basically nice standard Walkers’ toffee with a bit of mockolate in the middle. It was an interesting contrast from the chewy toffee to the soft, almost frosting-like innards, but flavor-wise it wasn’t spectacular, so also an O. Walkers’ also makes a mint chocolate eclair, which I ate and photographed but didn’t take notes on, and a banana split eclair which I remember being super banana-y and not my thing.

The treacle toffee is hands down my favorite, and the regular toffee is pretty darn good too. I wish they were available in the U.S. The others are okay for eating - the next time I’m in England, I’d gladly snatch up another mixed bag or two of them - but I like the treacle and plain better. I’ve also got a couple of slabs of hazelnut toffee that I’ve been saving for a special occassion. Mmm!

My favorite part about Whole Foods is their bulk food bins. I can pick out as much or as little as I want! Instead of buying a whole jar of a spice when I only need a pinch, I can buy just a pinch. Instead of buying a whole tub full of chocolate-covered almonds when I have a craving, I can buy just a handful.

And instead of buying a whole box or bag or whatever these usually come in, I can pick out just the SunDome flavors that I want to try: Chip ‘N Mint, Cashew Coconut Crunch, Mocha Jolt, and Chocolate Almond Toffee.

I’m currently having a hard time finding out more about these, as the SunRidge Farms website is under construction as of the time I’m writing this post. Best I can tell, they fit into Whole Foods’ image of crunchy-granola (literally) save-the-earth ethos pretty well. I can’t tell you, unfortunately, how many different kinds of SunDomes there are. I do remember the bin having at least twice as many different kinds as I bought - I wanted to get one of each, but that got heavy and too expensive.

The SunDomes are, expectedly, dome-shaped blocks of chocolate flavored in accordance with their names. The chocolate blocks are solid and thick, so not that easy to bite through and also not that easy to share. Each dome is sizeable, about half the size of a hockey puck.

Chip ‘N Mint had a strong, pepperminty scent with little bits of cookie or rice crisp that gave it a hint of crunch. The peppermint was nicely balanced - noticeable, but not too strong.

Mocha Jolt had a strong, genuine coffee taste that was quite enjoyable. There was a slight grit to the texture, which I’m pretty sure was ground up bits of coffee beans. Both of these were solid and thick, with a hefty, dull snap.

Cashew Coconut Crunch turned out to be a surprise. Its chocolate was a bit softer and milkier. It smelled strongly of coconut and had a hint of toasted dry coconut flavor that mingled with the slight nuttiness imparted by tiny bits of cashews sprinkled throughout. The surprise? Raisins! They added a fruity-raisin taste that sort of worked and sort of didn’t. For me, at least, that’s also how I feel about raisins. They sort of work as a snack, but they sort of don’t.

Finally, the Chocolate Almond Toffee, which also had a bit more give when bitten into. It starts with a slight nuttiness, thanks to the tiny bits of almond embedded throughout, that’s more roasty than that of the Cashew Coconut Crunch. That nuttiness then gives way to a burnt sugar note from the toffee aspect. I appreciated its complexity and flavor development.

I wish these came in smaller portions. I ate them across several sessions because they were just so big, and one bite of each was plenty satisfying. If they came in little tasting disks or something, I’d buy all of them again. As is, I think the Mocha Jolt and the Chocolate Almond Toffee are worth buying again, so they get OMs, while the Cashew Coconut Crunch and the Chip ‘N Mint are too big for their own good and get Os.

After Monday’s review, a Heath vs Skor showdown, I thought I’d continue the theme of chocolate + toffee with a review of Hershey’s Symphony of the Almonds and Toffee Chips persuasion. I think Hershey’s Symphony is a funny line - it doesn’t get much recognition or advertising, so it’s not especially distinctive, yet it’s been around for nearly as long as I’ve been alive (since 1989) and is pretty easy to find. There must be something redeeming about it to keep it around. Meanwhile, Joseph Schmidt’s line of truffles gets the axe. Sigh…

I think the Symphony line is supposed to be notable for the creaminess of the milk chocolate. I don’t quite get the name, especially since they make a plain milk chocolate Symphony, and the word Symphony conjures up images of complexity, but I do appreciate the effort of the packaging, with horizontal lines are probably meant to evoke the lines of a music staff. I wonder if the word Symphony could have been rejiggered to have a treble cleff as the S.

Underneath the wrapper, the bar has the big, traditional HERSHEY’S block logo on it, with what I consider to be the classic Hershey’s Almond bar shape - the rectangle with the arched curve to it. You can see the bits of almond and toffee in the cross section.

The bar was extremely nutty smelling thanks to the almonds. Unlike the Skor and Heath bars, which are toffee with chocolate, this was chocolate with toffee. And nice chocolate, too! The chocolate was creamy with a thick melt and a fruity finish, definitely different and superior to regular Hershey’s milk chocolate.

The almonds were in pretty big chunks and few and far between, so I didn’t come across them too often. The toffee added a bit of flavor but contributed more in texture, with a nice, cleaving crunch. Overall, it was a pleasant combination of tastes and textures. I’d give the bar an OM, and I wonder why the Symphony line doesn’t get more cred.