Now that I’ve eaten a dozen Reese’s products, I thought I needed a change. So I had a Boyer Smoothie.

Boyer is based in Altoona, Pennsylvania and may be somewhat of a regional brand. I don’t see them out in Los Angeles, but they’re not hard to find once you get to the east coast or midwest.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had it before; it’s even odder now that I’ve had this cup. All this time I was expecting something called the Smoothie to be like a Buckeye (which is an ultrasmooth peanut butter filling in milk chocolate). They’re described as, “Creamy peanut butter covered with butterscotch.” Not only that, they’re chunky! The “butterscotch” coating is kind of like an overly sweet white chocolate and it’s studded with chopped peanuts, so it pretty much tastes like peanut butter fudge. The peanut butter filling is much like the Reese’s filling, it has a nice salty hit to it and is slightly crumbly.

But the whole thing had this sickly sweet smell to it. I guess if you’re allergic to chocolate, this might be the peanut butter cup for you. It’s just not for me. I want something else to play off the peanut butter, chocolate is a good companion as is coconut like in the Chick-o-Stick or the Peanut Butter Ginger Chews. As Boyer products go, I think I’ll stick with the Mallo Cup.

This has to be one of the oddest “candy bars” I’ve tried in a long time. Balisto is a Muesli Mix bar. For those of you not familiar with Muesli, it’s like granola - a mix of whole grains. The same friend, Matt, who brought me the Caffarel Guanduia also included this in the package of European candy goodies.

This bar was kind of like a Twix ... well, not really. There’s a cookie base, but the cookie isn’t tender and flaky, instead it’s kind of grainy and has a distinct oats and wheat flavor. In fact, it tastes just like a hay bale smells.

On top of the cookie is a stripe of cream that had raisins in it every once in a while. The whole thing is covered in milk chocolate. It’s not bad, but it definitely doesn’t feel like a treat. It feels like a rock in my stomach. The wholesomeness of it is just too much for me! I can’t stop chewing the little chewy bits of grain in it!

The label also mentioned hazelnuts, but I didn’t find anything particularly hazelnutty. It seems like a really unlikely bar for Mars to put out, even for Europe, but hey, they’re the big successful candy corporation, not me. I’m sure this bar has its fans, so if you’re one of them, maybe you could explain it to me. As for the healthy part of this bar, the second ingredient is hydrogenated vegetable oils ... you decide.

I do love banana chips, but I gave up eating them quite a while back when I realized how much fat they had in them. I’m not saying fat is a bad thing, but somehow I figured a piece of chocolate was probably better for me than a banana chip.

Enter the Milk Chocolate Covered Banana Chip.

They’re not the most appealing looking treat, in fact, if you put these in a bowl and offered them to me, I’d probably decline. They look kind of like deformed chocolate ears. (I’m not sure, for the record, that I’d want to eat candy that looks like perfectly formed chocolate ears either.)

I don’t know what possessed me to buy these, but I am glad I did. It took a few bites to get used to them.

The chips themselves aren’t quite crisp, they have a little oily bite to them, but it goes oh, so well with the mild milk chocolate coating. The banana chip is thin and has that extra banana punch to it, the milk chocolate is super sweet but balanced by the cracker qualities of the chip. The chips also have this strange “cool” feeling on the tongue that just makes me want to keep eating them.

What’s even better was the price. At $1.69 for 10 ounces, it’s not bad at all for a chocolatey treat. Don’t kid yourself that chocolate covered dried fruit is in any way good for you - one serving of this has half your day’s ration of saturated fat ... and um, I’m not sure how many servings is in half the tub, but I think I’m on a restricted diet for the rest of the week to make up for this. After all, candy is a sometimes food.

I talk about Trader Joe’s a lot as a candy source; the store opening in Manhattan was big news. But on my trip to NYC, I found that they already have an extraordinary store, Fairway. We pretty much stumbled upon the market while walking back from the Upper West Side to our hotel in Times Square.

Like Trader Joe’s the store focuses on more gourmet, upscale or wholesome fare, with many items sold with their private label but at super-delicious prices. The best part, of course, was their candy section. They had a huge aisle of pre-packaged bulk nuts and panned chocolate goods, most of which made by Koppers.

The first thing that caught my eye were these little M&M sized dark chocolate goodies called Cayenne Pepper Savory. It was just what I was looking for all these years, a peppered chocolate in easy to eat morsels. But when they say Cayenne Pepper, they really mean it. It’s far too spicy for comfort. I might try putting them in cookies or something, but it’s too bad, the chocolate is really nice, but the afterburn is serious. ($5.99/lb)

Of course I have a hard time believing that they really were that hot, so after a couple of days I try another one. Same result ... whoo! I don’t know, it’s growing on me.

This was by far the best of the Koppers finds. It’s little cubes of dried apricot covered in dark chocolate. So simple. The chocolate has a nice smoky, dark bite. It’s sweet but doesn’t overpower the natural sweetness and tart chewy bite of the apricot.

It’s nice to find an affordable version of the glace apricots that I’ve seen at the upscale chocolatiers. Of course these don’t replace them, but they’re portable and high quality. ($5.99/lb)

Oh, I had such high hopes. Look at them, they’re gorgeous! Dark and glossy and sweet smelling. But there’s something so wrong about the taste and even though I’ve been sampling these for weeks, I can’t quite put my finger on it. They chocolate is sweet, but bitter. Smooth but a little waxy and it has this odd dairy taste to it, even though it’s dark chocolate. The malted center is not really malty or maybe the chocolate is overpowering it. I was just so disappointed.  ($4.99/lb)

And here’s the big secret - Fairway sells Lake Champlain! Only it’s their house brand and it’s far cheaper. I picked up two 5 Star Bars and they were only $2.19 each!  I picked up the Caramel one, just to make sure the Fairway house brand was truly the same as the Lake Champlain, and I also got this one, the Fruit & Nut Bar.

This stunning 2 ounce brick ‘o chocolate is dark chocolate on the outside, filled with a hazelnut praline (think Caffarel’s Guanduia) studded with pecans and dried cherries. Now I know I say that I don’t like cherry flavored things, but I have no problem at all with the real ones. This bar was really nice, the dark chocolate was bold and reigned in the thick flavor of the hazelnut praline quite nicely.

The nuts weren’t as numerous as I’d hoped, but the bite of the sour cherries and the chewy texture was a nice mix. I do like the inventiveness of mixing pecans and hazelnuts - two sadly neglected nuts in American candybars. Of the two that I’ve had now, I still prefer the Caramel bar, but this one is certainly interesting and I’m wondering how it compares to the 5-Star Hazelnut bar.

Fairway had a large selection of candies, both in their own packaged bulk items like the Koppers, upscale brands like Scharffen Berger and Valrhona. I also saw a huge variety of imported candies like European brands like Cadbury and Nestle (not the American versions). 

Fairway Market
2127 Broadway (Between 74th & 75th)
New York City
(212) 595-1888
Hours: 6AM-1AM Daily (isn’t that insane!)
Other locations: Plainview, Harlem and soon Brooklyn

Related Candies

1. Rum Cordials
2. Chocolate Hellfire Chip Cookies

I posted recently about Chocolate Covered Sugar Babies and lamented the loss of the Sugar Mama, which was a chocolate covered Sugar Daddy. Well, a couple of people have since told me that Sugar Mamas do actually exist. But only in name.

I think the story goes something like this: Sugar Daddy and the first Sugar Mama got married and had a mess of Sugar Babies. But Sugar Daddy wasn’t happy. Sugar Mama wasn’t happy, maybe resentful that the Sugar Babies got all the attention, maybe she started to drink, or maybe it had something to do with the big company, Nabisco, selling the Sugar Family to Tootsie, but Sugar Mama disappeared. I don’t want to say that someone put a hit out on her, but it seems that someone quietly got rid of her and was hoping that we’d forget that Sugar Daddy was a single parent. Maybe it was a Mexican divorce and Sugar Mama is out there somewhere, living under a different name, but she’s hiding really well.

So later on the new Sugar Mama comes along and Sugar Daddy gets a quickie marriage, I reckon they didn’t even go to Vegas, probably just to the courthouse in one of the states where you don’t have to wait. Sugar Daddy told Sugar Babies to call his new wife Sugar Mama, and I guess the Sugar Babies have complied ... but she’s not their Mama. She’s nothing like their Mama.

I wouldn’t really mind if Sugar Mama is Sugar Daddy’s trophy wife, but she’d have to be a trophy of some kind. She’s not really that good looking, just little flat squares of quasi caramel. Instead of being smooth and slow like Sugar Daddy, Sugar Mama is a little grainy, very soft and lacking in a strong caramelized sugar taste and that stunning orange/brown color that Sugar Daddy and the Sugar Babies share. However, Sugar Mama is not a hazard to dental work in the same way that Sugar Daddy can be.

I certainly like them better than the Kraft caramels, and they’re nice and soft and chewy, but they’re lacking in a certain elasticity and smoothness. They don’t have that grainy chew towards the end that Sugar Babies have, but they also don’t that ultra dense chew that lasts to the very end with Sugar Daddy. Now, if you’re thinking you can’t make a smaller version of the Sugar Daddy, you have to remember that they used to sell something called Sugar Daddy Nuggets, which were pretty much the same format as Sugar Mamas, but you know, really good.

Why did they do this? What’s with these big candy companies discontinuing a candy and then coopting the old name for use in a different candy (remember Marathon? Mars now uses the name for an energy type bar)? Can’t they at least wait a generation or two to prevent muddling? Aren’t there enough words out there that they can just take new names? I guess it’d look funny calling these Sugar Step-Mamas.