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August 2007Friday, August 24, 2007
This Week in Candy - The VacationOn my vacation to the central coast of California I stopped in a lot of candy stores. If there was a candy store nearby, you can be sure I went in. There was something sad about most of them. I don’t know if it was that tourism is down in that part of the state or what, but the shops were just not that appealing to me. (You know I love candy stores.) Part of it was the merchandising. The stores just didn’t feel fresh, the inventory wasn’t “fluffed” to look inviting and tasty. I also noticed a few new “taffy” stores. These are stores that pretty much only sell taffy and often for $6 to $9 a pound. What a great business that is! Seriously, taffy is one of the cheapest candies you can buy wholesale. At about $2 a pound, that’s a 400% margin. (Of course if you’re running a small chain you can get even better deals.) There’s very little maintenance involved ... you just get some big containers like barrels or whatever and mound the stuff up. Give people a basket or a bucket and tell them to go to town. Taffy is fluffed with air, so it looks like a lot of candy and of course taffy has a strong association with vacations. I didn’t buy any. I’ll have to post about taffy someday, I guess, I’m a candy blogger. I did pick up a couple of pieces of fudge (well, one was fudge and the other was penuche). I ate it, so no review or photos. Hey, I was on vacation! In other candy news, more Mexican candies have an alert out on them about high lead content. This time it’s the brands Miguelito and Barrilito. California inspectors have stepped up their testing of Mexican candies because they are so frequently found to fail the standards, so here’s to hoping that these get pulled from shelves soon. (Original notice from the California Department of Health - PDF.) In items that have not been recalled but contains bug parts, here’s a curiosity called Edible Ant Farm Candy. Yes, it’s a slab of transparent hard candy that looks like real ants in their native ant farm habitat. Such a strange experience. I’m fine with eating chicken eggs, but I don’t like to pretend they’re still in the nest or anything. (Image swiped from CandyWarehouse) Brits will be happy to hear that Cadbury is bringing back the Wispa. The bar was discontinued in 2003 and like our good old American Mars bar, when they brought out the replacement, the Dairy Milk Bubbly ... well, it wasn’t the same. I guess it’s a great sign that we should never give up hope. (Check out the current poll ... vote for what you’d bring back from extinction.) This week’s reviews in review: Monday: Chunky (6 out of 10) Tuesday: 3 Musketeers Mini Mix (7 out of 10) Thursday: UK Smarties (no artificial colors) (6 out of 10) Friday: Jones Soda Grape Carbonated Candy (6 out of 10) Weekly average: 6.25 ... 75% chocolate content. Related CandiesJones Soda Grape Carbonated CandyA couple of months ago I reviewed a dollar store find called Soda Can Fizzy Candy thinking that it was a cheaper and possibly cuter version of Jones Soda Co’s new Carbonated Candy. Allow me to say that I was wrong. While it is true that the Soda Can was less expensive and had a nice variety of flavors in one package, the candies inside are not the same. It’s not just that the Jones candy tablets are bigger, they’re simply more flavorful and fizzier. The nice tin from Jones is substantial. It’s tall and has a firmly locking flip top. Inside the top is a little encouraging missive, mine said “jump up and down for no reason” which is somehow more encouraging than some of the sayings inside the Dove wrapped candies. I did have trouble getting the tin open much of the time, but unlike the difficulties with the York tin, I never spilled anything. I bought these at Target, which had them for $1.39, not a bargain but certainly less than the $2.49 quoted on Amazon which scared me off of them in the first place. The selection was limited at Target though, at least at the checkstands I checked, so I had a choice of M.F. Grape and Green Apple. Seeing how grape is an actual soda flavor I enjoyed as a kid, I thought that was the deal for me. Later I pondered the “MF” part of the flavor name. I can imagine quite a few things that might fit into those initials: Marty Feldman Grape There’s probably something I’m missing as a possibility ... but this is a family-friendly blog. The little tablets are the size of a regular aspirin. The smell when opening the tin is absolutely grape, like the foamy head on a chilled grape soda or sitting next to a mouth-breathing child chewing Grape Bubble Yum. The flavor goes through and through with a tart bite and pretty well rounded grape flavor of both the chemical variety and a small dose of the grape juice note. What is most notable is the carbonation. These are pretty much fizz bombs for your mouth. Not blisteringly sour ones, just a simple frothy foam. Frankly, they’re not that appealing to me. I enjoyed the flavor more than the Bawls mints (but there’s no caffeine here). Carbonated things make me burpy and while a grape repeat isn’t too bad, I’m not fond of the later revisit of flavors like green apple. This is pretty why I don’t drink sodas anyway. But my husband liked the flavor of them, so I give them marks for appealing to him. The tin mentions that you can drop them in your soda as a flavor booster. So, if you’re a soda fan and are looking for a dried out capsule version to carry around with you, this might do the trick. The tin is pretty sweet looking and it’s easy to share a little pep-me-up with friends. There are only three calories per tablet and 50 tablets in the tin. I feel a bit more confident recommending them since they’re made in Canada and not China as the Soda Can candies were. Now, if they had a Root Beer version or perhaps Cola ... then I’d probably be more excited. I’ll stick with Bottle Caps for now. ZOMG Candy has a great review of the Green Apple. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 7:45 am Thursday, August 23, 2007
100 Calorie Packs - How Lazy Are We?I’ve noted over on Junk Food Blog the growing, and stupid, market for 100 Calorie Packs of food. While it make some sense when it comes to thinks like crackers, chips or cookies that usually come in large packages that make portion control difficult, it’s just plain ludicrous to reinvent the wheel when it comes to candy. I was at the Ralph’s in Los Osos, California on vacation earlier this week when I spotted this display in the middle of the candy aisle. It’s advertising Mars’ new 100 Calorie Packs for 3 Musketeers, Twix and Milk Chocolate M&Ms. For $2.50 (on sale, mind you) you get seven (7) servings and about 5 ounces of candy (depending on which one you pick). While the box is nice and dare I say, elegant, for something like Twix Bars and M&Ms, it’s an awful lot of packaging and space. But turning around and looking at the shelf below are some crazy candies that have been around and marketed for “lunch dessert” for at least 20 years. They include eight (8) “fun size” bars, which are junior versions of the full sized candy bars, usually around 3/4 of an ounce and 80-100 calories. This Ralph’s had them on sale for $1.25 a package ($1.79 regularly) but I see them often for 88 cents a pack at the drug store. So while some folks sit around and lament that it’s too hard to control their own portions and the extra packaging and expense is worth it in the fight against obesity, Mars is introducing a solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist in the candy world. Sure the “fun size bars” aren’t all exactly 100 calories, the Twix I looked at were actually 80 calories each, but isn’t the point that people want a treat and not too much temptation? Yes, there might be math involved if you get the minis in order to create a 100 calorie portion, but hey, math burns calories too! Related CandiesUK Smarties (no artificial colors)I reviewed Smarties a couple of years ago, but they were the Canadian version and I thought they merited a revisit with the originals ... especially since they’re so wildly popular around the world with sales topping $140,000,000 a year! Smarties were introduced by Rowntree in the UK back in 1937. Legend has it that Forrest Mars and a Rowntree family member were traveling through Spain in the mid-1930s and saw the soldiers there would eat chocolate that was covered in sugar to keep it from melting. Both men saw the merits of this novel way of serving candies, especially when combined with the French and Italian panning processes that provides an attractive colored shell. Rowntree first named their new chocolate lentils “Chocolate Niblet Beans” but changed next year to Smarties. They’re not sold in the United States owing mostly to the fact that the name Smarties is already taken here (and perhaps some sort of gentleman’s agreement between Rowntree & Mars ... I can’t find any record of it though). Smarties offer a wide variety of colors in their flat chocolate candies and recently change from artificial colors to all natural ones in hopes that it will reduce reticence among moms because of concerns about artificial colors being linked to hyperactivity. The hexagonal tubes that hold the Smarties are certainly cute. They’re easy to dispense from and they don’t roll around. The candies themselves are attractive, if now a little mottled in color. Smarties shells are a little thicker than M&Ms and have a light flavor to them that I can only call cookie flavored (maybe ‘Nilla Wafers or Graham Crackers). The chocolate inside is rather unremarkable - not terribly rich or creamy. What’s most surprising and pleasant about the Smarties is the flavor of the orange ones. They’re actually orange. Kind of a middle-of-the-road orange, not terribly deep or zesty, more like the Terry’s Chocolate Orange. The colors are remarkably different than they used to be. I tossed out a little array with some M&Ms ColorWorks as a comparison. The difference is pretty easy to see - the Smarties lack a depth to the color. However, it gives them a little artisan, homespun quality that certainly doesn’t turn me off. Brits are fierce about their Smarties, and even the little changes in the packaging and colors seem to get people all fired up. Here’s a commercial from last year when the Hex tube replaced the round one with the collectible caps. Here’s another earlier one that might lead one to believe that there’s something really psychedelic about these candies! While parents may be happy that the artificial colors are gone, vegetarians aren’t. They now use carminic acid to make the reds, which is made from cochineal insects. (It also means that they’re not Kosher.) Further, it’s not what Americans would consider “pure chocolate” as it contains whey and vegetable fat fillers. Ingredients are: Sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, dried skimmed milk, butterfat, whey powder, vegetable fat, lactose and soy lecithin. The coating is: sugar, wheat flour, modified starch, colors (titanium dioxide, mixed carotenes, carminic acid, vegetable carbon, riboflavin, copper, complexes of chlorophyllins), glazing agents, beetroot juice and flavourings. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 7:58 am Tuesday, August 21, 2007
3 Musketeers Mini MixI was thinking back when I wrote the review of the new 3 Musketeers Mint about the original 3 Musketeers. I’ve been searching high and low for images of it, but alas there are none to be found via my diligent use of google. What struck me as so wonderful about the concept was that it was much like the long-gone 7up Bar and the still here Sky Bar - a combination of segmented flavors. The old 3 Musketeers would have been the Neapolitan nougat of candy bars. Imagine my surprise as I ducked in the Rite Aid on Friday to pick up some things for my vacation (yes, I’m on vacation right now as I type this) that not only did the store have much of their Halloween candy on display, they also had this Autumn Minis Mix. It doesn’t say limited edition or anything. Perhaps it’s seasonal, there are golden leaves on it, after all. Here’s an old commercial I found from the days of black and white television animation: All for fun, and fun for all! Alexander Dumas would be proud. It features not vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, but a slight twist with Strawberry, French Vanilla and Mocha Cappuccino. The little mini bars are tiny, about the size of a normal boxed chocolate. Take them out of the wrapper and put it on an elegant plate and it might even pass for one at a glance. While I’ve never quite understood what French Vanilla is (and it’s often used as a description for candles and ice cream), I appreciate that this 3 Musketeers is a little lighter tasting. Where a regular one has a rather malty and dark salt flavor to it, this is light. It doesn’t quite have vanilla oozing from its pores as a flavor (more like the absence of any other flavors distinguishes this one), it’s still pleasant. Against my better judgment, I love the Strawberry. It absolutely reminds me of Neapolitan ice cream! The strawberry is sweet and has a light caramelized sugar touch to it, a little floral-y and certainly on the fake side. But the soft, fluffy and rather foamy nougat pulls it off. The chocolate is passable enough as an enclosure and adds the cocoa flavor to bring it together (I can certainly see me hating it if it were covered in white chocolate). The pink color of the insides is a little shocking and I’m guessing where the artificial colors listed in the ingredients are used. Kind of unnecessary in my book (especially since it seems that folks accepted the uncolored insides to the new Mint bar). Mocha Capuccino are surprisingly nice. Not too sweet, a good texture and creamy counterpoint of the chocolate to the nougat. However, they don’t taste like coffee. Nope, they taste like pecans or maple, but not like coffee. I don’t mind the flavor in the slightest, and considered it my second favorite of this bunch, but someone really needs to tweak their “coffee flavor” that they’re selling to these candy companies. (It could have been much worse, it could have been that dastardly Mocha that those limited edition KitKats had.) Overall, these are a nice change up from the standard 3 Musketeers and the simplicity of the bar in the first place makes the flavor changes perfectly acceptable. The price point on these, $3.79 for a 9 ounce bag was a bit hard to swallow. I prefer paying about $2.50 for these sorts of things, but I figured, I’m on vacation (or will be). Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 7:37 am |
Meticulously photographed and documented reviews of candy from around the world. And the occasional other sweet adventures. Open your mouth, expand your mind.
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