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February 2010

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Eat with your Eyes: Klik Double Crunch

You can consider this a mini-review of the Klik Double Crunch bar from Israel. It’s a milk chocolate coated cereal bar with nougat and almonds. (Package photo here.)

Klik Double Crunch

What it felt like to me was a mass of loosely packed crunchy cereal spheres lightly coated with a nougatine/cream and then covered with milk chocolate.

The effect is that the crunch has powerful grain taste to it, but it’s not overly sweet. It’s a little nutty, more on the hazelnut side of things than almond. It’s quite light ... the bar looks huge but is really only 1.42 ounces and 210 calories. I’d definitely buy it again. I picked mine up at Munchies, a Kosher candy shop on Pico Blvd.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:31 pm     CandyFeatured NewsFun StuffPhotography

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Eat with your Eyes: Cadbury Mini Eggs

Drug stores are clever, they put huge bins of tasty candy on sale and right next to the line at the registers. I couldn’t resist picking up a bag of Cadbury Mini Eggs.

Cadbury Mini Eggs

You can check out the review from the archives.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 9:35 am     CandyFeatured NewsFun StuffPhotography

Friday, February 26, 2010

Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Balls

Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate BallsEaster is the season for foil wrapper chocolate, probably more than Christmas. So I thought I’d include these Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Balls here now.

I have three varieties, which are all small foil-wrapped milk chocolate balls in a fruit flavor. Key Lime, Raspberry and Orange. The flavors are familiar to those who have had the Florida Tropic Oranges (which come in far more flavors).

The little stand up bags are nicely formatted, cleanly designed and compact. Of course they’re color coded - raspberry is hot pink, orange is orange and lime is green. (They’re also bilingual, half is in French.) There’s 5.3 ounces in there, so it’s enough to share, but not quite enough to fill up an ample candy dish like a bag of Hershey’s Kisses might.

Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Balls

Each 3/4” ball of milk chocolate is wrapped in matte foil keyed to the flavor. While they’re not quite Easter eggs, they colors, the fact that they’re individually wrapped & ready to nestle in some basket grass makes them an ideal choice. Especially since there really isn’t much out there like this.

Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Key Lime Balls

The first is Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Key Lime. Key lime is an interesting flavor. While it’s tempting to call all lime flavors the same, there is a perceptible difference between key limes (sometimes called Mexican limes) and the larger Persian limes that are found in most grocery stores. Key lime juice isn’t clear, it’s rather milky and has a more zesty and chalky flavor to it.

The flavor profile is softer than the Persian lime notes, which are a dichotomy of bitter zest and sour juice but little in between. In this case the slightly floral notes and powerful zest goes well with the milk chocolate. It doesn’t immediately call to mind cleaning products like Persian limes do. The aftertaste is strong though, strong enough to make me want to either eat more or something else.

The milk chocolate itself isn’t particularly notable - it’s smooth enough, better than the Terry’s Chocolate Orange I was once accustomed to. The milk and dairy notes are good, and give this a bit of a yogurty note.

Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Raspberry Balls

The Florida Milk Chocolate Raspberry smells strongly of floral berry notes right away. Raspberry is a tough flavor to do, it’s strong and can be cloying and put off some folks who actually like the fresh berries. This one is pretty close - there are strong flowery odors along with some good deep woodsy components. There’s a slight aftertaste again, the lingering flavoring. The chocolate combines well and the natural tang of the milk in there gives it a bit of a chocolate cheesecake vibe.

Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Orange Balls

The Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Orange is probably the crowd pleaser in the set. The chocolate is sweet but has a passably creamy melt, milky texture and well rounded orange zest flavors. I liked the texture better than the orange shaped one, and oddly it didn’t seem as orangy (maybe it’s just that they’re smaller morsels). There’s a little salt in the milk chocolate, which keeps it all from tasting too sickly sweet. It’s far better than any of the novelty-flavored Hershey’s Kisses I’ve tried recently.

I don’t have a price on these, but judging by the prices of the Oranges they make, I’d expect a bag to be tagged at less than $4 for the 5.3 ounce bag. A little more than Dove or Hershey’s but offering something they don’t ... a little fruity note.

Related Candies

  1. Eat with your Eyes: Orange Dark Chocolate Shells
  2. Divine 70% Dark Chocolate with Raspberries
  3. Choceur After Dinner Mints: Orange & Peppermint
  4. Florida Tropic Oranges
  5. Regional Flavors: Key Lime, Pina Colada & Huckleberries
  6. Frey Supreme: White, Lemon & Lime and Citron & Poivre
  7. Short & Sweet: Caramello /  Mega M&Ms / Orange Kisses
Name: Florida Tropic Milk Chocolate Balls
    RATING:
  • 10 SUPERB
  • 9 YUMMY
  • 8 TASTY
  • 7 WORTH IT
  • 6 TEMPTING
  • 5 PLEASANT
  • 4 BENIGN
  • 3 UNAPPEALING
  • 2 APPALLING
  • 1 INEDIBLE
Brand: Florida Tropic (SweetWorks)
Place Purchased: samples from SweetWorks
Price: unknown
Size: 5.3 ounces
Calories per ounce: 146
Categories: Chocolate, United States, SweetWorks

POSTED BY Cybele AT 3:58 pm    

Eat with your Eyes: Christopher Elbow

When I’m in San Francisco I like to stop at Christopher Elbow Chocolates for a few pieces and some hot chocolate. (It’s always cold enough for hot chocolate in San Francisco.)

Christpher Elbow

Previous review of chocolate bar and my first encounter with Christopher Elbow pieces.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 8:04 am     CandyFeatured NewsFun StuffPhotography

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Whitman’s Marshmallow Eggs & Carrot

Whitman's Marshmallow EggWhitman’s is out of the box this Easter. Until I spotted these little Marshmallow Egg covered in Easter Pastelle I didn’t know that Whitman’s didn’t make anything but boxed chocolates.

Whitman’s is now owned by Russell Stover’s, so it isn’t surprising that they might move into the single serving items and it makes more sense that if they did, it wouldn’t be with an item identical to a Russell Stover product. The new line seems to be all “Easter Pastelle” covered marshmallows.

The eggs were priced as I expected, regular price was 59 cents but on sale at two for a dollar at Walgreen’s where I found them (also spotted at RiteAid).

Whitman's Marshmallow Eggs

I found them in three colors: Green, Yellow and Magenta.

I also found that they were not flavored, which might have been fun. A raspberry flavored Easter Pastelle coating with a plain marshmallow would be an innovative piece of candy. A white confection on a marshmallow is, well, ordinary.

Whitman's Marshmallow Egg

Each egg is one ounce. They’re approximately 2.5” long and 1” high. The Easter Pastelle is thin and not quite crisp. It smells like, well, an Easter basket. A fake vanilla and sugar scent.

The Pastelle coating is made of sugar, hydrogenated palm kernel oil and milk products plus some food coloring.

The marshmallow is very soft and foamy, moist and sticky, not chewy and latexy like some. It’s all very, very sweet. In the case of the pink one shown above, I got a bitter metallic aftertaste from the pink Pastelle. The green was tastier in that it had fewer aftertastes to mess with the tastes.

Whitman's Marshmallow CarrotThe more exciting product in the new line though was this Whitman’s Marshmallow Carrot which cost a whole dollar.

The large orange carrot shaped marshmallow is covered in two different colors of Easter Pastelle, the orange body and a green carrot top. The whole thing weighs 1.75 ounces.It’s a little over 4” long, so it’s a hefty piece of fluffed sugar. This package has a little waxed card in it, I’m guessing this candy needed a little more support than the eggs. (It also helped to show off the product well in the package.

The flavor profile is similar to the Egg, except that the carrot is a little flatter, so there’s not quite as much marshmallow to Pastelle.

Whitman's Marshmallow Carrot

The marshmallow didn’t seem quite as moist either. But still, this is some intense sugar. I couldn’t eat more than two bites before I had to slip it back into its package.

These aren’t stellar, but they are different enough from what you can get in the drug store aisle from Russell Stover, RM Palmer, Hershey’s or Dove, so they have that going for them. Folks who like really high glycemic load (28 g total weight: 21g of carbs, 3g of fat) fluffed confectionery will probably go crazy for these. The carrot would make an amazing decoration on top of a carrot cake or a plate of Easter desserts.

I still think a bit of flavor thrown in would be interesting. Orange-flavored, Mint-flavored, Lemon-flavored coatings would really set this apart from the ordinary.

Related Candies

  1. Chocolate Covered Peeps
  2. Private Reserve Russell Stover and Whitman’s Reserve
  3. Cadbury Easter Mallows
  4. Elmer’s Dark Chocolate Heavenly Hash & Gold Brick Eggs
  5. Elmer’s Toasted Marshmallow Eggs
  6. Whitman’s Sampler Tin
  7. The Great Pumpkin Roundup
Name: Marshmallow Eggs & Carrot
    RATING:
  • 10 SUPERB
  • 9 YUMMY
  • 8 TASTY
  • 7 WORTH IT
  • 6 TEMPTING
  • 5 PLEASANT
  • 4 BENIGN
  • 3 UNAPPEALING
  • 2 APPALLING
  • 1 INEDIBLE
Brand: Whitman's
Place Purchased: RiteAid & Walgreen's (Echo Park)
Price: $.50 & $1.00
Size: 1 ounce & 1.75 ounces
Calories per ounce: 110
Categories: Mockolate, Marshmallow, United States, Whitman's, Easter


Name: Marshmallow Egg Covered in Easter Pastelle
    RATING:
  • SUPERB
  • YUMMY
  • TASTY
  • WORTH IT
  • TEMPTING
  • PLEASANT
  • BENIGN
  • UNAPPEALING
  • APPALLING
  • INEDIBLE
Brand:
Place Purchased: Rite Aid (Echo Park)
Price: $.50
Size: 1 ounce
Calories per ounce: 110
Categories: Easter, Whitman's, Marshmallow, Mockolate, 6-Tempting, United States, Rite Aid


Name: Marshmallow Carrot covered in Easter Pastelle
    RATING:
  • SUPERB
  • YUMMY
  • TASTY
  • WORTH IT
  • TEMPTING
  • PLEASANT
  • BENIGN
  • UNAPPEALING
  • APPALLING
  • INEDIBLE
Brand:
Place Purchased: Rite Aid (Echo Park)
Price: $1.00
Size: 1.75 ounce
Calories per ounce: 110
Categories: Easter, Whitman's, Marshmallow, Mockolate, 4-Benign, Rite Aid

POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:09 pm    

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