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May 2011

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Eat with your Eyes: Update Bears

Harbio Saft Baeren

These are the new Haribo Saft Baeren (Juice Bears). They come in a slightly different flavor list than the traditional Haribo Bears, like pear. They’re also made with natural food colorings. 

I’m a bit behind at my day job and won’t be able to update until next week, but I thought I could at least leave you with some tasty eye candy. Starting next week I’ll have copious coverage of the Sweets and Snacks Expo in Chicago.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:49 pm     CandyHighlightPhotography

Friday, May 13, 2011

Eat with your Eyes: Sugar Chicken

Barley Sugar Toys

It’s just a barley sugar chicken.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 9:46 am     CandyHighlightPhotography

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Candy Tease: Sweets & Snacks Expo 2011 Part 2

imageName: Tic Tac Strawberry Fields plus Cherry Cola & Lemon Lime Fizz
Brand: Ferrero USA, Inc
Description: Tic Tac Strawberry Fields is our newest fruit flavor sensation! Tic Tac Strawberry Fields is a blend of sweet and tart strawberry flavored Tic Tac mints, the perfect way to escape into pure sweet indulgence!  Later in the summer try our refreshing, fizzing and electrifying new flavors for Summer 2012; Cherry Cola and Lemon Lime Fizz. Experience them and satisfy your thirst in a new way! 
Introduction Date: 6/1/2011 & 7/1/2011
Notes: Tic Tacs are veering away from mint these days with fruity flavors. Strawberry Fields strikes me as an ideal flavor adaptation, I’m surprised it hasn’t existed up until now. I’m really excited by the soda flavors and hope that maybe we can get a Root Beer someday. (The copy I was given says that the Cherry Cola & Lemon Lime Fizz were to be introduced both July 2011 and Summer 2012, I don’t know if one, both or neither are accurate.)

imageName: Gimbal’s SOUR LOVERS
Brand: Gimbal’s Fine Candies
Description: NEW Sour Lovers! Sour Lovers is made with Real Fruit Juice and bursts with Real Sour Flavor. Sour through and through, Sour Lovers is High in Antioxidant Vitamin C with each serving supplying 25% Daily Vitamin C Requirement. Sour Lovers heart shaped candies feature 12 awesome true-to-life flavors! This unique and delicious assortment includes Pomegranate, Strawberry Daiquiri, Sour Blueberry, Mango, Georgia Peach, Fuji Apple, Bing Cherry, Meyer Lemon, Watermelon, Grapefruit, Tangerine and Baja Margarita.
Introduction Date: 03/01/11
Notes: This continues the line of Gimbal’s “Lovers” series of large jelly bean style candies they’ve been introducing over the past three seasons, the first was Cherry Lovers followed by Honey Lovers. I was so intrigued by this one though, since it includes Grapefruit and Tangerine that I ordered some online and I hope to have them next week for review. These appear to be sour sanded candies, not a smooth jelly bean shell, but I won’t know until I get to see them up close. Also of note, Gimbal’s facilities are free of the eight major food allergens and are Kosher, so they’re very inclusive of most folks with food origin/ingredient/manufacturing concerns.

imageName: PEEPS Chocolate Dipped Chicks in a Caramel Flavor
Brand: Just Born
Description: Chocolate Dipped Chicks for all seasons in a variety of different colors and/or flavors. They are all available in both Milk and Dark Chocolate.
Season Availability:
Easter offers Chocolate Dipped Chicks coated in yellow sugar.
Valentine’s Day offers Chocolate Dipped Chicks in Strawberry Creme Flavor.
Halloween offers Chocolate Dipped Chicks coated in orange sugar.
Christmas offers Chocolate Dipped Chicks in a Caramel Flavor.

Introduction Date: 7/1/2011
Notes: I think the chocolate flavored dark chocolate dipped PEEPS Chicks were the best Peeps ever. The caramel ones sound intriguing, especially if there’s a hint of salt in them. Next they should make an Espresso version. I say should as a suggestion, not a prediction.

imageName: Quench Grape
Brand: Mueller Sports Medicine
Description: Best-Selling Sports Gum in America now available in Juicy New Flavor! New Quench Grape will be added to our current assortment of mouthwatering flavors - Original lemon, juicy orange and tangy fruit. In addition, Quench is unveiling a whole new look to its products to coincide with the addition of grape with eye-catching packaging and merchandising displays.
Introduction Date: 06/01/2011
Notes: I did not even know there was a category of “sports gum.” Grape Bubble Yum was one of my favorites as a kid, even though I can’t stand it as an adult ... and I also chewed my fair share of Quench when I was a kid as well. So you can imagine the waves of nostalgia this combination is generating for me. (Of course I expect that would be short lived, I’d chew a few pieces and be satisfied until the next nostalgic kick was engaged some years later ... I’m probably not the target market.)

All images courtesy of the respective manufacturer.

Related Candies

  1. Candy Tease: Sweets & Snacks Expo 2011 Part 1
  2. Candy Tease: August 2010
  3. Candy Tease: Just Born 2010
  4. Candy Tease: Sweets & Snacks Expo 2010 - Part 2
  5. Candy Tease: Sweets & Snacks Expo 2010

POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:06 pm     CandyNew Product AnnouncementHighlightNews

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

KitKat Otonano Amasa (Adult Taste)

KitKat Adult ChocolateI love the combination of chocolate and cookies. The KitKat bar is a great confectionery combination of the two. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve craved sweets less and come to appreciate texture and taste a bit more. So an ordinary milk chocolate KitKat can be a little sweet for many snacking situations (and there are many snacking situations).

I picked up the KitKat Otonano Amasa, which is the “adult taste” version - a little less sweet and with more cookie texture.

KitKats from Japan come in smart little boxes instead of plain old plastic packaging. I suppose it’s wasteful, but they do protect the contents well. On the back there’s a little “To” and “From” section for gifting.

KitKat Adult Chocolate

Inside the box are two individually packaged two-finger pieces. Each is listed as 95 calories each.

KitKat Adult Chocolate

The bars are just like any other KitKat, cream filled wafers covered in chocolate. But the chocolate here has little bits of dark chocolate cookies incorporated. The taste is similar to the Oreo Bitter Bar I tried recently. But in this case the texture at the front is is the creaminess of the chocolate. The flavor is slightly bitter like charcoal or, well, Oreos. The crispy wafers are light and flavorless.

It was a great combination, I liked it so much that I bought another bag of the snack sized ones. Which is goofy because they’re ridiculously expensive for KitKats. The package here was $2.25 for 1.19 ounces, the bag was $5.89 for 5.29 ounces. I could get some fine chocolates (well, See’s) for about $16 a pound.

Which is what leads me to the trepidation I have about the bar. The ingredients.

Ingredients: Palm Oil, Sugar, Wheat Flour, Cocoa Powder, Salt, Cacao Mass, Lactose, Powered Skim Milk, Cocoa Butter, Yeast, Salt, Soy Lecithin, Baking Powder, Flavoring, Yeast.

Palm oil. That’s what the bar is. Most of the time I find palm oil candies to be greasy and stiff, but this was really well done for a rainforest destroying confection. Oh, and palm oil is bad for you. Far worse than cocoa butter. So if I’m going for a candy that has a whopping 160 calories per ounce (which is about as high as the scale goes), it’d better be exceptional. So while I enjoyed this candy physically like it was a 10 out of 10, the price and ingredients knock it back to 8 out of 10.

Related Candies

  1. Oreo Bitter Bar (Japan)
  2. Russell Stover Cookies ‘n Cream Nest
  3. Eat with your Eyes: KitKat Cookies Plus (Japan)
  4. KitKat Dark
  5. Q.Bel Double Dark Chocolate Wafer Bar
  6. Cookies ‘n’ Creme Showdown
  7. KitKat Bitter & White
  8. Twix Dark Chocolate


Name: KitKat Otonano Amasa
    RATING:
  • SUPERB
  • YUMMY
  • TASTY
  • WORTH IT
  • TEMPTING
  • PLEASANT
  • BENIGN
  • UNAPPEALING
  • APPALLING
  • INEDIBLE
Brand: Nestle
Place Purchased: Marukai Marketplace (Little Tokyo)
Price: $2.25
Size: 1.19 ounces
Calories per ounce: 160
Categories: Candy, Nestle, Chocolate, Cookie, Mockolate, 8-Tasty, Japan

POSTED BY Cybele AT 3:22 pm     CandyReviewNestleChocolateCookieKitKatMockolate8-TastyJapan

Monday, May 9, 2011

Zeke’s Butterscotch

Zeke's ButterscotchA few months ago I was contacted by Zeke’s Candy Company with an offer to try their Old Fashioned Cracked Butterscotch. I love butterscotch, but then I thought, what is butterscotch? Do I even know what the real stuff is beyond the artificially colored and flavored butterscotch disk hard candies that I grew up on?

Their website only added to the mystery, as there were no photos of the candy itself, just the containers. When it arrived, it was just as mysterious, a deep brown box. It rattled, like it was a jigsaw puzzle made out of ceramic. It was pretty heavy to, so this was some dense stuff. Inside were two sealed bags of powdery and jagged pieces. Pieces range in size from a half an inch across to an inch and a half.

The ingredients are simple: butter, cane sugar, unsulfured molasses, water, vinegar and salt. So there was no “flavor” for butterscotch, it was obviously what they did with these simple ingredients that made scotched this butter.

Zeke's Butterscotch

As an artisan candy, the pieces are not machine made in any fashion. They’re thin pieces of “bark” that are broken into pieces small enough to suck on and then tossed in powdered sugar to keep them from sticking together. This is a bit messy, as there is both a bit of powdery residue on the fingers and a few little shards in the bottom of the bag when you’re done. It also means that this candy really can’t be placed into a candy dish, it needs to be kept in an airtight container (a zipper plastic bag will do) or else it gets tacky.

Once the powered sugar is gone from their surface, it’s apparent to me that Butterscotch is just toffee cooked to a slightly different texture. Where toffee cleaves into crunchy pieces, butterscotch is like a hard caramel, it’s smooth and eventually warms enough to become a very stiff and sticky chew (but only do it if you have complete confidence in your teeth or dental work).

The flavor is great, full of deep notes of caramelized sugar, molasses, honey, toast and salt. It’s a slow candy, great for times when you need something to go with a pensive activity.

I had a really hard time not crunching on it, so it got to be a challenge for me to at least wait until it was soft enough to chew. I found the stuff satisfying and addictive at the same time. It’s nothing like any other butterscotch candies I’ve had, the deep creamy smoothness is so much better than a straight sugar and corn syrup base.

I don’t recommend it for humid areas as I did find that it got tacky and sticky if left uncovered even in the low moisture Southern California where I live. If you’re a fan of the style of hard lollipops from See’s, this is a great small piece version with fewer ingredients. I could see there being a few other versions of these, perhaps with nuts, cocoa or even some coffee.

Related Candies

  1. Mandy’s Old Fashioned Confections: Butterscotch & Caramel
  2. Eat with your Eyes: See’s Butterscotch
  3. See’s Lollypops
  4. Hammond’s Pantry Candies
  5. Japanese Black Sugar & Tropical Chews
  6. Werther’s Caramel Coffee Hard Candies
  7. Goodbye Reed’s
  8. Alcohol Arrows


Name: Old Fashioned Cracked Butterscotch
    RATING:
  • SUPERB
  • YUMMY
  • TASTY
  • WORTH IT
  • TEMPTING
  • PLEASANT
  • BENIGN
  • UNAPPEALING
  • APPALLING
  • INEDIBLE
Brand: Zeke’s Candy Co.
Place Purchased: samples from Zeke's Candy Co.
Price: $24.95
Size: 24 ounces
Calories per ounce:
Categories: All Natural, Candy, Toffee, 8-Tasty, United States

POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:27 pm     All NaturalCandyReviewToffee8-TastyUnited States

Page 2 of 3 pages  < 1 2 3 > 

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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