In the United States there are only a few options for candy coated chocolate morsels. There are M&Ms, and let’s face it, they’re ubiquitous and come in so many varieties, it’s hard to fathom why anyone else would try to make them. But there are Koppers Milkies and Hershey’s Pieces (though not in milk chocolate), and every once in a while you can find a store that carries Nestle Smarties.

In Europe things are a little different. There are M&Ms, though fewer varieties, and their main competitor, Nestle Smarties. And then there are all the other lentils. I picked up a few of them in Germany, today I present the Choceur Choco Dragees. For those who are familiar with Aldi, you’ll recognize the name Choceur as one of their house-brands of chocolate confections.

The package says (in German), multicolored full milk chocolate pieces with natural colors. I picked up the smallest bag I could find, which is 400 grams (14.11 ounces). I liked the package, it’s pretty compact and features a gusseted bottom so it stands up.

The Choco Dragees come in five rather muted colors. The pieces were all perfectly formed and consistent.

The shells were crunchy and shiny. The chocolate inside, well, it’s very German tasting. There’s a strong milk taste to it, a little tangy but not spoiled like Hershey’s. It’s smooth and rather sweet as well, but has a discernible caramel note to it as well.

They’re very different from M&Ms. The crunch of the shell is more pronounced and there’s no faint bitterness from any artificial flavors like I get from brown or red M&Ms. They’re sweet, but in a more muted, perhaps honey flavored way.

I’ve never seen these at Aldi in the United States, though they might have them in the seasonal stuff for holidays and I missed it. They’re worth picking up if you do see them and if I lived in Germany, I’d probably get these quite often.

Related Candies

1. Crispy M&Ms
2. Choceur Chocolate Crisp Bars
3. Russell Stover Color Me Candies
4. Choceur After Dinner Mints: Orange & Peppermint
5. Choceur Luxury Mini Chocolate Bars
6. Head to Head: M&Ms vs Koppers Milkies
7. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
8. M&Ms Line
9. Head-to-Head: Smarties vs. M&Ms

Trader Joe’s is usually right on target when it jumps on a trend. They seem to know when it’s too early to hop on (and customers will be too scared) or too late (customers will be weary of over saturation). Salt and caramel, salt and chocolate and of course, the combination of all three is right up there on the trend meter. Artisans and high end chocolatiers started the international push about eight years ago, and Trader Joe’s has introduced some fine salted caramels along the way.

Today I have one of their new bars, a 70% Dark Chocolate Bar - Caramel with Black Sea Salt. The design of the box is reminiscent of the Fearless Flyer’s clip art designs with fanciful sailing ships and airships and seaweed. The package mentions that the bar is gluten free.

The package describes the bar thusly:

Exotic Hawaiian Black Sea Salt hails from the Pacific seawater that surrounds the Hawaiian islands. This stunning black salt is evaporated in above ground pools that form naturally from lava flows. Together, its smoky aroma and intense caramel complement this sophisticated dark chocolate experience. Trader Joe’s 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate Bar with Caramel with Black Sea Salt pairs well with a lei, Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt.

Inside the box the bar is sealed in a tough silver mylar package. There’s no design flair to it, but something much more practical. There’s a little stamp that says not only when the bar was made, but also the best by date. (It’s pretty rare for a product to give you both pieces of information.)

I had two of these bars. The first, pictured here, I bought myself. The second was one my husband picked up, not realizing that I’d already procured one. This one was in good shape, glossy and unbroken. The color of the chocolate was a little dead - a little on the coffee ground brown side. The bottom of the bar is studded with sea salt crystals. They weren’t black, they were white and translucent. Some grains were small and well spaced, but others were clumped together or just downright large - like something you’d toss on an icy sidewalk.

The center of the bar is a gooey, near liquid caramel. It’s creamy and silky smooth with a light milky flavor with a strong salty note. The combination of salt from the dusting and the center was sometimes pretty intense. (The package says that there’s only 95 mg of salt here, but I think that’s a little off.)

The chocolate is a little bitter but strong with a fruity and woodsy note to it, kind of like smoked raisins. It’s quite decadent all together, sweet, salty, creamy and a little crunchy if you hit a salt patch.

My big complaint about this bar is the filling at times. The second bar was broken in one place, which unleashed the caramel into the package. Also, if you start the bar, you’re kind of obligated to finish it right away, because the caramel will escape within a half an hour of placing it horizontal. (I guess propping it upright might help.)

Trader Joe’s always makes a good quality product. The packaging was good, the label gave me all the info I wanted to know and the quality was excellent for the price. I don’t think this is my favorite bar, mostly because of the overly-salty spots and the mess factor.

There’s another bar in this set that I saw on the shelf, Trader Joe’s 70% Dark Chocolate - Toffee with Walnuts and Pecans - has anyone tried that as well?

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
2. Equal Exchange Chocolate Caramel Crunch with Sea Salt
3. Lindt Excellence Dark with a touch of Sea Salt
4. Marich Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews
5. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels
6. Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels
7. Fran’s Gray Salt Caramels

I found this Beacon TV Bar - Milk at Mel & Rose Wine & Liquors, which often has South African candies in stock.

The bar is described on the package as Tropical Coconut and Crunchy Rice Puffs in Smooth Milk Chocolate. Well, that’s an uncommon combination so I was intrigued. Add to that the bold wrapper, and I was sold. I also liked the name, as I work in television during the day, so it’s fun to try a bar based on the medium.

Beacon also makes other candies, like Fizzers (a chewy candy rather like Airheads but fizzy), large chocolate tablets called Beacon Slabs, Slim Slabs, Superfine (an upscale chocolate line) but perhaps they’re best known for their Beacon Allsorts, which are one of the best selling candies in all of South Africa. They have other candy bars with classic names like Wonder Bar, Nosh Bar, Inside Story and Now Bar.

The bar looks simple and appealing. It’s about 4.5 inches long and blocky. It’s 1.65 ounces, which is less than a Snickers bar (though about the same volume) but more than a pair of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It feels light so I wasn’t surprised when I bit into it and it was quite airy. The crisped rice is dense without being sticky like a marshmallow treat is. It’s held together by the lightest chocolate cream along with a bit of coconut. Though I didn’t catch much coconut texture, there was a lot of coconut flavor. It even overshadowed the chocolate. The chocolate coating may or may not be actual chocolate. There’s cocoa mass and cocoa butter in the ingredients list, but lots of other vegetable fats that could be in the coating as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the coating did have a bit of vegetable oil to it, it’s a bit mild and waxy.

The portion is ideal for me, about 250 calories for the whole bar. There’s also a TV Bar White chocolate one which I could only imagine is extremely sweet, but perhaps the milkiness of a good white chocolate would go well with the coconut. There is similar bar here in the States called Crispy Cat Mint Coconut, which is dark chocolate covering crisped rice, mint and coconut. I like the milky notes to this one and think it’d be a good fit for American tastes. (Or perhaps Hershey’s will make a Whatchamacallit Coconut version.)

The bar is marked Halal and is also distributed in Australia.

Related Candies

1. Twix Coconut (Limited Edition)
2. Nestle Tex
3. Limited Edition M&Ms Coconut
4. Hershey’s Whatchamacallit & Thingamajig
5. Atkinson’s Coconut Long Boys
6. Crispy Cat

Skinny Cow, the line of low fat ice cream made by Nestle, has come out with some candy which is also trying to position itself as being low calorie. In reality it’s just portion control.

I already reviewed the bars, called Heavenly Crisp, and today I’ll tackle their new Dreamy Clusters. The Dreamy Clusters come in dark chocolate and milk chocolate, but since I was buying a full box of these and they were $4.29 each, I only picked up one. (I’ve spent close to $15 on products for review this week, which is a bit steep for me when the average cost of a review item is about a buck.)

The package describes Dreamy Clusters as crunchy crisps and creamy caramel drenched in dark chocolate. That actually sounds fantastic. Kind of like a 100 Grand bar but in dark chocolate.

The box contains more than the wafer bars, there are six packets and each is just shy of one ounce. So the value is a bit better.

The ingredients start off pretty good for candy, but go a little awry after that:

Dark Chocolate (Sugar, Chocolate, Cocoa Butter, Soy Lecithin, Vanilla Extract), Rice Flour, Polydextrose, Maltitol, Vegetable Glycerin, Wheat Flour, Nonfat Milk, Butter, and less than 2% of: Cocoa Processed With Alkali, Cream, Milk Protein Isolate, Sugar, Baking Soda, Yeast, Barley Malt Extract, Palm Oil, Carrageenan (Vegetable Stabilizer), Soy Lecithin, Salt, Erythritol, Disodium Phosphate (Emulsifier), Caramel Color, Natural Flavor.

Maltitol & erythritol are sugar alcohols. They are less sweet than glucose, fructose or sucrose but also have a slightly cool effect on the tongue and can have some side effects (such as intestinal gas and a laxative effect). They don’t make up a large portion of the candy itself, but their presence means that the flavor and satisfaction may be affected.

The pieces themselves are quite small. But that’s no big deal if you think of them as tiny chocolates from an elegant box. I got five pieces in my bag, and I opened two bags. So I’m going to guess that’s the norm. (I also felt the other bags in the box and they seem to be the same, maybe I need to invest in a Candy Blog ultrasound machine.)

The packet that holds them is senselessly large - it’s five inches by four inches and each piece is about an inch in diameter. It does protect them, none of them were smashed though all were scuffed up.

The pieces smell great. They’re bumpy and though they vary in size, they’re pretty consistent in their construction. Each piece is made up of a caramel center with a dark chocolate coating studded with a crisped rice product. The caramel has a good pull, though it’s not a large reservoir, it only provides a small amount of chew and a large hit of salt. The dark chocolate coating is quite sweet but of good enough quality that it didn’t seem chalky or overly bitter. The main notes were raisins and a generic woodsy flavor. The crisps were salty, light and crunchy. They were bigger than the strange new things that they put in 100 Grand bars these days, so I found them pretty satisfying as a textural element. They didn’t have much of a malty cereal flavor.

Five pieces was actually satisfying. The portion sounds small (about half the mass of a Snicker or 3 Musketeers) but the fact that there were five pieces and they had a lot going on (especially if you bit them in half instead of popping them in your mouth whole) might make these a decadent little treat.

I’m annoyed by the use of the sugar alcohols and exceedingly long ingredients list. In a chocolate candy, sugar is not what racks up the calories, fat is. However, instead of substituting the inimitable cocoa butter for something else, they left it in, and just added the crisps which are part air and part lower-calorie fiber/carbs. The nutritional panel for these is decent enough - there’s actually 1 gram of protein and it says 3 grams of fiber.

It’s hard to give these a resounding endorsement because of my misgivings about their marketing (emaciated cows are appetizing?) and their ingredients. Also, the price is needlessly precious - you get half as much candy as a 100 Grand, but somehow it costs four times as much? (I’m basing that off of a $1.25 package of 8 fun size bars of 100 Grand which weights about 6 ounces.) However, these are nicely done for a candy marketed to dieters. They do taste good and without knowing that it’s “diet candy” I’d still eat them.

Related Candies

1. Glico Pocky Cookie Crush
2. Crisp Angell Organic Candy Bar
3. Hawaiian Host Maui Caramacs
4. Gimme Calcium
5. Q.Bel Crispy Wafer Bars
6. Fling: Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate & Hazelnut
7. 100 Grand Dark

Pocky was one of my first introductions to Japanese candy. It’s a simple construction that has no precise American analogue. It’s a flavorless cookie stick dipped in chocolate or some other creamy chocolate-like confection. Later versions, and there are plenty, have other flavors, stripes and inclusions. It’s been hard to keep up with them all. Once I found the Men’s Pocky, which I loved, I found that all others after that just couldn’t measure up.

The Glico Pocky Cookie Crush caught my eye though, as I’d already picked up the Oreo Bitter Chocolate Bar, I thought maybe this Japanese trend of crushed cookies was onto something.

The construction of the sticks is simple. The bland, dense and dry cookie stick is mostly dipped into a milk chocolate studded with chocolate cookie bits. It’s all very mellow. It’s quite crunchy, so there are a lot of textures going on, with the crisp low sweetness of the stick, then the sandy cocoa of the cookie bits and then the creamy chocolate coating that binds it all together.

Better, darker chocolate would probably throw these into the realm of perfection.

I have to say that the concept of a partially dipped crunchy stick is also genius. You can pick it up without getting messy fingers and nibble away at it or pop the whole thing in your mouth.

Each packet has only four sticks in it but still a nice portion of about 71 calories. The box was expensive, as far as I was concerned. It’s six packets but only 2.82 ounces for $4.75. It made me feel like they were precious and decadent, when in reality they were just pricey.

Related Candies

1. Oreo Bitter Bar (Japan)
2. Divine Milk Chocolate with Spiced Cookies
3. Chuao Panko
4. Cookies ‘n’ Creme Showdown
5. Cookie Dough Bites
6. Almond Crush Pocky
7. Pocky Kurogoma (Black Sesame)
8. Men’s Pocky