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October 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

Happy Halloween (now with fewer slaves)

Halloween Trick-or-Treat 2011

Here’s what I’m giving out for Halloween this year. I decided that it was more important to take a stand against child slavery in West Africa than give out the most loved objects of Halloween, such as Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Hershey’s, Nestle and Mars have had more than 10 years to assure consumers that they’re not buying from growers that enslave children on their cacao plantations. When they have, then I’ll start giving it out to children.

So to avoid this issue completely I bought sugar candy - that is, candy made without chocolate.

Airheads - multiple flavors of chewy fruity flavors. Made in Kentucky, USA.
Chick-O-Stick Nuggets - peanut butter flaky goodness. Made in Texas, USA.
Annabelle’s Abba Zabba & Big Hunk - nutty nougat. Made in California, USA (by union labor).

What I lack in chocolate, I’ll likely make up for with quantity and variety. We usually only get between 25 and 40 visitors. With more than 300 pieces of candy, each kid gets a heaping adult-dispensed handful. And it won’t melt. (Yes, it’s still in the 80s here this week in Los Angeles.)

So what are you giving out for Halloween this year?

Related Candies

  1. Look! and Big Hunk
  2. Airheads
  3. Abba Zaba
  4. Chick-o-Stick

POSTED BY Cybele AT 9:50 am     CandyHalloweenHighlightFun Stuff

Friday, October 28, 2011

Six Kilos of Felchlin Arriba 72% Chocolate

Felchlin Arriba 72% - 72 HourThis is not so much a review as a recounting of an ongoing chocolate Odyssey.

I regularly watch the eBay candy auctions. And when I say regularly, I actually check the pages several times a day during the week. Partly to spy new candy products, partly to find international candies that are hard to get in the US, partly to find deals and partly to squash folks who like to use Candy Blog photos for their auctions without asking.

About a month ago I saw a new auction pop up for someone selling 13.2 pounds of Felchlin Swiss Couverture chocolate coins of Grand Cru Arriba 72% Cocoa (conched 72 hours).

The auction was priced at $95 and included local Los Angeles delivery. I bid. I won.

Felchlin Arriba 72% - 72 Hour

Because it’s for use as an ingredient, it’s packaged modestly. The mini case holds three bags. Each bag is 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds). I pulled out one bag for immediate enjoyment and put the other two, inside the box, into the bottom of my wine fridge. (Okay, I’d probably call it a chocolate fridge, which keeps everything at 58 degrees.)

Felchlin Arriba 72% - 72 Hour

Each little coin is about 3/4 of an inch around and has a set of embossed cacao pods on it. They’re kind of scuffed up, as they come in a bag like chocolate chips. They work as extra large baking chips but function better as eating chocolate. At this writing I am finishing up the first bag. I’ve made one batch of chocolate pudding, one small batch of Chocolate Hazelnut Rocher (meringues from a recipe from Tartine) and the rest has simply been eaten.

The disks fit in the mouth wonderfully, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes to let their chocolate melt. (Put two together to create an oblate spheroid and they’re doubly good.) The flavor is exceptionally well rounded, there is no dominant flavor though I get notes of molasses, honey, coffee and raspberry jam sometimes. 

As noted above, this is a 72 hour conch. Conching is the process of both mixing and grinding chocolate over low heat. The longer the processing the smaller the grain size of the cacao bits and the more emulsified the chocolate becomes. This process varies in time depending on what the cacao is like and the necessities of the final product. It can be anywhere from 24 hours to 100 hours. The grinding part is done with either stones or metal rollers.

This long conch also allows Felchlin to make an uncompromising chocolate without emulsifiers. So all that’s in there is cacao mass, sugar and vanilla. (So if you must avoid soy, try this.) It’s also creamy without cream. (So if you’re a vegan, try this.) It’s made from Criollo beans from the Los Rios area of Ecuador.

Yesterday I mentioned to Coppeneur Chocolate that I loved their Chuao origin. Today they gave me these:

Earlier this year I got to try a great example of how important conching is. When I was in Germany at ISM Cologne, one of my favorite chocolate companies, Coppeneur gave me this box of two chocolate bars. They were both made from highly prized Chuao beans (review of those bars here) but inside this box were two versions - one that was conched 70 hours and one that was conched 100 hours. The difference is quite remarkable. The longer a bar is conched, the silkier it becomes.

What I’ve learned is that I love long conched chocolate. It’s so smooth that the texture itself becomes like a flavor because it’s simply so forward in the experience.

Chocolate by M NonpareilsI’m not sure why the local gal was auctioning the bulk lots of chocolate, but I did find out that she runs a local chocolate catering company called Chocolate by M. She was kind enough to leave me with these huge nonpareils along with the delivery. The photo might make them look small, but they’re huge 3 inch platters of dark chocolate (I don’t know if it’s the same as the Felchlin 72%) with a dense sprinkling of nonpareils on the bottom.

It’s just one easy idea of what I could do with my bevvy of chocolate.

Chocolate by M Nonpareils

Mostly what I think I’m going to do with my chocolate stash though is eat it. It’s incredibly munchable but also exceptionally intense. I’ve found that I can’t make it an evening snack as there are too many caffeine-like compounds in there that keep me up at night. But I’ve found that it’s a great treat during the day while I work, I’ve been keeping a little dish of them on my desk and probably eat about an ounce of them a day. They’re filling and sustaining.

But maybe the last bag will make it to December and I’ll end up making chocolate truffles for Christmas.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 3:29 pm     All NaturalCandyChocolateSingle Origin9-YummySwitzerlandHighlight

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Life Savers Gummies Spooky Shapes

Life Savers Gummies Spooky ShapesWrigley’s, now owned by Mars, has introduced Life Savers Gummies Spooky Shapes for Halloween.

Inside the box, which has an oddly angled end (which does make opening and closing the box a bit easier) is a mylar pouch with the candy inside. It’s well sealed and fresh. The package shows three shapes and colors, but makes no mention of the flavors inside.

DSC_4736rb

The gummis are tiny, similar to the scale of the Easter variety, and the shapes are hard to make out.

I found a witch’s head with a hat, a jack o lantern, a ghost, a hissing cat and a crescent moon.

They’re all soft and squishy with very little greasy coating and yet they don’t stick together much.

The flavors are identical, I think, to the standard Life Savers Gummies mix these days:

Watermelon is light green. It’s soft and tart and kind of unripe tasting.
Strawberry is bright pink. I wouldn’t call it vibrant, but it’s definitely different from the others.
Cherry is dark red and pretty much what you’d expect from Life Savers - woodsy, weird and slightly medicinal. Overall, I’m starting to like it.
Green Apple is the medium green. It has a good apple peel flavor to it, well rounded with both sweetness and sour.
Blackberry must be the purplish one. It doesn’t taste like much, a little like iced tea and perfume.

Overall, I didn’t think much of the shapes, they’re too difficult to discern. The size is strange, considering the standard shape and size of Life Savers’ large hoops. The flavors don’t taste as bold as I’m accustomed to the hard candy version. I also miss tangerine. The colors feel like the season though.

As a Wrigley’s product, which now includes Skittles and Starburst, this marketing and product design feels a little out of step with current trends. But maybe a little nostalgic “lack of polish” is refreshing. Still, it’s cheaper to just get the all year round version in the peg bag. Just pretend the Life Savers are O’s and they’re haunting you.

Related Candies

  1. LifeSavers Gummies: Bunnies & Eggs
  2. Grave Grabber Gummy Candy
  3. Brach’s Gummi Candy Corn
  4. LifeSavers Tangy Fruits Gummies
  5. LifeSavers
  6. Brain Candy! (gummi brains)
  7. Lifesaver Gummies


Name: Life Savers Gummies Spooky Shapes
    RATING:
  • SUPERB
  • YUMMY
  • TASTY
  • WORTH IT
  • TEMPTING
  • PLEASANT
  • BENIGN
  • UNAPPEALING
  • APPALLING
  • INEDIBLE
Brand: Wrigley’s
Place Purchased: Target (Eagle Rock)
Price: $1.50
Size: 3.2 ounces
Calories per ounce: 92
Categories: Candy, Halloween, Wrigley's, Gummi Candy, 6-Tempting, United States, Target

POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:31 pm     Candy

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Eat with your Eyes: Chocolate Knife

Mindestens Swiss Chocolate Knife

I saw these little candies making the rounds as a meme, but I didn’t see them in person until I went to Germany.

It’s a Swiss hazelnut chocolate confection shaped into a pocket knife and wrapped in red foil to look like a Swiss Army Knife.

Mindestens Swiss Chocolate Knife

The Mindestens Swiss Chocolate Knife is a pretty simple little candy. The center is soft gianduia (chocolate hazelnut paste) and covered with milk chocolate. It’s sweet and soft, nothing spectacular, as I’ve had much better gianduia before. But it’s hard to quibble with the design, as both the foil and the molding of the chocolate is so attentive to details. Seek them out if you have a Swiss Army Knife fan in the family.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 2:10 pm     CandyHighlightPhotography

Monday, October 24, 2011

La Pone Jordan Almonds

La Pone Jordan AlmondsJordan Almonds are one of the oldest confections. Panning nuts with a hard sugar shell is not only a beautiful way to serve nuts, it also seals the nuts up so that they don’t get rancid.

I picked up this cheap box at Rite Aid a few weeks ago because it was on sale for 75 cents but it’s not the first time I’ve purchased them. I picked them up on sale before, about three years ago when I took these photos. No, the packaging hasn’t changed. In fact, the copyright on the box says 1999 (but the expiration date for this box was December 2011).

I’ve never heard of the brand La Pone which is a division of Kings Candy Company. But I figured Jordan Almonds are all kinda the same.

I was encouraged that these were Thin Shell, as sometimes the sugar coating is so thick as to scare me that it’s really a candy encased rock.

La Pone Jordan Almonds

The sugar coated almonds come in a variety of soft pastel colors: pink, yellow, orange and green plus a bright pink. They’re shiny and huge. At first I thought it was because the almonds were really big, but it turns out that the shell is really thick. So thick that I have to wonder what their regular non-“Thin Shell” version is like.

They were hard, definitely not something to just mindlessly crunch away at. The shell is sweet, but not sticky or sickly. The nuts are fresh and chewy but not quite crunchy. I didn’t get any fake flavors like a lot of vanilla or almond extract, though an unnamed artificial flavor is on the ingredients.

The shell made me nervous, and I’m not good at sucking on things until I can crunch them. They’re pretty cheap, even at regular price which seems to be about $1.25 when I’ve seen them. It’s a nice snack that cuts down on the overall calorie load of plain nuts (almonds area bout 160 calories per ounce, these are 127 calories per ounce). The shell definitely kept me from gobbling them up too quickly.

The colors are inoffensive. This sort of packaging isn’t quite right for weddings or favors, but as a sort of way to bring back that wedding feeling they’ll do in a pinch.

(Also of concern in the ingredients is flour, so this is off limits for gluten free folks. They’re Kosher and otherwise vegan as long as you’re good with artificial colors and titanium dioxide.)

Related Candies

  1. Eat with your Eyes: Maison Pecou Jordan Almonds
  2. Marich All Natural Holland Mints & Chocolate Jordan Almonds
  3. Sconza Jordanettes
  4. Romanego Dragees, Cordials & Fondants
  5. Confetti & Agrumetti


Name: Thin Shell Jordan Almonds
    RATING:
  • SUPERB
  • YUMMY
  • TASTY
  • WORTH IT
  • TEMPTING
  • PLEASANT
  • BENIGN
  • UNAPPEALING
  • APPALLING
  • INEDIBLE
Brand: Kings Candy Company
Place Purchased: Rite Aid (Echo Park)
Price: $.75 (on sale)
Size: 4 ounces
Calories per ounce: 127
Categories: Candy, Nuts, 6-Tempting, United States, Rite Aid

POSTED BY Cybele AT 2:05 pm     CandyReviewNuts6-TemptingUnited StatesRite Aid

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