Ghirardelli Dark & Mint is part of a new line of small, single serve bars introduced by the California-based chocolate maker.

I found the bars at Walgreen’s on a dedicated display for Ghirardelli just before Christmas. They also come in Milk & Caramel, but that day I had a craving for something sophisticated and not-too-sweet.

The bar is square, which echos the little pieces, but a little thicker than their usual filled confections. It’s 1.3 ounces, so it’s right there as a single serving (it’s 170 calories) and I picked it up on sale for $1.00.

They’re about 2.75 inches square, and sectioned into four pieces. Each piece is well segmented, meaning that you can snap it apart easily and the reservoir of minty fondant is completely contained.

The bar has a rich cocoa smell, it’s a bit woodsy and herbal with a nice hint of fresh peppermint.

The fondant is creamy and flowing, but quite liquid. It’s very sweet but has a well rounded peppermint flavor that’s more like peppermint tea than straight peppermint oil. The dark chocolate isn’t too intense but has a bittersweet quality that keeps the whole thing from getting too throat-searing sticky. The wrapper doesn’t say what the cacao content is, but I’d put it at about 60%.

It’s not a revolutionary bar, but the convenience of a single serving for just a buck is nice. I like the big 3.5 ounce bars, but I don’t like the monotony of eating a whole one and it’s often hard to get enough consensus in this “too many choices” world for everyone to want that chocolate bar at that moment with me. I’d like to see this line expanded. I like the Ghirardelli style much better than Dove or Hershey’s at this price point, but sometimes I want a milk chocolate and crisped rice bar.

Related Candies

1. Ovation Mint Filled & Pumpkin Spice Oranges
2. Ghirardelli Squares Milk & Hazelnut Crisp
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Honey Mints
4. Dove Cookies and Creme + Ghirardelli Cookies Jubilee
5. Sun Cups Dark Chocolate Mint Cups
6. Ghirardelli Intense Dark Sea Salt Soiree
7. Ritter Sport Peppermint
8. Ghirardelli Luxe Milk Crisp

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Cola is an American flavor, invented in 1886 as a tonic mixed with soda water to cure a variety of ailments. The flavor is a combination of kola nuts, spices and citrus. (If not those actual ingredients, there are detectable flavor notes of them.) Though the drink is wildly popular in North America, it is rare in other forms. It’s not a common candy flavor, though it makes good candy. However, Europe seems to have embraced it and Germany has many excellent candies that utilize the unique combination of citrus and spice.

Haribo may have made its name and reputation on gummi bears, but there is one place where I think they do a much better job of creating an exclusive line of candies: Happy Cola. The Happy Cola line is a small group of cola bottle shaped and flavored products. They include the classic Happy Cola, Super Happy Cola (larger sized pieces), Fizzy Happy Cola (sour sanded gummis) and now the Haribo Happy Cola Flüssig gefüllt. These are liquid filled cola bottle gummis.

I first heard about these from CandyBrain.de and knew I had to track them down. This involved a candy swap with Kristian, as you may have noticed, I’ve had quite a few European candies featured since November and he has been featuring the American candies on his blog.

They’re a little different from the regular cola bottles, they’re a layered gummi. The bottom is a foamy, stiff marshmallow then there’s the honey-like goo and the top layer is the standard Haribo cola gummi. They’re about 1.3 inches high.

The effect of all the textures and their variations of flavor work really well together. The gummi itself is soft and chewy, but a bit stiffer than the American-made Trolli or Albanese. The marshmallowy bottom is creamy and has a vanilla note, giving it an ice cream note. The filling has a honey flavor to it with an extra little burst of spice and tartness.

It’s a nice combination and something that Haribo could easily expand to include other kinds of soda like ginger ale and root beer (though I had the root beer Haribo introduced years ago and thought they were horrible, but then again, many Europeans don’t actually like root beer).

Related Candies

1. Sugarfina: The Gummis
2. Jelly Belly Soda Pop Shoppe Gummi Bottles
3. Morinaga HiCHEW Fanta: Grape & Orange plus Cola
4. Napoleon BonBon Cola
5. Haribo Maoam Fruit Chews
6. Eat with your Eyes: Haribo Cola Wheel
7. Haribo Happy Cola
8. Fresh Cola Mentos
9. Ramune & Cola Bubble Ball

Amy’s Organic Andy’s Dandy Creamy Candy Bar is another bar in the new organic line from the famous ready-made food company.

The package describes the bar as Whipped Creamy Center with Caramel Covered in Chocolate. So, rather like a Milky Way Midnight bar.

The back of the package spends a lot of space telling you about what ingredients are in there, what ingredients may have been near the other ingredients and what ingredients are never in anything they make. It’s free from GMOs, preservatives, peanuts, eggs and gluten. Made from 99% organic ingredients (salt and water are the only non-organic items). It contains soy and dairy (made with rBHT free cows), but it’s also manufactured in a facility that processes tree nuts, wheat and seeds.

The two bars are a nice size. They’re one ounce each (a total of 2 ounces for the whole package). For comparison, a Milky Way Midnight bar is 1.76 ounces. The price for the bars is steep, I paid $2.49 for this, so twice as much as a regular Mars candy bar but actually larger. Inside the wrapper (which was devilish to open) the bars are set in a tray which protects them pretty well.

The bar just out of the package smells rich, like woodsy cocoa. Biting into the layers, it’s soft, not quite foamy but very forgiving. The fluffy center is less than creamy. It’s more like the nougat center of a 3 Musketeers. It’s airy and slightly grainy. It smells a little, well, cheesy. The caramel is unremarkable. There’s a malt note to the whole thing, but overall the center is quite sweet.

The dark chocolate is good, it’s at least bittersweet and cuts through some of the sweetness. The overall effect of the sort of the brewers yeast flavored center with the overt sweetness and lack of toasty caramel notes left me unimpressed. Granted, Milky Way has never been a huge favorite of mine, so the alternate versions I’ve had over the years are trying to measure up to something that I don’t care for in the first place. At this point, I’d say the other offerings in the Andy’s Dandy bar line are going to be more satisfying.

I knew from the first time I heard about this bar from Sweden that it was not for licorice haters. It’s called Marabou Black Saltakrits. It’s described (in English!) on the front as Milk chocolate with pieces of salty licorice.

When Swedes say salty licorice, they don’t mean sodium chloride, like the regular sea salt or table salt. They mean ammonium chloride which has a distinctly more metallic flavor profile and can give the licorice an ammonia note at times.

It’s marked as a king sized bar, and in Sweden that means 7.76 ounces ... they’re a unitary parliamentary representative democracy under constitutional monarchy, so they have a slightly more generous meaning for king-sized candy bars than we do here in our federal presidential representative democracy under constitutional republic.

This very big bar is about 8 inches long and 3 inches wide. As it traveled quite a distance to me (from its origin in Sweden to Kristian in Germany who packaged it up and sent it to the far side of North America) it was broken in several places, so photographing the whole was not very attractive.

Marabou is owned by Mondelez (Kraft) and this particular bar uses Rainforest Alliance certified cacao (30%). It doesn’t say anything else about the sourcing of the milk products or sugar. The bar contains soy and milk and may also have traces of almonds, other nuts and wheat.

The bar smells great, like sweet creme brulee and a hint of anise. The licorice was not at all what I was expecting. The bits are little little toffee shards, they’re crunchy, not chewy. There’s no molasses, so it’s a much more pungent licorice flavor than a mixed sort of Australian or American chewy flour-based licorice. If you’re familiar with cinder toffee or sponge candy, which has a note of sodium bicarbonate in it, you might find this familiar, too. The licorice has a sharp note that’s rather salty but sometimes taste more acidic. It’s sharp and sweet but overall pleasant in small bits, but large pieces are off-putting. The creamy and ordinary chocolate is great as a background, it balances it all out, though offers nothing in the way of actual cocoa flavors. It’s quite milky, which is also fine.

A few bites, and I like it. But more than a square and I definitely start getting an overabundance of the ammonia going and have to give it a rest. This is something I absolutely do not need a king sized bar of, I simple little one or two ounces would have sufficed. Still, it’s one of the best salted licorices I’ve had - I liked the crispy texture and quick dissolve.

Related Candies

1. Marabou Noblesse Crisps: Original, Dark & Orange
2. Theo Salted Almond Dark Chocolate
3. Toblerone Crunchy Salted Almond
4. Darrell Lea Dark Choc Liquorice Bullets
5. 12 European Licorices
6. Kookaburra Choc Coated Liquorice
7. Dutch Licorice
8. Salted Licorices: Djungelvral and Dubbel Zout