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Monday, April 26, 2010
Eat with your Eyes: Ritter Sport Haselnuss Krokant
Another perfectly molded bar from Ritter Sport. POSTED BY Cybele AT 9:10 am Candy • Featured News • Fun Stuff • Photography • Sunday, April 25, 2010
Eat with your Eyes: Irish Beans
Trader Joe’s searches far and wide for candy suppliers, these little all natural Jelly Beans are from Ireland. POSTED BY Cybele AT 8:54 am Candy • Featured News • Fun Stuff • Photography • Saturday, April 24, 2010
Eat with your Eyes: Mint Leaf
It’s a simple confection, just sugar with some food coloring and a dash of mint oil then molded into the shape of a leaf. As you can imagine, it’s very sweet. POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:15 pm Candy • Featured News • Fun Stuff • Photography • Friday, April 23, 2010
Swizzels Matlow Parma Violets
They come in little rolls of tablets, similar to another Swizzels Matlow product, Swizzels Fizzers. (Those in North America are probably more familiar with Ce De Smarties, also known as Rockets in Canada.) The name Parma Violet is for the city of Parma in Italy. Starting in the 1500s the violet plants (possibly originating in Africa or East Asia) were grown, hybridized and traded by the ruling elite. They spread through Europe in manicured gardens as well as greenhouses and sunporches in cooler climates. The flowers themselves, besides being cut and used in bouquets, were candied and used as decorations and eaten. Violet flavoring was common in candies like chocolate creams, fondants and dragees through World War I when it eventually fell out of favor. Of course it’s still around, but certainly not as ubiquitous.
Parma Violets a compressed sugar tablet flavored like violet. The roll holds 14 little tablets that are 1/2 inch in diameter. They’re a soft lavender color and are now made with all natural colorings (since 2008). The big difference I noticed in the ingredients is that they’re made with sugar (sucrose), not dextrose. Dextrose or glucose is the sugar of choice for Smarties and SweeTarts in the US, it’s a monosaccharide that is actually less sweet than sucrose (which is a disaccharide). Parma Violets are made from sucrose. So they’re quite sweet, sweeter than I expected from a “chalky” candy. The texture is the same as most other compressed sugar candies, it’s soft on the tongue and has a slow and sugary, slightly grainier melt.
Of course the overriding flavor of the candy is violet. Yes, the flowery kind. A honey-sweet smell of violets - cloying and definitely not nuanced. Violet for me is a humid flavor, moist and sticky like syrup. Part of this is probably because I gathered bouquets of violets in the yard as a kid and associate the smell of the real thing with dewy grass. These are dry and don’t stimulate a whole lot of saliva from me. The aftertaste is mellow and long-lasting. For folks who like jasmine, rose or orange blossom over mint as a breath freshener, violet might be for you. The good news (at least for me) is that the package contained the smell adequately. Since I tend to carry around a lot of candy at once, it would have been a travesty to contaminate my Mast Chocolate Bars with violet. They’re a curiosity for me, I ate three packages without complaint but only because they were in front of me. I can’t see buying them again, but I guess I’ll have to see if a craving kicks in. I prefer the panned layering of Anis de Flavigny. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 11:20 am Candy • Review • Compressed Dextrose • 5-Pleasant • Eat with your Eyes: Licorice Pyramid
Just another shot of the mild Panda Soft Herb Licorice. (Review here.) POSTED BY Cybele AT 7:58 am Candy • Featured News • Fun Stuff • Photography • Page 221 of 584 pages ‹ First < 219 220 221 222 223 > Last › 
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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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COPYRIGHT NOTICEAll content (text and photos unless otherwise credited) is copyright 2005-2026 by Cybele May Please do not use my photos without prior permission directly from me, they represent what I ate in preparation for these reviews and are not to be used for other purposes. Design by Hop Studios
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