Candy Blog

The weekend began without much new candy. The purpose was to get rid of it. What some of you have gleaned over the years as regular readers is that I do product photography on the side for Candy Warehouse. When I’m done shooting the photos, I get to keep the rest. Well, that’s far more candy than I can eat, and even far more than my co-workers at my day job can handle. I even gave away this pile of boxes to Soldier’s Angels for our service folks far from home.

Still, I had lots and lots, so I volunteered to create a Candy Buffet for the National Novel Writing Month‘s annual fundraiser called The Night of Writing Dangerously held in San Francisco on Sunday, November 22nd. Since there were going to be two hundred attendees, each wonderful fundraisers that deserve copious amounts of sugar, I thought a pound per person would be appropriate. So I packed up my car with nine boxes. Three were candy jars and the rest were filled with candy.

I had two cases of York Peppermint Patties from an art director for a commercial shoot here in Los Angeles, Kencraft Old Fashioned Candy Sticks, two gallons of Kasugai Fruit Gummis, Koppers Limoncello Marzipan, Koppers Dark Chocolate Almonds, Koppers Hazelnut Sea Shell Brittle, Salt Water Taffy and Butterfly Candy Tarts. I was worried that wasn’t enough, so I contacted Mars and asked if they could donate something for our good fundraising writers who supported our programs to create writing curriculum for schools & libraries for free and they sent over 1,000 pieces/packages of Snickers, Skittles, M&Ms Milk Chocolate, M&Ms Peanut, M&M Minis and Dove Promises. On top of that, another local Los Angeles event planner had some M&M Premiums in those individual serving boxes for us to pop into the tote bags. Still, I was feeling like we were missing some basic candy food groups, so I spent some of my own money and ordered up 10 pounds of Albanese Confectionery’s World’s Best Gummi Bears, 5 pounds of their Sour Gummi Bears and 5 pounds of the Double Dipped Malted Milk Balls (I should have set a pound aside for myself, they’re so good).

So now I was not only feeling pretty good because our fundraiser raised $33,000 for our programs, I’d also unloaded a bunch of candy that was taking up a lot of space in my house and office. My process of celebration began with ... acquiring more candy.

Sunday Morning:

Bi-Rite Market - 3639 18th Street, San Francisco.
1 x Pumpkin Pie BonBonBar (sadly it’s expired by several days) $4.99
2 x Scotch BonBonBars $9.98
1 x 8.8 ounce tube of Pralus Creme de Noisette $14.99
1 x ClaireSquares - dark chocolate shortbread & caramel artisan square $2.99
1 x 4 ounce box of NeoCocoa truffles $24.00
$57.95

Christopher Elbow - 401 Hayes Street, San Francisco
1 x Hazelnut Hot Chocolate (consumed on site - quite nice, complex & smooth but a little too sweet for my liking)
1 x Yuzu Truffle
1 x Bananas Foster Caramel1 x Fig & Balsamic
2 x Single Malt Scotch
1 x Maple Pecan
1 x Hazelnut Pattie
1 x Peanut Butter Sea Salt Pattie
1 x Sea Salt Turtle
$21.00

Miette Confiserie - 449 Octavia Street, San Francisco
1 x Mast Brothers Chocolate - Dark Chocolate Madagascar 72% ($12.00)
1 x Mast Brothers Chocolate - Dark Chocolate Madagascar 72% + Salt and Pepper ($12.00)
4 x La Suissa Mushroom Gianduja ($.50 each)
2 x Bergamotes hard candies ($.25 each)
2 x Napoleon Caramel ($.25 each)
4 x Napoleon Licorice ($.25 each)
2 x Vegan Fig and Marzipan Truffles ($3 each)
1 x Rococo Chocolates - Bee Bar White Chocolate + Cardamom ($3.50)
1 x Rococo Chocolates - Bee Bar Dark Chocolate + Lavender ($3.50)
1 x Rococo Chocolates - Bee Bar Milk Chocolate ($3.50)
2 x Krema Batna (a licorice caramel)  ($.50 each)
$44.50

The Candy Store - 1507 Vallejo Street, San Francisco
2 x Goat’s Milk & Buckwheat Caramels
3 x Gingerbread Caramels
2 x Groder foil wrapped Chestnut Gianduia
2 x Groder dark chocolate Gianduia
4 x Licorice Caramels (can’t remember brand)
1 x El Alemendro Turron Selection (three different varieties)
2 x Gerrit’s Broadway Strawberry Rolls (supposed to be closed thing to Delfa Rolls)
1/2 lb of licorice (griotten, skoolkrijt, sea salt fish & banana monkey faces) consumed on return trip to Los Angeles
1 x Peanutbutter BonBonBar
$31.96

Then Monday morning I packed up my candy jars and headed tried to go to Harry and David near my hotel as they always seem to have fun holiday candies, but they weren’t open yet. I made my last stop:

Charles Chocolates - 6529 Hollis Street, Emeryville
1 Hot Chocolate (consumed on drive back to Los Angeles)
2 x Caramel Pecan Rocky Road Bars
5 x Pate de Fruits (1 cabernet sauvignon, 2 blood orange, 1 raspberry, 1 champagne)
1 x lavender honey truffle
1 x meyer lemon yankee
3 x pecan caramels
1 x tin of Triple Chocolate Almonds (for Thanksgiving)
1 x jar of Meyer Lemon Marmalade (for Thanksgiving cheese plate) $12.00
$48.42

So this isn’t the normal candy review, just a peek behind the scenes at a combination of my obsessions. But hopefully it gives you some sense of what kind of candy lifestyle is behind the Candy Blog. It’s a pretty good life, and for that I am thankful. Thanks for reading, thanks for leaving comments and most of all, thanks for making Candy Blog part of your life. Your support of it enables me to do all this other stuff to spread the sweet joy.

It’s that lovely time of year when Trader Joe’s trots out oodles of holiday candies and treats.

I like to cruise the aisles and look at all the great new and returning items. This year my eyes lit on the Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Delights.

The box describes them as a crunchy hazelnut treat surrounded with praline, crispy wafer and milk chocolate. While I assumed that they are like Ferrero Rocher, the image on the box didn’t quite show whether they were flat or round (maybe the wafer is just that, a little disc). The box is also rather deep, and though it holds 7.05 ounces, I wasn’t sure how the items were packaged. Were they individually wrapped and just tossed in there? How many came in a box? Were they in a tray or just stacked up?

When I got the box home and opened it, most of my questions were answered.

Inside the trapezoidal box are two trays. Each tray is sealed in cellophane and has eight sections. (16 candies total in the box.) Each little spot holds a Hazelnut Delight. At this point I confirmed that there were a heck of a lot like a Ferrero Rocher. They’re also made in Germany, which is one of the locations that Ferrero has manufacturing facilities.

The ingredients are impressive at first. The first item on the list is hazelnuts. After that it gets a little less enchanting. Ingredient #2 is sugar, which is absolutely expected in candy. #3 is vegetable oil (palm, rapeeseed and sunflower) and only after that do we get to the cocoa butter, wheat flour, chocolate liquor, whole milk powder, nonfat dry milk and cocoa ... then a bunch more stuff including more oils.

The pieces are slightly larger than one bite. It’s a lumpy, bumpy ball and most had a little drizzle of white chocolate across them. What’s nice is that they’re not individually wrapped in foil, so it smells amazing, like roasted hazelnuts and hot chocolate.

Biting into one, the construction will seem similar. It’s a milk chocolate shell covering crushed hazelnuts stuck to a hollow wafer sphere. Inside is a chocolate and hazelnut paste ... somewhere in there is a whole hazelnut.

The amazing part though is the hazenuttiness. It’s just packed with them. It’s a sweet treat, but there’s both the whole hazelnut at the center plus the crushed hazelnuts then that hazelnut paste in the middle. There must be the equivalent of three or four hazelnuts in there.

The chocolate coating is sweet and melts easily. The paste in the center is, well, pasty. It’s sticky and has a good cocoa flavor but not much on the hazelnut side, not a problem there, because the whole hazelnut pretty much takes care of that at some point. (In the photo cross-section I obviously hadn’t found it yet.) The wafer is crunchy and has a light caramelized sugar note to it, like good ice cream cones do. The crushed hazelnuts steal the show though, so crunchy and with such a distinctive roasted nut flavor I was quite enamored of these little delights.

The price is a bit steeper than Ferrero Rocher (which I’ve seen on sale at drug stores for less than 1/2 the price from time to time). But there are far more hazelnuts here and of course they were extremely fresh. I might buy them again as a hostess gift for someone I was certain is a hazel-nut. I think I’d prefer a dark chocolate version for myself.

Other items returning for 2009:
Dark Chocolate Covered Mint Joe Joe’s
Trader Joe’s French Truffles
Trader Joe’s Irish Cream Chocolates
Trader Joe’s Peppermint Bark White Chocolate Bar
Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels (different box this year)
Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels
(I’ve also picked up their Belgian Chocolate Fancies, Dark Chocolate Orange and the Dark Chocolate Crisps to review in the next few weeks. Brandy Beans are also back this year, I didn’t pick them up when I was in Oakland - the first place I’ve seen the this year - but I’ll try to find them again.)

Related Candies

1. Hachez Edel Vollmilch Nuss (Milk Chocolate with Hazelnuts)
2. Doulton Liqueur Chocolates (Cointreau & Teacher’s)
3. Short & Sweet: Hazelnut Bites
4. Ferrero Prestige (Ferrero Garden)
5. Ferrero Rocher
6. Ferrero Mon Cheri

Last month I reviewed the new Ferrara Milk Chocolate with Almond Nougat, today I have the companion bar without the nuts and nougat bits. The new Ferrera chocolate line is to take the place of the chocolate products from Kraft that the company used to distribute from their Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Toblerone brands. They can be found at drug stores and discount retailers.

The Ferrara Belgian Milk Chocolate Bar is the same format as the faux-Toblerone, a long and domed trapezoidal shape with deep sections. The snap is good, though sometimes I had trouble cracking off just one segment and if I had a double I found it impossible to break that into two pieces. (So I had to eat two sections.)

The texture is quite smooth and creamy. It reminded me a little bit of Dove Milk Chocolate, but slightly sweeter. The silky melt and light caramel notes are pleasant. It’s a little sticky feeling in the mouth, but not overly thick. I prefer a less sugary bar but the fat in this one was a delightful mix of cocoa butter and whole milk.

The ingredients are all natural and the bar is Kosher. The package says the chocolate was made in Belgium but molded & packaged in the United States.

I was hoping for something a little deeper and richer, but for two dollars and the nice packaging I think it’s a good deal. I like the thick pieces compared to the flat tablet chocolate bars that are usually 100 grams, it makes the melt a little more interesting to have a chunky nugget. Since Toblerone doesn’t even make a nougat-less bar, it’s hard to even compare it. It’s not quite as satisfying as a Ritter-Sport which is in the same price category, but might make a prettier stocking stuffer in some instances.

Related Candies

1. Ferrara Dark Chocolate Covered Biscotti
2. Elmer’s Toasted Marshmallow Eggs
3. Ferrero Raffaello & Rondnoir
4. Pralines Leonidas
5. Ritter Darks
6. Ritter Sport Capuccino and Rum Trauben Nuss

I love it when the Candy Blog community points me to something new. We have a little conversation going on in the Candy Blog Forums about the 2009 holiday candy offerings. One that ruffy mentioned was Hershey’s Kisses Filled with Irish Creme. I found them at Target as well and I suspect since no one else has seen them anywhere else that they may be a Target exclusive this year.

Irish Cream is a combination of flavors and textures; it’s usually heavy cream, whiskey and coffee. Kisses filled with Irish Creme are less of that. There’s no actual whiskey in there, for starters. It’s a molded chocolate shell filled with a sugar and oil paste with some milk products (nonfat milk and whey) and artificial flavoring. So maybe a more accurate name would be Kisses filled with Sweet Flavored Whey Paste.

While my confidence level in them was low, I was also plenty curious. The dark green bag and gold wrappers with green fireworks on them were certainly appealing.

The smell, when I pushed my face into the bag, is actually mildly alcoholic. I don’t know how they did that, but it definitely has a bit of a whiskey note.

Out of the foil it’s even more noticeable - more than just bourbon vanilla, this smells like strong stuff. The chocolate flavors of the molded shell aren’t much. It’s smooth enough, with a slight fudgy grain that’s definitely candy-like. The center is a bit of a paste, thicker than the cordial creme in some of the Kisses. It’s not quite grainy and rather like a fondant. The center is a little bit salty so it has an immediate difference from the chocolate shell. The whiskey flavors of woodsy alcohol are there along with a slightly warm and cozy background note.

The liquor flavor though has an odd medicinal quality, especially later on. It’s like the after effects of Cepacol or some other throat anesthetic. Eating another one kind of gets rid of the benzocaine & menthol aftertaste by introducing the primary tastes of sugar, milk and whiskey flavored cheesecake.

I’m not blown away, but they are different than the last few flavors. But a true coffee flavored Kiss might be a nice change one of these days or an Egg Nog for the holidays.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Kisses: Chocolate Meltaway
2. Candy Tease: All Candy Expo 2009 - Hershey
3. Nestle Treasures 50% Cacao Dark Chocolate Truffle
4. Hershey’s Pumpkin Spice Kisses
5. Candy Corn Kisses
6. Honey Roasted Peanut Roca
7. The Mint Kisses: Chocolate Mint & Candy Cane
8. Choxies in Boxies

I know some folks may have been worried that I wasn’t going to give Fannie May another chance after the disappointing Mint Meltaway yesterday. Well, no worries, as I also found the Fannie May Pixie at Walgreen’s on the same trip.

Again, it’s a pricey piece of candy - at $1.39 for a 1.5 ounce candy billed as Crunchy pecans in smooth caramel, drenched in rich milk chocolate. But a careful shopper might notice that Pixies go for $22.99 per pound on the Fannie May website yet these individually wrapped pieces work out to $14.83 per pound. (But they’re also available in dark chocolate on the website.)

Fannie May is famous for these turtle-like candies and I’m a huge fan of turtle-like candies. The ingredients look much better. There’s real chocolate, 50 fewer calories and no trans fats make it into the listing. (There is some hydrogenated vegetable oil on the list, but it’s very far down.)

Honestly, it’s a huge turtle. Far larger than I’m accustomed to. The ratios are a bit off from smaller ones, as far as I can tell. There’s a lot of caramel here and what seems like a lot of chocolate and not a lot of pecans.

The crunch of the pecans at the base is good, they’re crisp and fresh without that trace of fibery chew or rancid oily taste that some drug store turtles can get. The chocolate is creamy, not terribly milky but has a good snap to it and stays on the caramel center well. The caramel has a nice buttery flavor. It’s not quite a stiff chew but still has a good stringy pull and smoothness.

So while I thought it was a bit too large at first, I had no trouble finishing it (though I did it in two sittings).

Related Candies

1. Robitaille’s Presidential Inaugural Mints & Turtles
2. Disneyland Candy Palace - Candy Case Chocolates
3. Theo Confections
4. Nestle Turtles
5. Choxies in Boxies