Candy Blog

Hershey’s has an expansive line of individually wrapped chocolate pieces: Kisses, Miniatures and the Nuggets line.

This new product for the Nuggets line is called Double Chocolate Nuggets:

Hershey’s gives you the best of both worlds with Double Chocolate Nuggets. It’s the perfect combination of Hershey’s Extra Creamy Milk Chocolate and Special Dark Mildly Sweet Chocolate, giving you a delicious taste experience.

I’ve mentioned before that I actually like the nugget format. I like a deep bite, especially for a layered product or one that has inclusions (which is why I thought those Cookies ‘n’ Mint Nuggets were so great).

These little blocks have a distinct scent - it’s both the sweet cocoa smell of the Special Dark and the tangy milk chocolate that made Hershey’s famous.

Biting into it right side up I got the slightly chalky taste of the Special Dark first, which has a dry and mellow chocolate bite to it but a thin & watery melt. Then the “extra creamy” milky chocolate, which has a yogurty dairy flavor that give it more of a fudge taste than a deep milk chocolate note. (I really don’t get how this can be considered extra creamy.)

The effect of it all isn’t good nor bad, it just is. I can’t say that I’ve longed for a combination product before, so it’s not like I was anticipating this.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces
2. Hershey’s Kisses: Chocolate Meltaway
3. Ghirardelli Luxe Milk
4. Scharffen Berger Dark Milk (68%)
5. Choceur Coffee & Cream
6. M&Ms Premiums
7. Kisses Chocolate Truffles

Yesterday my husband and I took the day off of work and went to Santa Catalina Island. We passed straight through town (well, we grabbed a cup of coffee) and headed up to the Botanical Gardens, looked around the Wrigley Memorial and then hiked up to the top of the ridge.

(GPS location.)

What powers me when hiking? Besides a fig bar before starting, we munched on Goetze’s Caramel Creams and Swedish Fish, then at the top, at 1,100 feet we ate a BT McElrath Salty Dog Bar.

Don’t worry, all we took were photos, all we made were memories and all we left were footprints.

There are scents that I regard as pleasant and summery and strawberry-banana is pretty high up there. It’s light, fruity & floral but has a sweet kick to it that I can almost taste when I smell it.

Yogen Fruz is a high-concept frozen yogurt & smoothie chain that began in Toronto and now has over 1,000 stores in 20 countries. In this case it’s the smoothies that have been turned into a line of little candies.

The little tin I picked up of the Yogen Fruz Smoothies Strawberry Banana smelled very strong. Even before I took off the plastic overwrap, I had to keep it in a ziploc bag.

Aside from the blastingly strong scent, the ingredients are pretty positive: pure cane sugar, yogurt, tartaric acid, malic acid, natural strawberry and banana flavors, ascorbic acid and natural color.

Though they’re made with nice ingredients, they’re basically a “tablet candy”, much like a SweeTart though not dextrose-based. They come in a tin, the same one, as far as I can tell, that Godiva uses for their Chocoiste Pearls but in this case I had no trouble with opening & closing it.

The little tablets have the umlauted U on them (that conveniently looks like a very big smile) with a light pink speckling. They’re immediately tangy on the tongue and dissolve a little unevenly. It’s both lightly sour and has that yogurt twang.

I thought the taste was vibrant and even a bit unique. If you’re looking for an all-natural SweeTart-like product then this is a nice idea though certainly quite expensive.

These are made in Canada by Big Sky Brands, who also make the Jones Soda candies.

Every once in a while I’m given a sample of something from a candy company or chocolatier and find it to be so wonderful that I consume it as I’m a regular person without a duty to record every bite.

Such was my experience with The Wild Thing chocolate bar from Lillie Belle Farms. So after eating my sample from Jeff at Lillie Belle Farms that I got at the Fancy Food Show in January, I finally found a store the stocks them: Mel & Rose here in Los Angeles.

The Wild Thing is a variety of chocolate known as cru sauvage which, conveniently enough means, wild vintage (or wild source). The beans are from feral cacao trees from old plantation properties in Bolivia that have been harvested. Like many “volunteer” plants that pop up long after a garden or farm is untended, they possess all the crucial characteristics of the well tended trees, but a little something else. Perhaps a little more of the true essence of cacao that made it so attractive to the ancient Americans.

The bar itself is wonderfully molded, I like a thick bar. It has the Lillie Belle logo on it, and though that’s pretty too, it doesn’t really make for easy portioning.

It’s a moderately dark bar at 68%. The wrapper mentions that the beans are roasted a low temperatures and then refined for nearly three days.

The color is a nice, solid brown with a hint of deep red. The thick pieces give a lot of room for developing the texture on the tongue. It’s sweet at first, but the melt is smooth and immediate. The primary notes that hit me first were brown sugar and raisin, but as the flavor develops there’s a slight dry bite that holds some cherry, tobacco and coffee notes.

The texture was really what blew me away on this bar. I love the extra silky melt, bright snap and shiny molding.

The bar is made with only three ingredients: cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar. No vanilla, no soy. (Though made in facility that does have soy, so not for soy allergic folks - same goes for nuts & dairy.) As far as I know, this chocolate is the Max Felchlin Cru Sauvage, just remelted (and nicely priced, if you ask me).

My only hesitation with the bar (besides the fact that I don’t like falling in love with things in short supply) is the packaging. While it looks nice, the wrapper is a bit thin, as is the foil. The paper overwrap is excessively glued, and pasted to the foil at that, so I never had any luck with either bar in rewrapping it. (That’s why I have a bunch of zip lock bags.)

If you’re a chocolate fan who enjoys single origins, this is definitely one to experience.

Related Candies

1. TCHO Fruity
2. Askinosie Chocolate
3. Amadei
4. Domori Cru
5. Choxie 3 Ounce Chocolate Bars
6. Malie Kai: Waialua Estate Chocolate
7. Michel Cluizel Les 1ers Crus de Plantation

Chocolate covered coffee beans are nothing new and caffeinated candy has been around for a while.

Here are two new super charged coffee bean candies. GoGo Beans are made by How Do You Take Your Coffee and feature “The Eating Roast” coffee, which are beans that are chosen & roasted to be tastier for consuming than for brewing (I already reviewed their JAVAZ). Jitterbeans are the overclocked version of Crackheads (review here) from Osmanium ... and when I say overclocked I mean it, each piece contains about 20 mg of caffeine so the package has as much as 6 small cups of coffee.

GoGo Beans
Size: 2.43 ounces (69 grams)
Price: $2.50
Caffeine Content: approximately 125 mg (about 5 mg per bean)
Calories per ounce: 134
Other Fortifications: ginseng, taurine, B vitamins
Allergens: soy & milk - plus uses confectioners glaze so not vegetarian (but made in a peanut free facility)
Ingredient notes: not real chocolate, contains palm kernel oil, artificial colors: Yellow 6 & Red 40
My source: sample from How Do You Take Your Coffee

GoGo Beans are super-fortified and offer both the caffeine inherent in the bean plus an addition kick added to the candy shell plus some special B vitamins, taurine and ginseng. The format is an bean at the center (specially roasted for eating) then a mockolate coating all covered in a thick candy shell.

The shell has a pretty immediate light bitterness which may be the fortification or may be the food coloring. That fades away pretty quickly for me. The inside has a mellow cocoa flavor but not a huge kick for me. The texture is soft and has a decent melt, but at times felt a little waxy. The bean at the center was lovely, just as I found with the Javaz - crunchy and crisp with a strong coffee flavor but no oily bitterness.

Jitterbeans
Size: 1.3 ounces (37 grams)
Price: retail $3.00
Caffeine Content: 600 mg (462 mg per ounce)
Calories per ounce: not available
Other Fortifications: none
Allergens: soy, peanuts & nuts - also uses confectioners glaze so not vegan
Ingredient notes: Uses guarana for extra caffeine, artificial colors: Red 40, Yellow 5 & Blue 1
My source: All Candy Expo

The Jitterbeans follow the tried and true format of chocolate over an espresso bean and adds a candy shell. Like the original Crackheads, these are in the classic tuxedo colors of black and white, though there’s no actual white chocolate in there.

The candy shell is rather thin and offers a sandy crunch. Inside the chocolate is sweet and has a bit of a spicy woodsy ginger flavor to it along with the mellow coffee notes. The extra caffeine isn’t bitter at all though some of the beans in the center had a bitter kick. The whole thing is rather tasty and probably very dangerous for those who don’t know that there’s a lot of caffeine in these and consumes a whole box. I limited myself to three beans in the three different times I tried these. That said, I have a hard time believing they have that much caffeine in them without so much bitterness that I’ve found in other caffeinated candies - maybe someone can comment on the caffeine in “guarana seed extract.”

Both of these are great, durable & portable caffeine supplements. They’re tasty and what’s most important - portionable so you can control exactly how much caffeine you take in. That said, I much prefer the more sedate and non-fortified versions and will stick with the JAVAZ for my candy, coffee & caffeine combination. The addition of artificial colors wasn’t enough of selling point.

Jitterbeans and GoGo Beans get a 6 out of 10 - not bad candy, but not for me.

Related Candies

1. Beechies Force Chewy Candy
2. Loud Truck Energy Gummies
3. Caffe Acapella - Coffee Confections
4. Trader Joe’s Espresso Chocolate
5. Pocket Coffee
6. No Time & Black Black