Godiva was founded in Belgium as a premium chocolatier. The company is now owned by a Turkish holding coming (Yıldız Holding) but is headquartered in New York and named after an Old English noblewoman.

The chocolate is reliably of good quality, though the prices are on the high side compared to other brands now available. I love their packaging, but I’m usually disappointed by the products as they tend to be bland.

Still, I was tempted enough by a press release about a new collaboration collection that I stopped by the local Godiva shop and picked up a box of the Chef Inspirations Flavors of the World Collection. It was $18 for a box of eight chocolates in six different flavors.

So, six flavors and eight pieces means that I got two duplicates. The box is nice, a rounded rectangle with a plastic formed tray inside. The whole thing was shrink-wrapped and definitely fresh and flawless when I opened it. It included a little brochure that described both the chef and chocolates themselves. Here’s a little bit from the website:

Welcome our debut Flavors of the World collection—part of our new Chef Inspirations series! GODIVA Chef Chocolatiers crafted these extraordinary pieces based on inspiration from their culinary journeys in six countries - Japan, Belgium, Brazil, the United States, China, and South Africa. Let our chefs guide your through this flavor-filled adventure.

Banana & Caramelized Coconut: Milk and white chocolate enhanced with caramelized coconut flakes, coconut milk and banana essence topped with the crunch of West African cocoa nibs. The banana flavors are sweet and have a bit of a creamy note. The coconut has a little tropical flavor, the whole thing is soft and chewy. The milk chocolate is smooth, but extremely sweet.

Black Tea Mousse & Sichuan Pepper: Chinese Sichuan pepper flavored ganache blended with an aromatic black tea mousse and wrapped in pure Belgian dark chocolate. The mousse has a very light chocolate note but strong tannins from the black tea. I didn’t catch much of the pepper, which is too bad. But I did enjoy the tea and this one was less sweet than the others.

Sirop de Liege with Speculoos: Classic Belgian Sirop de Liege, a pear and apple syrup, and a Speculoos cookie mousse wrapped in pure Belgian dark chocolate. This is a beautiful piece and an interesting combination. It is by far the most innovative and successful in the assortment. The speculoos is soft and creamy with a hint of gingerbread spices. The syrup is more like a fruit jelly, tart and smooth and bright, it’s really a great pairing with the dark chocolate and cookie butter. They should make this in a bar format.

Japanese Dark Sugar Ganache: Dark chocolate layered with Kuromitsu molasses and Valencia almond praliné mixed with diced hazelnuts and Guerande sea salt. Since I started Candy Blog, I’ve been obsessed with Japanese black sugar, so this was the piece was thinking would be a home run. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but lacks any sort of black sugar note at all. The almond and hazelnut notes are great and the touch of sea salt does really balance the piece which gets a bit sweet, but the molasses is just so slight, I missed it. And I had three of these ... the two that came in the box and I bought one on the spot and ate it at the mall.

Brazilian Coffee Nut Praliné: Brazilian coffee and Costa Rican chocolate blended with hazelnut praliné enrobed in white chocolate and decorated with crispy chocolate confetti. As you would expect, this one was sweet with the white chocolate coating. The coffee notes a fresh and bright and the hazelnut flavors really mixed well. The little crisps on top gave it the texture it needed as a finish. Dark chocolate enrobing would have made me a bit more satisfied.

Honey Roasted Caramel: Caramel infused with hints of honey, almonds, brown sugar and condensed milk covered in milk chocolate and crunchy almonds. This sounds rather pedestrian and it really is, but that’s no reason not to appreciate it. It was chewy, but not too sticky. The honey and darker toffee notes were good and the milk chocolate brought it together well with some other dairy notes. The almonds were kind of lost, but at least fresh and crunchy.

Overall ... well, it was too sweet and not intense enough. I liked the attempts and part of the fun was just imagining what the combinations would be like. But I think I’ll stick with my local chocolatiers like Compartes or Valerie if I want to get into that price range, or just stop at See’s and be happy with their caramels.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Speculoos Cookie Butter Cups
2. Godiva Cake Truffles
3. Meiji Chelsea Kokutou Black Sugar
4. Amsterdam on Foot: Three Chocolate Shops
5. Godiva Spring Pearls
6. Teuscher
7. Lillie Belle Farms Assortment
8. Godiva Easter Eggs

Russell Stover has been branching out into more pie flavors for their novelty confections. The Big Bite line already includes S’mores and Apple Pie, now there’s Russell Stover’s Big Bite Pecan Pie.

Pecan Pie is actually just candy in a flaky pastry dough, as far as I’m concerned. The pecan pie filling is a cross between a custard and a fudge, a mix of fats and sugar ... all topped with caramelized pecans. Most pecan pie lacks enough pecans as far as I’m concerned, and I usually want mine in the filling, not just on top.

Even though this traveled about a thousand miles, it did well. The graham cracker base was just a little rounded off and about half of the pecans fell off the top. (But were very easy to just pour into my mouth from the package.) This version of pecan pie has milk chocolate ... which isn’t a bad thing, I often enjoy a chocolate pecan pie, or at least a pecan pie with a hot fudge sauce on it.

Like many pecan pies, the center here has no pecans in it, it’s just a penuche-type fudge center with excellent butter and brown sugar notes. The milk chocolate is actually less sweet than the center, which is nice, and the graham cracker moderates it all even more. The pecans are not integrated into this at all, which is disappointing, because they shouldn’t be the afterthought, they should be the center.

Still, as a confection, it’s quite nice, very sweet but a lot of textural interest. As a candy version of pecan pie, it fails. Don’t worry, I’m willing to eat Russell Stover’s mistakes.

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Big Bite Apple Pie & Pumpkin
2. Russell Stover Eggs: Carrot Cake, Birthday Cake and Wedding Cake
3. Russell Stover Pumpkin Pie
4. Russell Stover Big Bite Caramel Apple
5. Russell Stover Red Velvet Santa
6. See’s Holiday Pie Truffles
7. Russell Stover Big Bite Pecan Delight Egg
8. Ghirardelli Holiday Squares
9. Ethel Holiday Assortment

Ritter Sport has been releasing seasonal variations on their popular square bars for the past few years. Only in the past few years have they appeared reliably on US shelves, and usually for the Winter Editions.

The new Ritter Sport Coffee & Hazelnuts is a new bar, though it combines elements from other existing bars. I found my bar at Cost Plus World Market with the Christmas candies, they had all three varieties for this season, including the return of the Caramelized Almond and the also new Vanilla Crescents. It’s nice to see new bars in the mix, but disappointing that they’re all milk chocolate. This bar was $2.99, a smidge higher than the regulars, which sell for $2.49.

The bar looks like all the other Ritter Sport bars ... a 4x4 grid of sections, each with the Ritter Sport logo on top. This is a filled bar, a coffee cream studded with crushed hazelnuts. It’s a simple concept and rather baffling that no one has been doing this all along.

The ingredients, however, were not promising when it comes to cocoa content:

Ingredients: sugar, palm fat, milk, cocoa butter, chocolate liquor, lactose, milk, hazelnuts, skim milk, butterfat, hazelnut paste, coffee powder, soy lecithin, natural flavor, natural coffee flavor.

I’m not against fat, I love the stuff. All that fat made this bar pretty high on the calorie count, 172 calories per ounce ... that’s 600 for the whole bar (for reference the whole hazelnut dark bar has 550 calories for the whole bar). Ritter Sport has been pretty good about the sourcing of its cacao, but they’re not forthcoming about their palm oil. For that reason and others mostly of taste preferences, when buying their bars for just eating, I usually stick to the solid chocolate varieties (or marzipan).

It looks great, smells mildly like coffee and cocoa but mostly sweet. The bite is soft, as most of the milk chocolate Ritter Sports are. The cream center has a cool melt and a vague coffee note to it, but it’s not as strong as the Espresso Bar, which is disappointing. The cream center is a little slick and thin, ultimately. The bar is extremely sweet for something that’s supposed to be coffee and hazelnuts. There are some hazelnuts, enough for a crunch and a touch of gianduia in the center. I really wanted a deep roasted experience ... the mix of the hazelnuts and coffee were promising, but ultimately not as deep as I’d hoped. But if you like Ice Cubes, you’ll appreciate the decadence of this bar. Dark chocolate would improve this bar immensely.

It’s not a bad bar, but like many of the bars that Ritter Sport has been making, especially the filled ones, they’re sweet and too oily without enough flavor. I want more dark chocolate options.

Related Candies

1. Good and DeLISH Morning Rush Coffee Bites
2. Dove Hazelnut Crisp Dark Chocolate Promises
3. Trader Joe’s Chocolate Kona Coffee Truffles
4. Mast Brothers Stumptown Coffee
5. Ritter Sport Espresso
6. Meiji Corot & CoffeeBeat
7. Choceur Coffee & Cream
8. Short & Sweet: Hazelnut Bites

The Brach’s Milk Maid Royals candies were always quite special looking. I remember seeing them in the pick-a-mix assortments at the dime store as a kid. I was attracted to the bold foil wrappers that each little flavored caramel rod sported. The looked expensive and sophisticated. The are a lot more caramel choices in the stores now and it seems harder to find the Brach’s individually wrapped candies since the bins of the candy disappeared from many grocery store candy aisles.

Royals Caramels are a layered candy, a flavored center chew is surrounded by caramel. It’s a simple construction that’s helped by the fact that caramel goes with just about everything.

I’ve noticed that Brach’s has recently started repackaging their standard line of candy and sprucing up the flavor assortments to match current tastes. The new Brach’s Apple Caramel Royals come in a stand-up gusset bag and are positioned right next to M&Ms and the new morsel sized candies like York Minis and Snickers Bites.

The package is a lovely apple red but the candies inside are wrapped in neon green waxed paper. It’s kind of an odd, especially because I had two flavors sitting around at one time and I kept grabbing the wrong package. However, Brach’s did use red for their Caramel Apple Candy Corn, so the flavor colors do match on the outside at least.

Unlike the foil-wrapped ancestors, these candies don’t look like much in the wrapper. They’re the kind of candy that would probably sit around with the Tootsie Rolls at the end of Trick-or-Treat until I was desperate.

The look of the candies unwrapped is odd, the caramel looks good - an opaque medium brown color. But the green center is on the blue side, which makes it look a little more like a caramel filled with toothpaste than a green apple candy. Luckily the smell aligns everything again. It’s sweet and with a light apple peel and milk scent. The chew is soft, the caramel and sort of taffy center mix well. It could use a little bit of salt to bring it together. It’s never quite a smooth and creamy caramel, but much more satisfying than the Brach’s Candy Corn Nougats I tried last week.

The ingredients list actual apples plus buttermilk as an ingredient in these, which really makes them one of the closest candies on drug store shelves to actual caramel apples.

The Brach’s Sea Salt Caramel Royals come in the same style of gusset bag. It’s a more sedate design, as the colors are more subdued.

While caramel apple candies are quite trendy right now for fall, the general salted caramel rage is a year round thing and still going strong. It only makes sense that Brach’s, now owned by the Ferrara Candy Company, would expand into some of these mainstream trends.

While they say sea salt on the front of the package, the ingredients list only salt. The nutrition panel shows that there are 180 mgs of salt per serving of 6 pieces. As a point of reference, the Apple Caramel Royals have only 75 mgs.

The Sea Salt Caramel Royals are, well, quite nice! The chew is soft with a little difference between the caramel outside and the sort of pasty chew inside. They’re definitely salty, but it does highlight the brown sugar notes of the caramel. I wouldn’t be likely to buy these again, especially at the price when I can get some really good sea salt caramels from Trader Joe’s or just some Sugar Babies ... but I will finish this bag.

These candies are made in Mexico. The contain milk, soy and egg ingredients. There’s no notation about nuts or gluten, though.

Brach’s Milk Maid Royals have been made since the late 1920s (though I’m sure the wrappers have changed over the years). The flavors are probably also cyclical with changing tastes. The last time I had them I enjoyed the extra-sweet Maple and Butter Rum, but didn’t care for the sherbet flavored Orange. The Chocolate is softer than a Tootsie Roll but didn’t have the reliably long chew.

Related Candies

1. 15 Caramel Apple Candies I’ve Reviewed
2. Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate Sea Salt Cashew
3. See’s Caramel Apple Lollypops
4. Pearson’s Sea Salt Caramel Nut Goodies
5. Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered Sea Salt Butterscotch Caramels
6. Werther’s Original Caramel Apple Filled
7. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels

Ah, yes, a holiday candy with a bit of cognitive dissonance.

This is a pumpkin shaped candy that’s flavored like Apple Pie. This is really nothing new, as Russell Stover has more than half a dozen holiday shaped treats that are flavored like baked treats: Carrot Cake, Birthday Cake, Wedding Cake, Pumpkin Pie, Gingerbread, Cookie Dough and Red Velvet. The packaging looks pretty much like the other Russell Stover one ounce pumpkin shaped candies, so I had to look carefully on the shelves to find it.

The Russell Stover Apple Pie Pumpkin is an apple pie flavored fudgy center covered in milk chocolate. At only one ounce, it’s a small little treat.

Since there are two versions of the Apple Pie on shelves, I thought I’d compare them.

The milk chocolate pumpkin is compact and has a nice enrobed milk chocolate coating. It’s not overly sweet but is milky and creamy. It’s a nice balance to the fudgy, grainy filling. It’s like a spice fudge center. It’s mostly a spice blend of cinnamon and nutmeg maybe with a hint of lemon zest but there’s also an apple flavor that kind of floats above it all. There’s just enough salt to keep it interesting. Some of the other cake flavored pumpkins have actual cake mix in them (uncooked flour) but this is just a sugary, buttery center.

I enjoy these sorts of confections in small quantities and the chocolate kept it all together well, even if it kind of kept it from tasting like actual apple pie.

Russell Stover has started making year-round versions of some of their usual holiday items. The Big Bite line includes the Big Bite S’mores (which aren’t sold in any other format to date) and some Big Bite Caramel Apples. The Big Bite Apple Pie actually accomplishes an Apple Pie experience a bit better than the Pumpkin.

Like the Big Bite S’mores, this confection features a graham cracker base.

The Big Bite Apple Pie is twice the weight of the regular Pumpkin but features a large graham cracker base. The milk chocolate coating seems a little thinner, but the spiced penuche fudge filling is about the same. The addition of the graham cracker really brought home the pie notes, but the lack of actual apples and the anomalous existence of milk chocolate in an otherwise chocolateless pie kept this from being the best emulation ... but taking it for what it is, it’s a fun little candy. It’s different, it works.

In some other news, Russell Stover was purchased this year by Lindt & Sprungli, the same company that already owns Ghirardelli Chocolate. This makes Lindt the third largest chocolate company in the United States (behind Hershey’s and Mars, bumping Nestle out of third). It will be interesting to see what sort of changes Lindt will make, and I’m hoping they’re only improvements but they don’t lose this quirky little seasonal line.

Related Candies

1. Brach’s Apple Pie Candy Corn
2. Russell Stover Eggs: Carrot Cake, Birthday Cake and Wedding Cake
3. Dilly Dally Pickle Candy and Barrels of Yum
4. See’s Holiday Pie Truffles
5. Jelly Belly Ice Cream Parlor Mix

If you liked the Despicable Me movies, and more specifically, the Minions, might I interest you some Mike and Ike: Minion Mix?

The box is quite cute. Both the front and back feature Minion characters. (The back is formatted to stand on its end instead of the long side, and has a Minion holding up a banana.)

The mix is not very mixy, it’s just two flavors: Banana and Blueberry. The yellow and blue colors go thematically with the colors of the Minion worker overalls and their skin (?) color.

The blue Blueberry Mike and Ikes are blue. Very blue. The blueberry flavor is, well, a flavor. It doesn’t taste like blueberries, but it’s pleasant enough. It’s tangy and sweet.

The yellow Banana Mike and Ike are great. I don’t know if they’ve done a straight banana before (plenty of banana blends), so this was a pleasure since it’s such an uncommon flavor. It’s sweet with no weird acetone burn to it. It’s just, well sweet banana with a little toffee note like it’s very ripe.

This particular mix hit 100% for me, as I liked both flavors and didn’t need to do any picking. They combined nicely, but were good on their own. I can’t think of anything to improve it. It’s a quality movie tie in, instead of just throwing some movie logos on an existing product, they made something that had a fun little flair that goes with the show. (Kind of like the Jelly Belly mixes that have been coming out lately.)

Related Candies

1. Chocolate Covered Banana Gummi Bears
2. Mike and Ike Strawberry Reunion
3. Bonomo & Doscher Banana Taffy
4. Mike and Ike Autumn Medley
5. Mike and Ike Berry Blast
6. Mike and Ike Italian Ice
7. Banana n Cream & Red Orange Mentos
8. Mike and Ike Alex’s Lemonade Stand

Brach’s has quite a few new candy products on shelves, including some for Halloween. One of the new seasonal twists on Candy Corn is Brach’s Apple Pie Candy Corn.

Brach’s Candy Corn is widely available this year in a variety of flavors and shapes. I was able to find my 4.2 ounce peg bag at the Walgreen’s near my house and on sale. The previous bags I’d seen were over 10 ounces, which is too much of a novelty flavor. (But I admit that I did buy two bags of the Halloween Mellocremes.)

There is no description on the package of what the Apple Pie flavor is supposed to be. Just a picture on the front of a slice of apple pie with a dollop of whipped cream on top. I’m amused the shape of a slice of pie and a Candy Corn piece a similar, though the stacked nature of the Candy Corn layers doesn’t say pie.

It smells like a bad candle (of course I just watched this, so maybe I have Bath & Body works on my mind).

Brach’s Candy Corn is always some of the nicest at stores. The pieces are elegant and tall, and are unusually durable. Many other Candy Corn brands are easily broken or have a problem with sticking together.

These are subtle, just a creamy white base and a caramel middle/top.

The flavor is definitely like apple, like a baked apple. It’s very sweet but has a little hint of salt as well (75 mg per serving). The apple flavor is like a hint of juice, but there’s no citrus tartness at all. The cinnamon note is very mild, but welcome.

It’s not an ideal flavor for adaptation ... though I could see a whole Pie Candy Corn series, with Chocolate Cream Pie, Lemon Meringue Pie, Cherry Pie, Pecan Pie and of course they already have Pumpkin Spice.

Like other Brach’s mellocremes, this contains gelatin so it’s not suitable for vegetarians and not kosher. Though the packaging makes note in several places that they’re America’s Candy Maker (tm), these were made in Mexico.

Related Candies

1. Brach’s Caramel Macchiato Candy Corn
2. Brach’s Carrot Cake Candy Corn
3. Brach’s S’mores Candy Corn
4. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
5. Pumpkin Pie Gourmet Candy Corn
6. Milk Maid Caramel Candy Corn
7. Brach’s Autumn Mix

There probably isn’t a store as pumpkinfused as Trader Joe’s around this time of year. They have a mix of actual pumpkin items and some that are just utilizing the pumpkin spice array. Happily here’s a new candy from Trader Joe’s that has a little of both: Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Seed Brittle Dusted with Sugar and Pumpkin Pie Spice. See, it’s not pumpkin flesh that’s in there, it’s the pumpkin seeds.

The quaint box holds a simple plastic bag filled with a stack of roughly broken brittle pieces. The picture on the box does represent the contents well.

What I found most alluring was that this list of ingredients actually said which pumpkin pie spices they were using: cinnamon, ginger, lemon peel, nutmeg, cloves and cardamom. (I find it interesting that cloves is plural.)

The smell of the brittle is dominated by cinnamon, but there’s a sugary, buttery component as well. The pieces vary in size, some as big as three inches long, others are just little shards. They’re coated in mostly-sugar dusting of spices. There are pumpkin seeds embedded in there, but not as many as I would have liked, it’s mostly candy.

The bite is easy, as the pieces are pretty thin. The sugar gets everywhere, though it does a good job of sticking to the brittle as well. The effect of the whole thing, probably because of the easy crunch and sanding is more like a cookie. It’s crunchy and sweet, with a nice balance of textures between the smooth toffee-like brittle (which contains dairy ingredients) and the chewy seeds and grainy sugar. The pumpkin spices are balanced, though it smells like cinnamon, the more nutty and woodsy flavors of the nutmeg and cardamom come through along with a light warmth from the ginger and cinnamon. The lemon keeps it all bright.

It’s simple to enjoy a piece, and it goes well with some nice strong coffee or a cup of tea, just like a cookie would. I would still like more pepitas in there.

The candy contains dairy, corn and wheat ingredients and may also contain traces of peanuts, pecans, almonds, cashews and coconut.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Salted Caramels
2. Ovation Mint Filled & Pumpkin Spice Oranges
3. M&Ms Pumpkin Spice
4. Trader Joe’s Almondictive Bits
5. Las Trojes Pepitoria Brittles
6. See’s Pumpkin Spice & Root Beer Lollypops