Following up on yesterday’s Japanese candies, here’s another one that a friend (Joz, of course!) brought me. They’re little hard candies flavored like Cola and Ramune.

Ramune is a Japanese flavor similar to Lemon-Lime but with something else in it that I can’t quite put my finger on, it might be kind of like tonic water. Ramune soda comes in a unique bottle, which has a bubble in the neck that holds a glass marble that seals the bottle when it’s upright and then as you tip the bottle it rolls out and allows you to drink. (The marble can’t get out of the little bubble it’s in, so you don’t have to worry about swallowing it.)

Just about every candy in Japan comes in a Ramune version. Hi-CHEW, Puccho, gum, Shigekix & gummis.

These little candies are also about the size and shape of a glass marble:

The Ramune hard candy is immediately tart and a little floral tasting and has a tingle and fizz that comes right after that. I think the fizz comes from a combination of baking soda and citric acid that’s activated by the saliva in your mouth. The fizz goes all the way through. It’s pleasant and not too tart, so you don’t have to worry about burning your tongue when you consume too many.

The Cola flavored ones came in little red packets, with different colored lettering on them. I suspect that some were lime cola, lemon cola and perhaps cherry cola, but I really couldn’t tell the difference. They were all cola and had the zippy fizz and spicy cola flavor combo. Of the two flavors, I think I preferred the Cola ones, but I’ve been on a kick for Cola flavor lately. This bag had a mix of flavors (you can also get solo flavor bags or tubs), so I could indulge whatever whim I had ... but at the end of the bag there were just Ramune left.

I’m a big fan of using hard candies on long car trips to keep you alert and your mouth moist. This is also good for planes, especially in these days where you can’t bring your own water. These are pretty cool because they’re so active in your mouth. I have to warn you though, this is no idle bubbly tingle, these will give you the burps just like real soda ... but no refrigeration needed!

The Japanese have some strange candies and these have to be right up there at the top. Puccho are pretty popular and with good reason, they deliver just about everything. They have variety in both the experience and the range of flavors, great packaging, they’re inexpensive and of course you can share them easily.

There was a wide variety of flavor combinations at the store and I was especially interested in the Cola one but wanted to stay away from the yogurt ones (I like yogurt, but not as a flavor).

The Cola (in the red package) was awesome. The little piece had white and brown stripes in the candy and every once in a while there was a little piece of cola flavored gummi or a nugget of sour foamy grains. The grains gave it a lemon-cola zap and the gummis gave the soft, Hi-CHEW-like taffy a little bump of longevity.

The second one is a bit more of a mystery. The English sticker on the label calls it Genki Drink, which didn’t really help me to narrow it down because I didn’t know what a Genki Drink is. A little time on Google and I knew EXACTLY what they are ... you’ve probably seen them before, those mysterious brown glass bottles by the checkout at the Asian markets and tea shops that claim to boost your mental acuity and, um, other things.

The saffron colored chews are similarly soft and have a tangy, lemon tea flavor to them but also a floral note that reminded me of violets. There are similar nuggets of white powder that release a little zap of fizz and tartness, but these seem to have a bitter bite to them. The little gummi bits linger and have a little fruity taste to them and help to scrub away any lingering taffy bits in the teeth (that’s how they’re described on the Puccho website).

I definitely found the Cola ones fun and practically addictive except for the later burps that the little fizzy bits seem to generate. The Genki, not so much, even though it probably has infusions of all sorts of healthy things (the only one I’m sure of is vitamin C). I’ll probably stick to my tried-and-true Hi-CHEW but the Cola ones are definitely compelling if I’m in a mood.

Interesting note: the motto for UHA Mikakuto is “Deliciousness is Gentleness”

There are a lot of candies that are not unique, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s good to have choices. But usually there are similar products on the market becaue they’re made by different companies. I ran across these recently: Chewy Mini SweeTarts and Chewy Tart n Tinys. SweeTarts and Tart n Tinys used to be nearly identical products, except for the shape of the little pieces. And that was fine because one was made by Sunline (SweeTarts) and the other was made by Wonka (Tart n Tinys). Then Tart n Tiny’s were glazed in a bright candy shell and they were suddenly a vastly different product and coincidentally now owned by the same company (Nestle).

But here we are again with the same thing?

Chewy Mini SweeTarts are little spherical versions of the larger Chewy SweeTarts which, in turn, are like the original SweeTarts. They come in five flavors: grape (purple), cherry (red), orange (orange), lemon (yellow) and apple (green). There are also Giant Chewy SweeTarts, which have been around since I was a kid.

They have a little glaze on them to keep them from sticking together and their colors are a little mottled, but not unattractively so. The chew is soft but grainy, with a nice cool feeling to it and a quick dissolve. The flavor is about what you’d expect from a SweeTart - a lot of tart at the beginning with a round, chemical flavor and then it finishes sweet and grainy.

Somewhere back in the distant past Tart n Tinys were not colorful - they were plain and chalky, like SweeTarts only pellet shaped. Then someone gave them a shiny color coating. They have little character versions of the candies on the package, but I’ve never paid much attention to them, but I guess that’s what sets them apart from SweeTarts.

The Chewy Tart n Tinys are little chewy pellets of tartness, a bit of flavor and a grainy chew all coated in a thin, crunchy shell. They come in five flavors: grape (blue), cherry (red), orange (orange), lemon (yellow) and apple (green). Sound familiar?

Besides the colorful coating and the difference in the color of the grape flavor, and the slight difference in size (the Tart n Tinys are 11% smaller than the Chewy SweeTarts Minis) they’re the same candy.

SweeTarts come in a handy dispenser tube (but I’ve seen them in the bags before, too), which is kind of fun for sharing and saving for later. There’s a little more in the Tart n Tinys package (1.6 ounces vs 1.75 ounces) but I guess it all comes down to how you want your candy to look. Chewy SweeTarts Minis look kind of like tiny Trix and Chewy Tart n Tinys look like little beads. Chewy Tart n Tinys have fewer calories per ounce, I can only guess this is because the tartness ingredients are higher on the list and perhaps there are more colorings in the Tart n Tinys, which take up mass but have no calories. Both deliver a lot of variety and a consistent product. Why they both exist from the same company is beyond me, but then again they stopped making Wacky Wafers because they said they were too similar to Bottle Caps, and I really miss Wacky Wafers.

In the end, the Chewy Tart n Tinys win out by a very slight margin. I’m not sure why, I think it’s just that I like the look of them better, and when the taste is the same, that’s just about all it comes down to.

Sometimes I buy chocolate and it melts. Lately that’s been happening a lot. Why not just buy already melted chocolate?

A dear reader sent me an email telling me about this new product called Lava Bar which is just that, liquid chocolate in a pouch. I wrote to the manufacturer and soon I had a few in my hot little hands to try! And this is one case where my hands being hot was not necessarily a bad thing!

The Lava Bar is billed as the world’s first liquid chocolate bar.

Since you’re probably curious, here are the ingredients: corn syrup, chocolate liquor, sugar, butter, water, high fructose corn syrup, whole dry powdered milk, vanilla extract and salt. Chocolate liquor listed there is not alcoholic, it’s just ground up roasted cocoa beans - it contains both cocoa butter and cocoa solids.

So now that we know what’s in there, what’s it like? Well, it’s like brownie batter. Very, very good brownie batter. It’s smooth and thick, but not sticky. The chocolate is very sweet, which is a little disappointing, but has some nice complex flavors. Mostly it’s woodsy notes and some smoke. There’s a little bitterness to it, but I didn’t mind that at all.

I don’t know if this could ever replace my desire for a chocolate bar, which has other things to recommend it from a sensual point of view - it’s a solid and then a liquid, you can break off pieces of it and share, you can stack the little pieces up or just admire the unwrapped bar.

The dispensing system, which amounts to squeezing the stuff into your mouth is a little odd, too. Unless you squeeze it out and then lick it off, you never really see what you’re eating. The package holds two servings (2.5 ounces) but it’s not that easy to just reseal it for later (I’d recommend a clip or something for that). I think astronauts would love it though (of course M&Ms and Hershey Kisses probably travel well in space, too).

The wrapper and website recommend using it as a sauce or dip, which I found much more satisfying. I squeezed a little on pretzels and almonds and found that to be great because I could control the proportions or each element. You can also add it to ice cream or use it in shakes.

It’s certainly interesting, but lacked the sort of ultrasmooth true chocolate experience that I was looking for. I think it’s because of the lack of enough cocoa butter ... but if there were more cocoa butter it would be a solid and then it wouldn’t be the Lava Bar.

I can see this being a great thing to hike with. You don’t have to worry about it melting, because it already is. As a nutritional replacement ala Chocolate Cliff Shots, it’s got a lot of fat: half the calories are from fat, some solid chocolate have 2/3 of their calories from fat. So if you use it as a sauce to satisfy a craving, this could be a way to keep on a diet.

I could see the flavor extensions on this being quite interesting: mint, coffee & dulce de leche. Lava Bars should be showing up in stores soon, or if you can’t wait you can order online.

Equal Exchange has been at the forefront of the fair trade chocolate and coffee movement in the United States for twenty years. But I think they understand that it’s great to give people a living wage and all, but the important thing is to sell something of value to the customer to keep everything in motion.

At their launch, the Equal Exchange chocolate products were rather mundane. Don’t get me wrong, they were nice, but the selection wasn’t very exciting. They’ve remedied that with the introduction of three new bars: Mint Chocolate, Espresso Bean Chocolate and Dark Chocolate with Pure Cocoa Nibs.

The Organic Chocolate with Espresso Bean is made with a 55% cocoa solid chocolate (the lightest chocolate of the three new bars) with good reason. Coffee is a powerful flavor and needs a good balance in order for both flavors to shine though.

In general I’m not fond of coffee bars that have coffee grounds (or bits, whatever) in them. The chocolate itself is infused with the coffee flavors, which are dark and pungent, a little smoky and acidic. The beans are crunchy and crisp, which is better than some fibery ones that some companies put in their bars. But still, it’s just not my thing. The chocolate was wonderfully buttery but very sweet so that it can stand up to the espresso beans. Of the three bars, this is the one that I still have some left of. (7 out of 10)

Organic Mint Chocolate. This dark chocolate bar made with 67% cocoa solids was quite a surprise. I fully expected it to be dark, mint flavored chocolate. Instead, it’s a mint crunch bar. It’s not quite like a mint bark that has little pieces or starlight mints in it. Instead it has little sugary grains of mint in it. The grains aren’t large, like big sugar crystals. The chocolate itself is not as sweet as the espresso bar, and has a strong acidic quality to it with a complex chocolate profile. Then as you chew or allow the chocolate to dissolve on your tongue you come across these little crystals of mint. It made the bar much more fun than I expected.

The acidity of the bar still got in the way of the mint, it just wasn’t the ideal match for me. (8 out of 10)

Organic Dark Chocolate with Pure Cocoa Nibs. Now this is the bar for me! 68% cocoa solids make this a pretty dark bar. The acidity here doesn’t bother me a bit, because it goes right along with the blissfully crunchy and rich cocoa nibs. Every nib was great, no fibery ones, no bad ones. The crunch of the nibs isn’t quite like a nut, they’re not quite as fatty tasting, but crisp and of course flavorful, creating a new texture without interrupting the pure chocolate density of the bar.

If you’re a nib fan, you should really seek out this bar. I’ve tried the Endangered Species bar and the Scharffen Berger and this bar really wowed me. At about $3.50 per bar retail for a 3.5 ounce bar they’re a good value for high-end chocolate. Add in the social responsibility and you’re silly not to at least give this bar a try. (9 out of 10)

I’ve been spotting Equal Exchange at Whole Foods, so keep your eyes open. If you have a favorite store that you shop at that doesn’t carry them, ask. (They don’t know what you want unless you tell them!) You can order on the Equal Exchange website, but only in full boxes of 12 for the bars.

Equal Exchange bars are not only organic but Fair Trade certified ingredients are used whenever possible, including the sugar. I think the only part that isn’t fair trade is the organic vanilla bean.

William at Chocolate Obsession has a large review. Siel at GreenLAGirl had a tasting party, so you can see lots more opinions on the bars there. If you’re interested in anything that has to do with incorporating fair trade, social responsibility and environmentalism into your everyday life, she’s your girl.

I’ve had Dove chocolate a few times, but I’ve never bought it before. It’s usually on someone’s desk in an assortment and I’ll take a bite, but it was never something I was terribly blown away by. But then again, if the assortment has Reese’s Miniatures, I’m pretty much blind to everything else.

At Target over the weekend they had these bars, which said they were NEW!, but I’m not sure there’s much new about these except the shape. These bars are just like a bunch of linked Promises miniatures.

If there’s one thing that defines Dove chocolate, it’s their promotion of its silkiness. The bars aren’t large (1.3 ounces each), but they pack a lot of chocolateiness into each little segment. The dark bar has a lovely sweet aroma, but the vanilla notes aren’t as complex as I’d like.

The Rich Dark Chocolate melts quickly on the tongue, giving a thick taste of chocolate instantly. It’s very sweet, so the chocolate notes aren’t as prominent as they are in some of the upscale bars I’ve tried. The flavor is just middle of the road chocolaty, there aren’t hints of raisins, cherries or smoke. Just chocolate. But it’s dependable and wonderfully creamy.

The ingredients in the Rich Dark Chocolate bar start with sugar, which is apparent from the beginning. But this is another candy, like the Dark Raisinets that uses milk products in the “dark” chocolate, though not quite to the degree that the Nestle product did. Right after cocoa butter the ingredients list milkfat, which probably explains the cholesterol level (5 mg), which is the same as the Milk Chocolate bar.

The smoothness of the bar, I’m guessing, can be attributed to a process called conching. This process is what the liquid chocolate is continually ground up using rollers or metal beads, this works all of the larger particles of the cocoa bean into ultrafine pieces that cannot be detected individually by the tongue. Less expensive chocolate is usually conched for a much shorter period of time, which means that it might have some noticeable grain to it. Conching is an expensive process because it takes so much time, so some companies skimp on this step. Lesser chocolate can be conched as little as 6 hours and the finest chocolate may be conched for 72 hours. (Unusual graininess may also be caused by bad tempering, which results in an inconsistent cocoa butter crystaline matrix.) This conching process is one of the reasons that you can’t make chocolate at home - the particles in standard cocoa are not fine enough.

The other thing that accounts for the silkiness of the bar is the fat. These bars are pretty high in fat, which is definitely not a bad thing, but rather uncommon in the standard consumer chocolate bars like Nestle’s and Hershey’s.

I’d never tried Dove Smooth Milk Chocolate before, so I was kind of curious if it was like European milk with its powdered milk taste or if it was like American chocolate which can be a little smokier/tangy tasting.

It’s smelled rather like the European version - sweet and with lots of dairy tones to it. This bar is also very sweet, sweeter than the Dark by a longshot, which is easy to see on the nutrition label, the dark as 17 grams of sugars, the milk has 20 grams (the only other difference seems to be the dark has 3 grams of fiber and the milk only 1 gram).

I actually found this to be a very pleasant bar. It went well with my strong coffee and I ate some of it with some salted pretzels. It’s a little on the sweet side and lacks some chocolate notes, but those are replaced by the complex dairy flavors. There is some tangyness to it, which I rather liked.

My biggest fear about the bars was that they’d be waxy, which is something I’ve noticed with the chocolate on the Dove ice cream bars (but the chemistry associated with frozen chocolate is vastly different than room-temp chocolate). But still, there’s something that feels very plastic about the bars, I’m not quite sure what it is, and it’s not a feeling that I get with Hershey’s Kisses or M&Ms. It might be that I don’t like ultra-smoothness. And that’s purely a personal preference.

(Update: Because it has become an issue, no comments will be allowed here promoting any sales of Dove at Home or any other chocolate. Please limit your comments to the products reviewed here.)

My recent shopping spree at Mel & Rose’s has a little story attached to it. A commercial was recently shooting on our street and the production crew paid us $300 for the inconvenience of having other people park in our driveway and the fact that they were going to wake us up 90 minutes earlier than they told us. I vowed to spend $100 of that on import/upscale candies (I consider it an investment in Candy Blog!). So off to Mel & Rose’s while the crew was making a ruckus and fouling the air with their diesel generators.

I was very tempted to get the Nougat de Montelimar again, but they had quite a few other import varieties, so I thought since someone else was footing my experimentation bill, I’d branch out to other continents.

Massam’s Deluxe Nougat is about as far flung as I could find, made in South Africa. It’s a lovely chunk of nougat, about the size of half of a Snickers bar. The white inside wrapper on it is actually a potato starch paper that’s edible. The nougat itself is not quite hard and not quite soft. The almond distribution is a little uneven. I had two bars, the first one had a great balance of them, but the second one had a complete void of almonds on one half and then a nice amount in the other half.

The taste of the nougat is sweet and smooth and the starch of the potato wrapper gives it a rather cereal quality. It’s odd, as I get to the end of the chew it reminds me of Cheerios. The honey notes weren’t as rich as I’d hoped, but these bars are pretty good in their own right. I had a little trouble biting them, so for the second bar I started cutting it with a knife and it worked a bit better.

At a dollar twenty-five a piece for an imported nougat (they’re a little over an ounce each when I weighed them, but there’s nothing on the label) they’re pretty good. I might pick them up again, especially for the novelty of the potato paper.

For the record, I only spent $50 on candy that day, including a tasting kit of Michel Cluizel that I’ll have a review of soon. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I guess you should never go to a candy store AFTER lunch. I bought a new bike with the rest of the money.

This nougat is both Kosher (Parev) and Hallal.

Remember Zotz? Those hard candies with a sour and fizzy center? These aren’t those.

Jolly Rancher Double Blasts are billed as “flavor-infused powder filled candy.” Each little bag contains a mix of two flavor combos, Chorange (Cherry outside and Orange inside) and Raspilime (Blue Raspberry outside and Lime inside).

Each little candy rod is about the same diameter as a pencil. The color and shape makes them look more like little pegs that you’d use with Tinkertoys than candy, but that didn’t keep me from putting them in my mouth (or from them marking them as a choking hazard for young children). The hard candy outside is nice, it’s tangy and flavorful but not at all like the traditional Jolly Rancher hard candies that have a pliable stickiness to them. Pretty soon, as the candy dissolves, especially around the seams, you start getting a little jolt of the powdered center. The center is the second flavor and is not that strong, but the texture and effect is pretty stunning.

The powder is made from erythritol, which is a sugar alcohol like xylitol that has an instant cooling effect. It’s also sweet, which is also a plus!

They’re pretty addictive in the sense that each time I ate one, I was trying to either crack them open with my teeth to get to the super-cooled center or suck on the candy so that as much of it as possible had dissolved by the time I got to the powder. In the sense that the flavor combos are tasty, well, I could take them or leave them. I was surprised at how much I liked the Chorange, seeing how the bulk of it is Cherry and the Raspilime was just kind of boring (and my assortment had twice as many Choranges).

I’m hoping they’ll do some other flavor combos, but I’m most interested in the other version of these called Sour Bolt Blasts, which might be more like Zotz and have one flavor through and through.

Of course they still make Zotz, so I could just go find some of those.

These candies were made in Canada.