Gimbal’s is one of those candy companies where you’ve probably had their products, you just don’t realize it because they’re often sold in bulk. They have fun little sour jelly stars, sour sanded bears and licorice scottie dogs.

They also have an extensive line of Gourmet Jelly Beans.

They’re similar to Jelly Belly, they’re a similar smaller size, have different color codings for the flavors and in this instance, come in an assortment of dozens of flavors in one bag (41 in this case). I’ve seen these 7 ounce bags for sale at Walgreen’s, usually for about $2. I know that CandyDirect.com sells single flavors of these (and you may find them in bulk bins that aren’t identified by brand). At only $3.40 a pound online, that’s about a third off to half off the price of Jelly Belly.

I don’t have tasting notes for absolutely every flavor, but here are a few of the highlights of what I picked out of the mix over the past week:

Tiramisu - like a caramel coffee creamer.
Wild Cherry - tangy and with those dark woodsy cherry tones ... you know, cough syrup
Roasted Marshmallow - a slightly toasty/caramel vanilla
Bubble Gum - oh yeah, that’s bubble gum, I can almost taste the bad comic printed on wax paper
Strawberry Daquiri - rather nice, like strawberry & lime
Strawberry Cheesecake - like the daquiri without the twist of lime
Watermelon - yes, that’s watermelon
Root Beer - hey, that’s zazzy! I like it, I want a whole bag.
Chocolate - really, what are these doing in here, some things are simply not flavors, chocolate is one of them. Worst part is I kept thinking that they were either licorice or root beer and disappointed every time.
Red Delicious - tasted like a candied apple, not very strong or tart, just a sweet apple flavor.
Cinnamon - not as spicy as the wonderful Lava Balls (but there was supposed to be a sizzling cinnamon in the mix, but I never found it), but still a pleasant mild spice.

Yes, they have a buttered popcorn flavor ... but I picked all of those out and didn’t even taste them. I don’t care for actual buttered popcorn, nor things flavored like buttered popcorn.

Too many reds! There’s cherry, cinnamon, raspberry, fruit punch, red delicious. I had similar problems with the orange/yellow things. But this is an issue with many candies that have too many flavors in one bag.

I’d probably prefer to buy a more narrow mix of these, like just fruits or maybe carnival flavors (toasted marshmallow, bubble gum, red delicious, root beer… maybe someone needs to invent a funnel cake flavor).

The beans are nicely formed and all had an even amount of distinctive flavor.

Gimbal’s is not only Kosher, but also a facility free of most of the major allergens. They are tree nut/peanut, gelatin, gluten, dairy and egg free. So if you like Jelly Belly but have to avoid gluten and peanuts, this would be an excellent option. As a bonus, Gimbal’s are less expensive than Jelly Belly. Just harder to find.

Related Candies

1. Gimbal’s Lavaballs
2. Lifesavers Jellybeans
3. Cadbury Dairy Milk Whispers
4. Starburst and Jelly Belly Jelly Beans
5. Jelly Belly - Full Line

Another new brand of jelly beans from an old favorite, Smarties Jelly Beans.

Just to make things clear, the package says, “Tangy Fruit Flavors” ... just in case people thought they were some other assortment of flavors associated with Smarties. They never actually say which fruits they are, though.

Actually, I think Smarties are an ideal Easter candy, with their pastel colors and light flavors. I like Smarties. I like their lack of flavor, the way they dissolve so quickly and smoothly. I like their tiny tablet size, their light colors and complete indistinguishableness from one another.

These jelly beans were about the same price as others are these days, retail of $1.99.

The Smarties come in five flavors/colors.

The shell is a dry and a little crumbly and cool on the tongue (as dextrose usually is). The shells have a tangy and flavorful layer. The flavors aren’t very strong or complex. Grape is the most vivid, in that grape soda way. Green apple is pretty mild. Blue tastes like ball point pen ink smells (I think it’s raspberry). Cherry is very tart and then very sweet but less bitter than most pink/red cherry candies. Lemon was probably the sweetest of the bunch.

What was missing was the white Smarties, you know, that one that we all think is pineapple and is by far the best. (What? You don’t think so, too?)

The colors are bright and opaque, rather like highlighter pens. The funny part is that Smarties actually makes their lack of color in their compressed dextrose tablets a selling point. From their website:

Our candy is intentionally made in pastel colors so that our customers will be eating more candy and less artificial colors. Don’t be fooled by candies like ours with bright colors, you can taste the dye!

In the case of these little jelly beans, I think they’re using just as much dye as everyone else. Most of all I noticed the similarities between the Smarties Jelly Bean and the SweeTarts Jelly Beans.

So I gathered up an assortment of both and put them side by side. The SweeTarts Jelly Beans are on the left and the Smarties Jelly Beans are on the right. They are extremely close in colors, although the Smarties are missing the orange one completely.

The beans were essentially identical with the Smarties being slightly more flavorful, mostly in the tangy layer. The colors very little but the purple and the green are the easiest to tell apart by looking at them and the blue in the SweeTarts version is punch flavor, not raspberry.

I really don’t have a preference of one over the other. If you have a choice, I say go with whichever is cheaper or whichever brand you feel you prefer to support.

They’re both made in Canada and come in 14 ounce bags, though their ingredients label differs slightly ... so it’s entirely possible that this factory churns both out under contract with Nestle or CeDe Candy.

While all of the Smarties compressed dextrose products are gluten, nut and milk free, the Smarties Jelly Beans are made in Canada and are made in a facility that processes all the hit-list allergens: peanuts, nuts, milk products, soy products, wheat, eggs and sesame seeds.

Related Candies

1. Wonka Nerds Jelly Beans
2. Blueberry Hill Spice Jelly Beans
3. Jelly Belly Deluxe Easter Mix
4. Smarties Bubble Gum
5. Starburst and Jelly Belly Jelly Beans

No, I was not in some sort of sugar-shock. Just a little site difficulties today with some nasty spammers clogging up the works. My apologies to anyone who was trying to visit earlier today and had trouble reaching the site.

I’ve disabled a few things while I wait for it to abate, so I’ll turn comments back on soon and the search will be back shortly after that.

Many thanks to the folks at Nexcess.net and Travis at Hop Studios talking me through the problems from the airport on his way back from SWSX!

All I can say is that I really, really want some chocolate now. (The photo is of some organic gummi worms ... it’s intended to reflect how I felt about my recent spam infestation and in no way reflects my affection for the actual candy.)

Vosges graciously sent me a full set of their adorable and tasty chocolate rabbits. Unfortunately, my UPS driver must like to drive my packages around in the hot sun all day before delivering them. The included dry ice was completely gone ... and the precious little rabbits were melted & runny.

But I’m ever the optimist and improvisationalist ... so I did another Peeps Mash Up with the pre-heated fondue!

(See even larger here)

Suffice to say, they all made my Peeps taste much better, I really enjoyed the Barcelona, which has little bits of sea salt and smoked almonds in it. The graininess of the Peeps crust and the sea salt bits made for an interesting texture and riot of activity on my tongue with all that creamy chocolate and spongy marshmallow. Guanduja was my second favorite with the only drawback being the sweetness, followed by the lemon and peppercorns of the Amalfi. The Red Fire with its dark chocolate and smoky chili flavors was great on its own but didn’t match my high hopes for the fondue (not that it was designed for that!).

Someday Vosges will open a shop in Los Angeles and I’ll be happy to stop by and pick them up in person. Until then, I think I need to swear off chocolate deliveries at home unless UPS starts guaranteeing they’ll use a refrigerated truck.

Related Candies

1. Peeps Monster Mash Ups
2. Peeps Mash Ups
3. 2006 Independent Food Awards
4. Candy Mash Ups - Marshmallows & Chocolate

It’s a candy resurrection story! Good & Fruity  has been reissued by Hershey’s after being off the market for several years (could this petition have anything to do with it?). It should be available in stores any day now.

Good & Fruity is the companion candy to Good & Plenty, which is a sugar-shelled licorice. Really, there’s very little that’s similar about them, though at one time Good & Fruity was a candy coated fruit licorice nib.

The current incarnation of Good & Fruity, simply put, is jelly beans. Tiny, narrow jelly beans in a box.

They’re a little different from typical jelly beans, the shell isn’t as grainy, mostly because there’s so little shell. It’s crispy and has a light cool feel on the tongue with the sweeter flavors.

Lemon  - tart, but not quite lemony.
Lime  - a good mix of sour and lime essence.
Cherry  - sort of mellow, pretty standard black cherry flavor
Orange  - tangy and with a very strong orange zest component. A really good orange jelly bean. 
Blue Raspberry - a bit of raspberry and a bit of blueberry, neither flavor the best those berries have to offer.

Some of the G&F were a little inconsistent. Some were tangy, others were plain and sweet, like they’d missed their flavor coats.

The colors are vibrant and really compelling. Like little pieces of beach glass.

These are probably a good movie candy, a palatable mix of flavors, easy to eat with a very low mess factor. I’m just not that into them. They’re Kosher and unlike Good & Plenty, the colors here are all artificial so I guess it’s okay for vegetarians. Earlier versions of the candy were known as Good ‘n Fruity.

UPDATE 5/4/2010: For those who miss candy coated red licorice, you might want to find Wiley Wallaby Outback Beans. While they’re not exactly like the original Good ‘n Fruity, they’re closer than this.

Related Candies

1. Jelly Belly - All Natural
2. Blueberry Hill Spice Jelly Beans
3. SweeTart Jelly Beans
4. Organic Surf Sweets
5. Jelly Belly Soda Pop Shoppe
6. Starburst and Jelly Belly Jelly Beans
7. Jelly Belly - Full Line

I have a roundup of new jelly beans and some overlooked classics: Smarties Jelly Beans, Wonka Nerds Bumpy Jelly Beans, Jelly Belly Dark Chocolate Jelly Beans, Gimbal’s Gourmet Jelly Beans.

Related Candies

1. Gimbal’s Gourmet Jelly Beans
2. Smarties Jelly Beans
3. Good and Fruity
4. Wonka Nerds Jelly Beans
5. Jelly Belly - All Natural
6. Blueberry Hill Spice Jelly Beans
7. SweeTart Jelly Beans
8. Organic Surf Sweets
9. Jelly Belly - Full Line

Here’s a new jelly bean for flavor fans.

Nerds just don’t appeal to me much, part of it might be that they’re kind of hard to eat (maybe they should be sold in straws like Pixy Stix?), but I love the idea of them. Enter the Nerds Bumpy Jelly Beans.

Where regular jelly beans lack texture, each Nerds Bumpy Jelly Bean has oodles of nooks & lumps on a crunchy candy shell.

Where regular jelly beans lack a flavorful punch, each Nerd has a tasty tart layer just below the candy shell.

Yes, they look like freakish confectionery mistakes or maybe wads of leftover acrylic paint. They’re hard and have uneven textured shells. But they’re also vividly colored, so there’s no confusing any muted colors (is this pink or magenta?).

The biggest contribution these beans have to the jelly bean pantheon is crunch. They’re really crunchy.

Orange: a nice mellow orange flavor, with a rather tart flavor layer under the shell.

Lemon: the tartest of the bunch, it does kind of lose its zazz when I got to the end of chewing it up when it was just a big wad of sweet.

Strawberry: I was afraid this was going to be cherry, it’s not quite the vivid red I photographed, just slightly on the pinker side of red. A nice sort of cotton candy delicate floral strawberry with a dose of sour power.

Green Apple: my mix seemed to have an inordinate amount of these, which is too bad, because they were my least favorite. They are sour and do taste just like artificial green apple.

Grape: fantastically artificial, like having a Grape Shasta (complete with a slight fizz mimicked by the crunchy shell).

It’s funny how excited I am about these. Let’s face it, there hasn’t been much innovation in the jelly bean world since Jelly Belly started adding more flavor by using both a flavored center and a flavored shell.

These are fun to eat because there are so many options. You can just pop them in your mouth and chew them up, or let them dissolve or nibble away at the crunchy coating.

The centers are clear and have only a light flavor and a vague tartness to them.

I think they’re a great change-up from the milder jelly beans out there and will definitely appeal to kids, but are still palatable for adults. I enjoyed all the flavors (though picked around the green ones after I finished my review). Still, I found that I couldn’t eat as many of them as I can eat jelly beans. The tartness gave me a tummy ache after about a quarter of the bag. (See the levels of testing at Candy Blog Labs that I go through?)

The interesting news though is that while I was shopping at Walgreen’s a few weeks ago, I also found this little bag of Giant Chewy Nerds. I bought them, at first thinking they were a clearance item, perhaps a test marketing. But the expiration is December 2008, so they were definitely fresh.

So, it looks like this is what they’re called in the “Non-Easter Season”. I can find no mention of either of these products on the Wonka site (does that surprise anyone?).

SugarHog.net also has a review (and got hers at Target for $1.99) plus another review from Sugar Hi.

These have a variety of artificial colors in them as well as Carmine, making them unsuitable for vegetarians.

Related Candies

1. Jelly Belly - All Natural
2. Blueberry Hill Spice Jelly Beans
3. SweeTart Jelly Beans
4. Organic Surf Sweets
5. Jelly Belly Soda Pop Shoppe
6. Starburst and Jelly Belly Jelly Beans
7. Jelly Belly - Full Line

It’s funny how many different interpretations there are in the confectionery world for the word “creme”. In the case of Cadbury Creme Eggs, it’s simply a runny fondant. In the case of many of the Hershey’s Kisses it’s a firmer fat based ganache style and in Starbursts it’s just a flavor.

In the case of Nestle, it means “something softer than chocolate”. I picked up their Nestle Crunch Creme Egg with Caramel and Butterfinger Creme Egg at the drug store to complete my All Egg Week.

At 1.1 ounces, the Nestle Crunch Creme Egg with Caramel is virtually the same weight as a Cadbury Creme Egg, but slightly narrower and denser.

The outer shell looks almost like dark chocolate. It has a pleasant little squiggly design and the name Nestle on both sides of the egg.

It’s easy to bite without any mess. The chocolate shell is pretty thick and contains the fillings well (no sticky eggs for me). The base of each half of the hemispheres is filled with a firm and lightly salty chocolate creme studded with crisped rice. Each side is a little shy of full and that reservoir holds a scant bit of flowing caramel along with a rather large void.

The caramel is a bit salty, not very caramel flavored, but I don’t expect that from Nestle. The chocolate creme is still chocolatey without any greasiness or sticky-milk qualities. I wanted more crunches though, I really like crisped rice and think this would benefit from more of it.

It’s a very dense egg, I think I might prefer it in a slightly smaller form (maybe a half an ounce like the Canadian Cadbury Eggs I tried last year) but it’s a rare egg these days in the drug store that’s just going for chocolate (with that little bit of caramel & crunchies).

I give it a 7 out of 10.

Nestle also makes the Wonka Golden Creme Eggs, which are pretty much the same thing except there are graham cracker flavored bits in there instead of crisped rice.

The Butterfinger Creme Egg says it’s 1.15 ounces but I have my doubts with that huge void there. At first I thought it was just that one that was a little underfilled, but the second one (still wrapped in the photo) had a similar large cavern of nothingness.

It smells sweet chocolatey with a good roasted peanut butter undertone.

My major complaint with Butterfinger bars is that they don’t use real chocolate on the outside. In the case of these (and the Butterfinger Jingles), it’s real Nestle Milk Chocolate (which still isn’t spectacular) ... well, that’s what the foil says, “Butterfinger Pieces & Peanut Butter Creme in a Milk Chocolate Shell” but I’m kind of unclear when I read the ingredients that featured the second ingredient as “confectionery coating” but that may be a mock white chocolate base of the creme filling.

All that aside, it’s an enjoyable egg. The center has all the flavor of a Butterfinger. That buttery flavor with the little crunchy bits of peanut butter brittle (that don’t stick to your teeth!) a little bit of salt to even out the very sweet chocolate shell. It’s nothing like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg, but that’s okay, they’re both pretty inexpensive, get both.

A solid 7 out of 10 for this one as well.

Related Candies

1. Godiva Easter Eggs
2. Palmer Nest Eggs
3. Melster Marshmallow Eggs
4. See’s Scotchmallow Eggs
5. Dove Truffle and Snickers Eggs
6. Lake Champlain Hazelnut Eggs
7. Hershey Eggs