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

It’s November, there’s a crisp chill in the air (yeah, it was in the fifties last night here in Los Angeles) which usually signals mint & chocolate combinations are in season. Last week I tried Dove’s new Peppermint Bark. This weekend my eye was drawn to this Fannie May Mint Meltaway in with the holiday candy at Walgreen’s.

First of all, I never see Fannie May all the way out here in the West Coast. Second, this was a drug store, someplace I didn’t expect to run across a boxed chocolate brand. I know many readers have been urging me to cover Fannie May, so into my basket they went without complaint.

Fannie May used to be a fine chocolate company, founded in 1920 and based in Chicago. In 2004 they declared bankruptcy and were bought up by Alpine Confections who already owned a similar Midwest confectioner, Harry London of Canton, OH. In 2006 they became part of 1-800-FLOWERS. So they’re not quite the tiny little boxed chocolate company any longer; this is what their website says:

Fannie May is a quality chocolate candy store that has been specializing in gourmet chocolates since 1920. Since the store’s opening, our chocolates and candies have been made of the finest ingredients, never sacrificing the quality of a box of Fannie May chocolates. Not only is Fannie May candy known for its quality, but also for its wide array of candy varieties.

So some of you caught that I said that they used to be fine chocolate. Well, read on and you’ll see where I take issue with including them saying they’re “fine chocolate” when they’re not using the “finest ingredients.”

The Mint Meltaway package is rather refreshing and easy to spot. It’s a rather clinical white with a little pile of the candies isolated in the middle of the wrapper. The top and bottom edges have simple evergreen boughs and pine cone trim. There’s actually only one piece in the package though the image shows three, but at 1.5 ounces, it’s definitely not skimpy. The package describes the meltaway as Rich chocolate mint center drenched in creamy pastel coating. Wow, creamy pastel coating, can you tell how much my

mother

mouth is watering at that? What is creamy pastel coating? Here’s what takes up a portion of the back of the package:

INGREDIENTS: White Coating (sugar, fractionated palm kernel oil, nonfat dry milk, partially hydrogenated palm kernel and cottonseed oils, milk, glyceryl lacto esters of fatty acids, soy lecithin, salt, natural and artificial flavor), Dark Chocolate (sugar, chocolate liquor processed with alkali , cocoa butter, chocolate liquor, milk, butterfat, soy lecithin, artificial flavor), Milk Chocolate (sugar, whole milk, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, and vanillin), Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (cottonseed, soybean), Peppermint Flavor, Green Color (soybean oil, Yellow #5, Blue #1, soy lecithin and BHA).

You know what all that adds up to? 1.5 grams of trans fats. Most companies have mucked around with their serving sizes so that they can skirt in under the “you can say there’s no trans fats if you have less than .5 grams in a serving” but Fannie May, well, she’s bold. She’s out there with a huge 240 calorie portion (160 calories per ounce) that contains 49% of my daily value of saturated fats. And those actual trans fats.

The block is two inches square and a half an inch high. The soft, matte & dull green looks like a bar of soap or a vintage fireplace tile. It has a soft peppermint scent, not menthol nasal-passages-clearing-strong.

The white coating is rather smooth and not at all greasy. It’s not minty but also not really much of anything besides a texture and slightly salty. The chocolate center isn’t a soft meltaway, it’s a bit firmer, like a Frango. It melts quickly though, cool and chocolatey with a pleasant peppermint essence to it. After a while it gets a little greasy though, a little thin and watery.

The ingredients don’t warrant the $1.39 price tag when I can get the Dove Peppermint Bark made with real cocoa butter just a little further down the aisle. Or if you don’t mind the mockolate, just eat some Andes Mints.

Related Candies

1. Dove Peppermint Bark
2. Hershey’s Bliss Creme de Menthe Meltaway Center
3. Nestle Toll House Mint Holiday Gems
4. Trader Joe’s Peppermint Bark White Chocolate Bar
5. Andes Mints & Dessert Indulgence
6. London Mint is really from Ohio

When I was in London last time, my mother and I went to Portobello Road to the flea market. While there we stopped in a little basement cafe to get some coffee and had what turned out to be the best scone of my life. It was served with clotted cream. As far as I can tell, clotted cream is a cross between super-fatty butter and unsweetened whipped cream. I have no problem with either of those.

When I saw this Buchanan’s Scottish Clotted Cream Fudge at Bristol Farms over the weekend I thought about my positive experience with the clotted cream part of the name. I know that Scottish fudge is rather different from American fudge (notably that it’s not chocolate), kind of like a grainy caramel. Think of it as a cross between dulce de leche (or cajeta) and penuche.

Upon getting it home and reading the package, it didn’t sound quite as fun as the scone experience: Sugar, Corn Syrup, Milk, Vegetable Oil, Butter, Clotted Cream, Salt, Soy Lecithin, Mono & Diglycerides, Natural & Artificial Flavors. Well, color me bummed. Clotted Cream way down there by salt (of which there is approximately 212 mgs)? Piffle.

Well, I paid $5.99 for a quarter of a pound of it, I had to give it a try.

The package is long and narrow. Inside are two little bars. Each bar is pre-scored into six little pieces.

I have to say, it smelled fresh, like caramel and butter. And they do look fresh and stunning. The bite is quite soft, like a Kraft Caramel. It’s not chewy, but also not quite as grainy as fudge can be. The smooth kind of pliable dough does dissolve into a slight sugary grain, but also releases some bold toasted sugar and butter flavors.

It’s a nice vanilla fudge, but not worth $24 a pound. But now I want to try the fresh and wholesome stuff in Scotland, not stuff with artificial flavors and barely a splash of real clotted cream.

Related Candies

1. Rosa’s Fudge
2. Crown Nuggets Borrachitos
3. Texas Chewy Pralines
4. Jim Beam Fudge
5. Charleston Pralines
6. Cajeta Elegancita

If you’d asked me a year ago if there were any more mint flavors that Altoids could come in, I would have said, “Nope, it’s all been done.”

I know, this is a really short review but it has a really big picture. I spotted these new Cool Honey Altoids at Walgreen’s. I liked the prison stripes of yellow and black,oh wait, maybe they’re supposed to be bee colors. It’s distinctive enough I don’t think anyone will mistake this for Ginger or Licorice.

I liked the idea of cool honey, like a cough drop version of Altoids. (Honestly a eucalyptus version might be good.)

They’re lightly tinted, maybe a little yellow, I thought sometimes they looked a tad green. Perhaps absinthe! But the flavor? They’re minty and strong but other than that I wasn’t getting anything honey-ish out of them. They’re milder than a regular Altoid, but lacking the complex flavor combination that I enjoyed in the Creme de Menthe version.

It’s too bad, it was a nice idea. But at least the tin is cute. Gigi also reviewed them.

Related Candies

1. Menu for Hope V - Confectionery Round Up
2. Christmas Mint Round Up
3. Chocolate Dipped Altoids - Creme de Menthe
4. Palmer Bee Mine
5. Altoids Chocolate Dipped Ginger Mints
6. Chocolate Dipped Altoids

Heide Red Hot Dollars have a colorful past. The original Heide Red Hot Dollars were raspberry flavored, but when they were bought by Hershey’s in the 90s, they thought the name was confusing, so they changed it to Red Raspberry Dollars, which was obviously more descriptive but also lost the decades of product identification. To make things more confusing Farley’s & Sathers bought the brand (which includes Jujyfruits) and introduced these Red Hot Dollars, which are cinnamon flavored.

When I tried Red Raspberry Dollars last year I was a little frustrated because I wanted to try their spicy Red Hot Dollars. I was too cheap to actually buy them via the internet where shipping candy is often in excess of the candy cost, so I just kept my eyes open. When I was the NACS show in Las Vegas last month I mentioned my difficulties in finding them to the Farley’s & Sathers representative and he helped me out by giving me two boxes. (But no real help in finding them again.)

The box was frustrating. Dots usually have a cellophane wrapper on the boxes. But Heide candies are just a plain paperboard box with product rattling around inside. But what they lack in moisture seals they more than make up for in glue. It was impossible for me to open either box at the flap ends without tearing the layers of paperboard to bits. But fortunately this frustrating package did keep it fresh. They were soft and pliable.

The thick “coins” look exactly like the raspberry ones. They don’t smell either, so don’t throw these in a bowl together unless you love both.

They’re soft like Dots, a little softer than Jujyfruits tend to be. The matte surface doesn’t have a greasy coat like some gummi products do. The gumdrop texture is dense and firm and very cinnamony. Some were hotter than others, enough to make me sweat sometimes.

I really enjoyed them and had no trouble eating both boxes in a matter of weeks. They’re a great candy to keep at my desk because they’re not messy, easy to offer & share plus they don’t give me any sort of weird candy breath. I enjoyed the smooth texture more than the grainy jelly bean known as Hot Tamales, but they really did get stuck to my teeth.

Vegans may be able to consume these; there’s no beeswax or confectionery glaze and the colors are all artificial. It all depends on how you feel about mineral oil and sugar. They’re also Kosher.

Related Candies

1. Good & Fiery
2. Dots Elements: Earth, Air, Fire & Water
3. Cinnamon Fire Twizzlers
4. Gimbal’s Lavaballs
5. Jujyfruits & Jujubes
6. Dots
7. Hot Tamales and Hotter Tamales