While picking up a birthday cake for The Man a few weeks ago at Lark, a neighborhood bakery, I also sampled some locally made artisan nut brittles.

Morning Glory Confections makes a short list of nut brittles in quirky flavor combinations: Chai Tea & Cashew, Cocoa Nib, Coffee Bean & Pecan, Fleur de Sel & Peanut, Indian Curry & Pistachio and New Mexico Chili & Pumpkin Seed.

I’ve tasted all of them, but chose to buy a little package of the Chai Tea & Cashew. It wasn’t cheap, the 2 ounce package that contained four slender planks cost $4.95. But the artisan name was supported by the tantalizing ingredients:

Cashews, sugar, corn syrup, butter, chai spice (it included a list), Darjeeling tea leaves, baking soda, Madagascar vanilla extract, Kosher salt.

The glossy and narrow bars are lumpy with the cashews within and speckled with the tea & spices.

It smells a bit buttery and like warm tea and spices ... a bit like carrot cake, actually. The cashews are toasted to a crunchy light brown and have a darker flavor to them than I would have expected. The salt comes forward first then a little kick of creamy butter and the crisp flakiness of a toffee.

The baking soda keeps the salt note a bit on the mineral side of things, but also keeps the candy from tasting too sickly sweet. The key with Morning Glory brittles, all that I’ve tasted, is that it’s not about the nuts. While the nuts are nice, it’s about the flavors imparted to the brittle.

While I really enjoyed my four pieces, the price is just staggering (oh sure, it’s not so bad when you buy a larger quantity at $32 per pound.) I appreciated that the inner wrap was actually a zip lock to protect my precious bits from evil, evil moisture.

(I would also take this opportunity to recommend Lark’s cakes. They have an impressive carrot cake that is both beautiful and fulfills my husband’s and my particular issues: he doesn’t like raisins and I can’t eat walnuts. So it’s all about the moist carroty cake with warm spices and a light, not-too-sweet cream cheese frosting. We’ve picked up this cake three times in the regular size and one of the itty two-serving size since they opened.)

Related Candies

1. Ginger Chews: Hot Coffee
2. Seeds of Change: Dark Chocolate with Mango and Cashew
3. See’s Pumpkin Spice & Root Beer Lollypops
4. Sanders Caramels & Titans
5. Wha Guru Chew
6. Dagoba Chai

One of Scharffen Berger’s new projects is the Chocolate Makers Series with limited runs (about 120 cases) of single origin beans. There are two on the market right now. A Scharffen Berger rep sent them to me after I twittered about my obsession with the Milk Nibby bar.

In this case the both of the bars are 65% cacao dark chocolate - an easily accessible for nascent chocolate tasters, but not too sweet for hardliner chocophiles.

The boxes are quite smart - simple kraft paperboard boxes with a wrap-around label including tasting notes for the bar.

Inside the package the bar is enclosed in a glassine sleeve and sealed with a sticker. It’s well done, I found it easily protected the bars and was great for munching on a little, breaking inside the sleeve & serving to others.

The Tome Acu is sourced from cooperative farmers in the Brazilian State of Par?, which if you look on a map is a big, wide area far from any roads.

From the package

Notes: A single origin from deep within the Brazilian Amazon - unlike any cacao we’ve ever tasted.

Profile: Notes of wild apple & pear with the finish of a fine dessert wine.

Here’s what I got: Light green wood scent with slight bitter notes. Very sweet at the forward flavors but kind of in the honey/syrup arena with notes of cinnamon, raisins, green olives and green tea. The bitterness was high pitched and short lived, but gave way to some lower boiled cherry and plum notes. Still, quite a tangy chocolate and what I have come to expect from the Scharffen Berger style.

Though Theobroma cacao originated in the New World, more cocoa is grown in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Ghana is second only to C?te d’Ivoire in production. The earliest plantings in the area were from the Amelonado cultivar which, interestingly enough was also from Brazil (like the Tome Acu).

The Asante bar is named for the Ashante region & peoples (map). They’re known for their beans as well as the care the farmers & cooperatives take in the fermenting process, which is crucial to making good chocolate. (Underferment and the chocolate is acrid, overferment and the chocolate is musty.)

From the package

Notes: A single origin bar with a long finish and the deep chocolate flavors of Ghananian cacao.

Profile: deep, rich chocolate with hints of wild cherry, citrus and spice.

Here’s what I got: Coffee, cedar & cardamom plus a strong molasses/sugary vibe. The chocolate punch in here was strong and clear reminding me of the smell of chocolate cake without much of the sourness that I often get from Scharffen Berger bars.

The texture of both bars was excellent. Plenty of cocoa butter, smooth and silky melt without grittiness. The snap on both was bright & crisp.

You can follow along with the Chocolate Maker’s Series in the journal on the Scharffen Berger site, even if you never buy one of the bars, the process is quite interesting to read along with great photos from all over the world.

Related Candies

1. Scharffen Berger Dark Milk (68%)
2. Amano Jembrana
3. Askinosie Chocolate
4. Scharffen Berger Milk Nibby Bar
5. Amadei
6. Amano Single Origin Bars: Madagascar & Ocumare
7. Scharffen Berger - Cacao Nibs

One of the iconic candies in Japan are caramels. There are oodles of caramels available, most in the classic style of a hard, short caramel (meaning it’s rather chewy but dry).

Often they come in different flavors, but the classic caramel has endured for nearly 100 years. One line is the Meiji Dice, which are little caramels that come in pairs inside cube boxes that also double as dice.  More recently, as Meiji has acquired the Pokka Coffee company, they introduced the Pokka Coffee Caramel.

The cute packages feature half with icons of the Pokka coffee brand with their logo & seal. The other half are the dice - in this case using little coffee beans on each side to mark the numbers.

The caramels are bigger than the Morinaga ones I’ve had before, or the other, similar Meiji cubes.

They’re about 5/8 of an inch square with a distinct checkerboard texture on them. Each pair is wrapped in waxed paper and tucked into a box. So there are eight caramels total.

They smell very sweet and a lot like dark roasted coffee or espresso. There’s very little milk taste to it, though milk is a major ingredient. It’s definitely a sweet black coffee flavor. (Some coffee caramels taste like coffee ice cream.) I liked it much better than the grainy & gone texture of the Chewy Coffee Rio.

The dark, rich flavor and the soft, ample chew was really appealing to me. I found I ate three of the boxes before I was even ready to do this review. They were a bit on the expensive side for a mass-manufactured candy ... and the overpackaging is sweet for the first day or so, but silly and wasteful after that. I’ll likely stick with the Morinaga Caramels I know and love so well, or perhaps try the Meiji Chelsea Coffee if I can find them.

Related Candies

1. Beechies Force Chewy Candy
2. Coffee Nips
3. Japanese Black Sugar & Tropical Chews
4. The Candy Dump 2008
5. Coffee Beat
6. Green and Black Caramels

Just when I thought Mars had done every variation of the Snickers bar, they’ve got another one waiting in the wings: Limited Edition Snickers Fudge.

The simple bar features Fudge with peanut butter nougat & peanuts wrapped in milk chocolate. Like most other limited edition bars, it’s smaller than the standard, this one is the smallest yet at 1.78 ounces.

While the bar may feel a little light, it’s pretty dense and the textures consistent throughout.

I’ve often felt like the Snickers/Milky Way/3 Musketeers nougat is more like a fluffy fudge than a nougat anyway, so this seemed like a stack of dense fudge on top of a layer of light fluffed fudge.

The peanut butter nougat layer has a light creamy color with a distinct salty hit and peanutty flavor. The peanuts studded in the fudge are distinct, a little on the soft side but crunchy and tasty.

The fudge itself has a slight but consistent grain to it, a nice chocolatey flavor and good salty/sweet balance.

The creamy chocolate coating brings it all together.

I missed the chewy caramel, but give this one its due because it is rather different from other existing bars. The salt keeps it from being cloyingly sweet like a Milky Way. Also, I noticed as I was trying to do my bites & slices that there were quite a few voids in there around the nuts. I can’t tell if this is normal or if mine was just an anomaly.

It’s quite a satisfying bar and I can see it being a big success all on its own.

Clocking in at 250 calories, honestly it doesn’t need to be bigger. (Regular bars are 2.07 ounces and 280 calories.)

This bar is supposed to be on shelves in August, but that’s what they said about the Coconut M&Ms which are actually out, so look sharp they may already be available. I’m planning to try another one when I find them.

Related Candies

1. Snickers Nougabot Bar & Transformer M&Ms
2. Snickers Adventure Bar (Indiana Jones)
3. Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road Bar
4. Snickers Charged
5. Snickers Nut ‘n Butter Crunch
6. Snickers Almond Dark
7. Snickers Dark
8. Snickers Xtreme

At the same time I picked up the Trolli Sour Brite Crawlers, I also got a smaller bag of Trolli Sour Brite Crawler Eggs.

While I knew what gummi worms were, I never had these before and wasn’t quite sure what they were.

They certainly look like jelly beans but the ingredients, with gelatin as a key component, read like gummis.

It turns out, after just opening the package and squishing one between my fingers that they’re jelly beans with gummi centers.

(I appreciated that the package on this one had a clear best by date - which the Brite Crawlers did not have.)

Like the Crawler worms, there are three color varieties here:

Red & Yellow = Cherry & Lemon - I loved the look of these when I bit them in half, it’s like tie-dyed candy. The color goes through and through, and the flavor is virtually identical to the worms, a mix of cherry and lemon but with the added texture of the sandy candy shell.

Blue & Pink = Raspberry & Strawberry - for some reason my blue & pink ones were remarkably larger than the two other varieties. Like the worms, I liked this variation best. The woodsy berry & cotton candy with a little tangy pop goes well with the grainy jelly bean coating.

Green & Orange = Lime & Orange - because I was eating these whole instead of biting one end or the other, the combination of flavors was much more important. Lime and orange make a great citrus combo, so I’d say this one works better than the worm version.

The attention to detail and the readily identifiable flavor combos made this a really distinctive candy. As far as jelly bean shaped gummis, I’m not sure anything could supplant the Meiji Gummy Chocos. They come in a close second though. They’re not really sour as advertised, but that aside, it’s a fun, easy to share candy ... perfect movie food.

Related Candies

1. Spree Jelly Beans
2. Dr. Doolittle’s Pastilles (Lemon, Grapefruit & Wild Berry)
3. Chocolate Covered Gummi Bears
4. Wonka Nerds Jelly Beans
5. Jelly Belly Deluxe Easter Mix
6. Krunchy Bears
7. Starburst and Jelly Belly Jelly Beans

The last two varieties to complete my set of Nips reviews are Chocolate Parfait Nips and Mocha Nips.

In case you haven’t been reading along, Nips are a hard caramel, first made by a company called Pearson’s which was later bought out by Nestle. They’re a great summer candy because they don’t melt but have a rich creamy flavor that can satisfy that craving even on the stickiest of days.

Both are variations on previously reviewed Nips, as they’re filled & flavored.

The Chocolate Parfait Nips are made up of a Caramel Nip outside and a chocolate flavored inside.

The caramel is a little salty, creamy and with a silky sweet melt on the tongue. Sometimes it softens up a bit for splitting & bending ... or cementing teeth together.

Inside the bliss of the confection loses track for me. The chocolate center is like an oily Tootsie Roll. The chocolate flavor is weak and the texture is worse than that, a sort of waxy, greasy mess.

I’ve had this box for several months and I’ve eaten all of four of them so far.

The Mocha Nips are a bit darker looking. The rich hardened caramel is coffee flavored, just like the original Coffee Nips. In this case the mocha element comes from the cocoa paste filling.

The creamy, milky coffee outer portion is just like the classic Nip ... a good rounded coffee flavor. The inside though, like the Chocolate Parfait isn’t quite chocolate, it’s more like a frosting.

The bold strength of the coffee flavored outside masks the chocolate deficiencies better than the Chocolate Parfait, so I did end up finishing most of the box.

While I appreciate the attempt to create a few other versions, the chocolate just isn’t good enough to make me chose these over the classic solid flavors.

Related Candies

1. Coffee Rio
2. Nips: Butter Rum & Peanut Butter Parfait
3. Nips: Caramel & Dulce de Leche
4. Coffee Nips
5. M&Ms Premiums
6. Nestle Crunch Cappuccino Stixx
7. Cafe Select Chocolate Coffee Trios

Trolli is a big gummi brand in the United States. Originally founded by a German (actually West Germany at the time) company named Mederer Corporation in 1981, they quickly established an American production facility in the United States in 1986.

Though you wouldn’t notice it as a candy buyer, Trolli has passed through quite a few corporate hands over the years. First Favorite Brands, Inc bought them in 1997, but went bankrupt and were bought out by Nabisco in 1999. Nabisco sold them off in 2000 to Kraft. Then Kraft sold all their candy brands to Wrigley’s in 2005 and within that same year it was acquired by Farley’s and Sathers.

Trolli has the distinction of innovating the Gummi Worm. Not only was it a new shape (one that kids love to play with and adults might find a little off-putting) but it also features multiple flavors in one piece.

Trolli’s Sour Brite Crawlers not only have that duo of flavors, they’re also fluorescent colors with a slightly sour grainy coating.

There are three flavor varieties in the bag, though there is no directory or description of what they are:

Orange & Green = Orange & Lime - these are not Sour Patch or Sour Skittles style sour ... they’re just a little more tart than the regular gummis. The flavor combo here is a nice mix of citrus. The lime is rather ordinary and I don’t think I’d care for it much in a plain gummi, but it goes well with the juicy and tangy orange. Some good zest notes to keep it from being all about some sort of bland punch flavor.

Pink & Blue = Strawberry & Raspberry - nice berry mix though the distinction between the two isn’t terribly clear. I liked the tangy bite to the chew and the graininess on the outside especially on this version.

Yellow & Red = Lemon & Cherry - the cherry flavor was dominant when I opened the bag, so I fully expected both ends of this worm to taste the same. Cherry is, well, a light sour cherry without the dark woodsy “black cherry” notes. The lemon side is distinctive, a good lemonade flavor though not quite sour enough for a product that calls itself sour.

On the whole, a fun candy. The colors are, as described, very bright. They’re nicely made, the bag was fresh and cheap ($1.59 at Target). The only hesitation is that these in no way qualify as a sour candy.

Related Candies

1. Albanese Gummi Butterflies
2. Super Sour Worms
3. Krunchy Bears
4. Brain Candy! (gummi brains)
5. Gummi Lightning Bugs
6. Gummi Clown Fish
7. Haribo Gummi Bears vs Trolli Gummi Bears

I’ve been on a kick to find summer-friendly chocolate. M&Ms certainly fit the bill but of course that doesn’t help Candy Blog readers who are already well aware of them.

While wandering around Mel & Rose’s wide selection of imported mass-produced candies I finally found Galaxy Minstrels in single sized packs.

The package seemed light and didn’t seem to have a lot of candy in it, but I’m always game for something new to me.

Galaxy is a chocolate brand made by Mars and sold in the UK and selected parts of Europe (if the languages on the back of the package were any evidence, I’d say Greece/Cyprus and Spain). Though many folks consider Dove to be the American equivalent of Galaxy, there are a few subtle differences. (My previous Galaxy review.)

Minstrels are big, about .75 inches in diameter. They’re like giant M&Ms but the proportions are more like Nestle Smarties - a bit flatter.

All of the candies are dark brown ... no color varieties here. These are serious candies, somber and easy to pick up.

The flavor is like chocolate milk, slightly weak but sweet & rich chocolate milk. It’s not strongly chocolate ... it doesn’t even have a distinct cocoa flavor, it’s more about milk. The crunch of the shell is good - crispy and without any additional flavors (like I experience with Smarties, which have a bit of a Cheerios flavor).

They’re completely different from M&Ms as far as I’m concerned, they’re more like white chocolate than milk chocolate. Looking at the ingredients list I can see that they’re not even qualified to be called chocolate in the United States, which has more stringent standards than the UK, which allows vegetable fat and whey - though it still has a strong proportion of cocoa butter as it is the second ingredient. (I’m lumping this in both the mockolate and chocolate categories.)

They’re really nice, I had two packages and ate both. There’s a slight malty tone to it, it’s milky without being sticky sweet like Cadbury and of course the bold disks make them fun to play with. If these were widely available, I’d certainly pick them up regularly, especially to pair with pretzels, Sugar Babies and almonds for a summer trail snack.

I mentioned last week that Cadbury in the UK is going Fair Trade; Galaxy in the UK is moving towards certification with the Rainforest Alliance for sustainable cocoa growing.

Related Candies

1. M&Ms Premiums
2. Head to Head: M&Ms vs Koppers Milkies
3. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
4. M&Ms Line
5. Revels
6. Mars Maltesers