While on vacation on the central coast earlier this month I made my regular stop at Sweet Earth Chocolates in San Luis Obispo to pick up some rations for our vacation rental.

I bought some turtles and some other items for immediate consumption and then a few items to bring back to Los Angeles for review. One item that I sampled in the store is their Fair Trade Certified & Certified Organic Bittersweet Chocolate Drops. Yup, I went on vacation and I brought back a bag of chocolate chips.

It’s 12 ounces of 65% dark chocolate with only three ingredients - organic cacao (liquor, cocoa butter & cocoa powder), organic sugar and organic vanilla.

I love the bag. It’s simple, the same sort of wax lined kraft paper bag with a wire-fold closure that you get fresh roasted coffee beans in. It has the same bean bag heft and satisfying crunch when squeezed.

The pieces are small, some as large as a dime but most the size of a flattened standard baking chocolate chip (2/3 of an inch). The smooth disk shape makes them easy to eat and melt in the mouth, no spiky top.

There’s a light tangy note to the pieces upon melting with a slightly dry finish. It’s much sweeter than I would have expected for a 65% chocolate. The flavors are woodsy and smokey with notes of figs and molasses, they’re on the coffee side of the rich flavors. In fact, the package was sitting on my desk one morning and a co-worker said “Your coffee smells really good today.” I didn’t actually have any coffee, it was the open bag of chocolate that smelled like that. On another day the smell was so distracting, I had to close the package up and put it away.

I’m sure this would be great for baking, hot chocolate or pudding. But I was content to just snack away on them. It was no compromise, in the sense that these were organically grown, fair trade certified and not overpackaged. It was $9.50 for the bag, but for 12 ounces, I thought it was a pretty good deal compared to some of the chocolate bars that I buy for the same price but only get 3.5 ounces.

They’re made without soy or dairy (so they’re vegan) but are processed in a facility that has both.

As more of a novelty item I tried their new caramels. They’re like gourmet milk duds. I picked out the Coffee Caramel. The little quarter pound bag is very simply done. A cellophane bag sealed with a little twist tie. (They had samples in the store, I tried the orange and chili one and found it a little too spicy for me, so I opted for the coffee.)

Instead of a glossy coating of chocolate on the house-made caramel nibs, these are coated in chocolate and then rolled in cocoa. They’re lumpy and mis-shapen, some are flat and others are rustically spherical.

The chew is smooth and sweet with some good flavors. The primary flavors are woodsy, a combination of the dark chocolate and cocoa coating plus a little note of coffee. The caramel itself is interesting, the toasted and burnt sugar flavors are missing, are are the butter notes, but still it doesn’t end up tasting like syrup. There’s a little note of cinnamon and coconut in there, but that could be my imagination.

As a gourmet Milk Dud, I was happy, though they are certainly more expensive, don’t have quite the shelf life and are kind of messy with the cocoa coating.

I will continue to visit the Sweet Earth Chocolate shops in San Luis Obispo when I’m in the area. It’s easy on and off the 101 if you’re traveling through the area. My previous review of the shop is here (with photos).

UPDATE: Sweet Earth changed the name of their company to Mama Ganache.

Related Candies

1. Sweet Earth Chocolates
2. Meiji Pokka Coffee Caramel
3. Ginger Chews: Hot Coffee
4. Javaz - Milk & Dark Chocolate Covered Coffee Beans
5. Divine Fair Trade Chocolate
6. Coffee Nips
7. Sweet Earth Chocolate Cups
8. Guittard Akoma Fair Trade Chocolate Chips

Before I started Candy Blog there was a rather short but significant list of candies that I had never tried before. One of them was Licorice Allosrts. This is mystifying for regular readers, I’m sure, who already know that I love licorice. But I didn’t quite understand what it was and as Allsorts are often sold in bulk bins, there was no package (or blog) to explain it to me.

Allsorts are various shapes and combinations of licorice mixed together. The most common items within a variety bag would be rockies (cream filled tubes), twists, nibs, sandwiches (layers of licorice with layers of either fondant cream or coconut fondant), buttons (jellies or gummies covered in colorful nonpareils) and possibly licorice flavored mellocreams. 

Trader Joe’s Allsorts -a- Licorice is a very conservative and safe assortment of little licorice shapes, perfect for those who are shy of strong licorice and want to dip their toes into the anise waters.

The bright and moderne fifties style design on the packaging does a decent job of demystifying its contents. It says that it includes a fun and colorful variety of licorice shapes and sizes including sandwiches, tubes and swirls. The ingredients boast that there are no artificial flavors or colors, though as is the case with most licorice, it’s not gluten free and also contains milk and gelatin ingredients. Though there is no coconut in the sandwich creams, there is coconut oil.

The assortment consists of: tubes filled with pink, orange or yellow cream; sandwiches with pink, orange or yellow cream; twisted nibs and licorice wheels. 

While they’re glossy and pretty, they’re also soft. So soft that many in my package were lumped together.

The cream element is very soft and though it’s not sticky it does like to stick to the other pieces and gets dented and malformed easily.

They’re made in France, so they’ve had a long trip (but they’re well within their expiry date - good until July 2013).

The texture is soft and chewy without being doughy like some Australian styles can be. It’s also not crumbly or waxy like Twizzlers can get. The addition of gelatin gives it a good bounce and helps it keep its moisture. The licorice flavors are mild. There are some nice bitter molasses notes, it’s sweet and lightly salty and only lightly anise-y. The cream is sweet and only slightly grainy, it’s soft and dissolves quickly, almost like frosting. The flavors are what you’d expect: yellow is sweet lemon, orange is a little bit like orange and pink has a floral strawberry sweetness.

I enjoyed the different shapes, though the sandwich pieces were the least successful because they were so malformed. It was interesting to have a cream licorice sandwich that didn’t have coconut, as so many do. I missed the chocolate flavored cream though, that would have been fun.

I found the mix very munchable. It didn’t really satisfy any deep cravings for licorice, but it was a great snack. As a die hard licorice fan I don’t think I’ll be picking this up, but if you’re looking for something that kids and adults can enjoy together, this has some features that both will appreciate.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Candy Coated Licorice
2. Natural Vines - Black Licorice
3. Leaf Schoolchalk, Allsorts & Pipes
4. Black Licorice Twists & Snaps
5. Bassett’s Licorice Allsorts
6. Haribo Licorice Wheels

When the classic Slo Poke Caramel was revived earlier this year, its chocolatey partner Black Cow was also on the slate for reboot by the Classic Caramel Company.

Originally released back in the 1920s by Holloway, makers of Milk Duds, the Black Cow was just a chocolate covered Slo Poke (not that dissimilar from the Sugar Mama which was a chocolate covered Sugar Daddy.) In this new version the Black Cow becomes an actual chocolate infused caramel.

The candy now comes in two formats, a large bar (in this case mine is 20% larger at 1.6 ounces instead of the standard 1.5 ounce) and the little individually wrapped pieces.

Unlike Tootsie Rolls which only have cocoa in them, Black Cow uses whole chocolate (cocoa liquor which includes cocoa butter) in their recipe.

The chew is quite soft. Though you can whack it to make bite sized pieces, I found I had to refrigerate mine. (And once I had broken it into pieces, they reformed into the bar after they came back to room temperature.)

The chew is not quite as smooth as the Slo Poke or even Tootsie Rolls. But the flavor is actually very well rounded - the chocolate notes are rich and woodsy thought not entirely chocolatey. It’s kind of nutty with creamy dairy flavors that are authentic without a greasy partially hydrogenated taste. Still, the ingredients aren’t exactly wholesome, which is sad because real caramel doesn’t really have a lot of expensive ingredients and is relatively shelf stable. This one has both high fructose corn sweetener and partially hydrogenated coconut oil in the list (though very far down, not as predominant ingredients).

For a really satisfying, very chocolatey caramel, you really can’t beat the Storck Chocolate Riesen, which is an actual real chocolate covered chocolate caramel. However, these are far and away better than a Tootsie Roll, which never ceases to bring chewable cardboard to my mind unless encased in hard candy and on a stick.

Trivia: back its heyday the Holloway Black Cow came in a lot of other flavors, including Purple Cow, Pink Cow and Orange Cow, plus the tantalizing Banana Cow.

Related Candies

1. Slo Poke Caramel
2. See’s Double Caramel
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
4. Storck Chocolate Riesen
5. Twix Triple Chocolate
6. Sugar Mama
7. Chocolate Covered Sugar Babies
8. Junior Caramels

Most chocolate and liquor combinations are about the flavors. This one actually has a real sip of Scotch inside each chocolate sphere. Kind of like and alcoholic geode.

These little morsels are from K Chocolatier of Beverly Hills. This is just a tease, review to come.

While on vacation I like to seek out hometown goodies. One I’ve been after for at least a year are Joycups which are handmade peanut butter cups made in Cayucos, CA.

I found them at the Baywood/Los Osos Farmer’s Market where Danna J. Dykstra Coy sells them in all sorts of formats. She makes her vegan/gluten free cups from mostly organic ingredients and whenever possible, from locally grown produce. (The chocolate is from Guittard.) For a handcrafted confection, I found them very affordable. The peanut butter cups come in three different sizes. I opted for a box called the JoybittyBox 16 which has the medium sized cups with four each of the four different flavors. I paid $13.00 for my box of goodies, which I thought was pretty fair. I also picked up two of the large sized cups (like a traditional Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup size) for $3.00 for a pair.

The cups are tucked into the rather small, unbleached kraft paper box, stacked two deep. There are Traditional Peanut Butter, Olallieberry/Raspberry, Blueberry/Lemon and Local, Raw Honey. The design on the tops of the cups are just decorative, the only way to tell them apart is the color or design on the fluted paper cup.

Each little cup is about 3/4 of an inch across on the bottom, which is about the same as a foil wrapped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup miniature. However, the top is like a spilled over, generous muffin top.

The most notable flavor of the set is the Peanut Butter & Olallieberry/Raspberry. The Olallieberry is very popular on the central coast. It’s a curious hybrid berry that’s best illustrated by this genealogical chart on Wikipedia. I’m going to start with that, because all of them effectively tasted like raspberries were somewhere nearby, even if some cups were seedless.

The peanut butter is soft and creamy, not at all dry. The seeds are large and a bit distracting, but at least tell me which variety I’m eating. The chocolate is smooth and creamy and a little cool on the tongue; though dark chocolate, it’s not too dry or intense for the combination. There are a few little crystals of sea salt in there too, which provide a strange little crunch a pop of flavor.

Traditional Peanut Butter lives up to the reputation of a tried and true comfort candy. The creamy chocolate, the salty peanut butter is all just about balanced. If I had any complaint, it was that biting into the pieces was difficult because the tops always smashed the rest of the cup, whether bitten right side up or upside down. If you find there’s too much chocolate for your ratio preference, it’s pretty easy to either pop the top off or nibble around the edges for an added treat.

Peanut Butter & Blueberry/Lemon is fresh tasting, the little hint of zest just gives it a little pop that goes well with the sea salt. The blueberry could easily be mistaken for the scent of the raspberry, as I didn’t notice any actual blueberry bits in this one but the slight note of iced tea was there that I always associate with blueberries.

Peanut Butter & Local, Raw Honey - honestly, I’m not sure which one this is. I tried two that were what I’d call plain. The one I think is the honey cup is much smoother. I didn’t get any honey notes on any of them but there was a buttery, beeswaxy note to it.

The big issue I had was figuring out what I was eating. The first few I knew what cup color I picked out, but later as there were fewer in the box, they tumbled out of their cups. It would make much more sense if the designs on the top said what they were.

I don’t know if I’d order these via the web, but that’s mostly because I have such issues getting chocolate in good condition in Los Angeles (it’s hot here and every delivery company seems to insist on driving my packages around in a hot vehicle for about 6 hours before delivering, even if it’s an overnight package). If I’m back in the area, I’d definitely find a way to hit the local shops or farmers market that carry these cups. They’re just different enough from the commercial fare and the fact that they’re ethically sourced makes the price tag seem inconsequential.

I’m going to say that these are all natural, however, I’m not certain about the colorings used in the transfer designs on the tops, so if you’re sensitive, ask first.

For the record, as far as the raspberries go, I’m most fond of Black Raspberries.

Related Candies

1. Justin’s Organic Peanut Butter Cups
2. Sun Cups
3. Green & Black’s Peanut Milk Chocolate
4. Dove Peanut Butter Silky Smooth Milk Chocolate
5. Dark Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
6. Koeze Cream-Nut Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cluster
7. Trader Joe’s Mini Peanut Butter Cups
8. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Line

Flix Candy has introduced two flavors of the frozen treat known as Dippin’ Dots. Today I have the Ice Cream Flavored Dippin’ Candy - Cookies ‘n Cream for review. I can say from the start that these are better than the Ice Cream Flavored Dippin’ Candy Banana Split variety I reviewed last week.

The candy is made up of little spheres of vanilla, creamy confection (fake white chocolate) and little nuggets of chocolate cookies.

The “white coating” ice cream flavored spheres are made of sugar and a large amount of partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, and hydrogenated palm oil along with some nonfat milk powder and whey powder with a smidge of sorbitan monostearate and polysorbat 60 tossed in. The cookies bits are actual cookie bits with an enriched wheat flour base, sugar and a fair amount of cocoa.

Like my experience with the Banana Split variety, the texture is not terribly creamy and doesn’t have a smooth melt. It’s simply sweet. Taken on their own, they’re really quite horrible and equal to the rating of 2 out of 10. However, the little cookie bits are great. They’re crunchy and salty (there’s 160 mg of salt in a package) and crumbly and with a charcoal cocoa darkness. If I mistakenly got a bag that was all cookies and no cream, I’d have no complaint. In fact, if they did a 90% cookie with 10% cream, I think I’d actually buy these. But that’s not the case. My package was probably 50/50 and that’s too much of the fatty, greasy and sweet balls.

If you like Cookies ‘n Cream candy, I don’t think you can get much better at the mass market stores than the Hershey variety, and if you’re looking for the bite size version, try the Hershey’s Cookies n Cream Drops. (But it would be nice if someone would do an upscale version with real cocoa butter white chocolate.)

I really need to find out where to buy the little cookie bits in bulk. That’s the real find in this instance.

Related Candies

1. Ice Cream Flavored Dippin’ Candy - Banana Split
2. Cookies ‘n’ Cream Bites
3. Glico Pocky Cookie Crush
4. Oreo Bitter Bar (Japan)
5. Russell Stover Cookies ‘n Cream Nest
6. Hershey’s Drops: Milk Chocolate & Cookies n Creme

The Slo Poke Caramel Pop was introduced in 1926 by the Holloway Candy Company. It was a simple, firm, rectangular caramel lollipop. It was sold for the first time the year after the Sugar Daddy made its debut (as the Papa Sucker). As the name might imply, the Slo Poke was a candy to savor and enjoy over a long time. The sucker format meant that kids would either allow it to dissolve or nibble off bites to chew.

As with most candy products of this age, it’s been through many owners. MJ Holloway, also the maker of Milk Duds, sold out to Beatrice Foods in 1960. Beatrice later sold off their confectionery division to Leaf and Leaf divested its candy lines to several different companies. Milk Duds went to Hershey’s and Slo Pokes and their chocolate brethren, Black Cow, went to the Gilliam Candy company in 1998. For a brief time in this century, Slo Pokes stopped being made until the Warrell Corporation acquired the brand and recipe and began making them again last year under their new Classic Caramel Company (which also reintroduced Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy).

The new format of the revived Slo Poke is the 1.8 ounce bar. It’s a big plank of caramel. Like Turkish Taffy and other taffy/nougat candies, the simplest way to serve yourself is to whack the package on a hard surface to break it into bite sized pieces. I chose to eat mine in all of its chewy wholeness.

The texture is soft, much softer than a Sugar Daddy, which is the closest approximation to this candy. Like the Sugar Daddy, this is a true caramel. The first ingredient is corn syrup, followed by sweetened condensed milk and then more sugar. The color is dark and authentically toasted sugar. The flavor is quite sweet and the texture is mostly smooth. There’s a slight grain to it towards the end that I can only equate with a Sugar Baby or a poorly made fudge.

The flavor is almost exactly like the center of a Milk Dud (as you can imagine). It’s not quite as tough or smooth a chew as the Duds though.

The ingredients aren’t as pure as I’d like. Far down on the list is high fructose corn syrup, which an extremely rare ingredient in candy as well as partially hydrogenated coconut oil, calcium caseinate, distilled monoglycerides and artificial flavors. For something that’s labeled as Real Caramel I have to wonder what that actually means.

I liked the bar, mostly because it was soft and easy to eat. I don’t recall buying these much as a kid, I really was more of a Sugar Daddy fan, though those are certainly more threatening to teeth and dental work. I think my favorite easy-to-eat caramel is still Sugar Babies though, partly because they’re a bit neater and partly because they’re so cute but mostly because I prefer the mix of the smooth texture of the caramel center with the grainy jelly bean style coating. But if I was really going to satisfy my caramel cravings I’d have to go with Walkers’ Nonsuch Toffee.

The candies are no longer made in their original lollipop format. They’re sold in bars or the little, individually wrapped bite sized pieces. I don’t think those who loved the original are going to be disappointed with this resurrected version.

Related Candies

1. Helliemae’s Salt Caramels
2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
3. Kraft & Ferrara Pan Caramels
4. Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy - Chocolate, Vanilla & Strawberry
5. Short & Sweet: Dollar Store
6. Walkers Nonsuch Roasted Hazelnut Toffee
7. Kits & BB Bats
8. Grandma’s Caramels
9. Sugar Babies

Dippin’ Dots is a frozen treat, made from flash frozen spheres of real ice cream.

I heard that Flix Candy was coming out with a candy version of the dessert and I was excited. I hoped it would be like Astronaut Ice Cream, simply little spheres of freeze dried ice cream. What they created with their Ice Cream Flavored Dippin’ Candy is eminently more complicated than that and equally disappointing. I found the candy while on vacation last week and ponied up the two bucks for the little 1.6 ounce packet of the Banana Split flavored version of the smooth creamy bites.

The Dippin’ Candy features little spheres of four different flavors: strawberry, vanilla, chocolate and banana to simulate the flavors of a real banana split. The sphere vary in size but are about a quarter of an inch in diameter. The package smells sweet and a little like bananas and cocoa when opened.

The spheres are solid and firm with the basic structure of them created with a sort of flavored white confection. The base of the candy is made from sugar and tropical oils with some milk.

Vanilla is sweet, pure greasy, grainy sweet. It has more milk in it than the others, but it does nothing to moderate the sweetness or improve the creamy qualities.

Strawberry doesn’t really taste like strawberry ice cream, it doesn’t really taste like much at all.

Chocolate was especially greasy. It wasn’t as sweet, but it was waxy and never actually dissolved very well or melted.

Banana has a mild and milky banana flavor, it’s definitely the most notable of the set.

The ingredients list is huge. However, they list the ingredients for each color/flavor separately (though they don’t really define which is which, except the chocolate one is pretty easy to figure out).

Color Coating: sugar, vegetable oil [palm kernel and hydrogenated palm, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oil], whey powder, nonfat dry milk, sorbitan monostearate, polysorbate 60, yellow #5, red #40, soy lecithin, vanillin, natural and artificial flavors.

White Candy: sugar, nonfat milk powder, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, soy lecithin, monoglycerides, titanium dioxide, artificial flavor.

Confectionery Coating: sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil [palm kernel, coconut, palm], cocoa powder, whey powder, soy lecithin, vanillin.

Chocolatey Candy: Sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil [palm kernel, coconut, palm] cocoa processed with alkali, dextrose, cocoa powder, whey powder, soy lecithin, vanillin.

It’s an interesting idea, and I applaud the packaging and the flavors chosen for launch (there’s also a Cookies ‘n Cream version which I’ll review separately). However, the execution is just sub par; it’s the kind of candy I expect from R.M. Palmer around Easter. I can’t believe that they couldn’t come up with a better tasting candy sphere (and with better ingredients). The only thing that I can think that they’d be good for at this moment is decorations, in a situation where they might not actually be eaten.

Note: Ferrara Pan also has a spherical ice cream treat called Dry Scream (more here) based on Itti Bitz frozen treats. I’m still trying to track that down.

Related Candies

1. Baskin-Robbins Hard Candy - Pralines ‘n Cream
2. Ritter Sport Sommer-Genuss 2010 Limited Editions
3. Choco-Fudge Mallow Sundae
4. Dove Desserts Bananas Foster
5. Jelly Belly Ice Cream Parlor Mix
6. Baskin-Robbins Soft Candy
7. Whoppers Milkshake Strawberry
8. Skittles Ice Cream