One of the most popular chocolate brands in Europe is Milka. It’s currently distributed by the international food conglomerate Kraft but began its existence as a family chocolate brand made by Suchard back in the early 20th century. I tried the version that’s available in the States about four years ago.

Milka is, of course, known as milky chocolate, very similar in profile and price to Cadbury. However, instead of putting vegetable oil in the chocolate, Milka uses just a touch of hazelnut paste.

Milka is now widely available in the United States but I wanted to pick up some while I was in Europe, just in case it was a little different. I did find this assortment called Milka NAPS Mix in Germany. It features four different varieties of tiny bars: Alpenmilch, Crunchy Caramel, Erdbeer & Creme au Cacao.

The little bars are about 4.25 grams, individually wrapped and easy to identify your favorite. The bars are about 1.5 inches long.

The traditional Milka is just as I remember it. Milky, sweet, smooth and not very chocolatey. They’re a good candy and at this size, and excellent little tough-covering pick me up. The hazelnut is just a light hint of roasted nuts, not like a thick gianduia. It’s much creamier than I recall the American packaged bar I tried, though as someone who likes a lot of either chocolate in my chocolate or hazelnuts in my gianduia, this didn’t quite fit my personal profile.

The Milka Crunchy Caramel is the same little bar with some toffee chips in it. (Not Daim chips, for some reason.) I liked the crunchy texture and light salty hint, though sometimes they tasted a bit like butterscotch and not quite like toffee. This was my favorite of the mix, now I’m sorry I didn’t pick up the Daim version of Milka.

The Milka Erdbeer is the milk chocolate with dried strawberry bits in it. The strawberry bits taste real, but have a grainy quality to them that kind of ruins the texture of the chocolate at time. Still, the milk and strawberry flavor was great, it reminded me of neapolitan ice cream.

This was the only filled bar in the mix. The center was a thin little strip of chocolate creme. It really didn’t taste that much different than the standard Milka Bar, mostly because of the proportions. It had more of a chocolate frosting flavor to it though. It was my least favorite of the mix.

I like that Milka comes in so many different varieties and that the European versions also come in different sizes and seasonal variations. This box of chocolate though was a bit on the expensive side, compared to the large 100 gram (3.5 ounce) tablet bars at 3 Euros (about $4). Basically, I could have bought one of each of these varieties as a full sized bar for about the same amount of money, but had more than 3 times as much candy.

I have a dark chocolate version of a Milka bar at home, I’m hoping that’s a bit more to my personal liking, but mixes like this always have something to please most folks. (And I did finish most of the box without any help from anyone else.)

Related Candies

1. Kraft Daim
2. UK vs US Cadbury Dairy Milk
3. Terry’s Chocolate Toffee Crunch Orange
4. Toblerone Single Peaks
5. Milka Alpenmilch
6. Caffarel Gianduias

One of the candies I was looking forward to seeing in the United States from Panda Licorice was their Candy Coated Licorice.

They’re little, beefy one inch rods of licorice with a candy shell. What’s interesting about these that’s different from most licorice pastels is the fact that the shells are flavored. They come with two flavors in each bag - lemon (yellow) and peppermint (white). As with all Panda licorice, the ingredients are all natural and vegan.

In Europe a slightly different version of this candy is available. I bought a bag in Amsterdam called Liquorice Comfits, which had three different colors (more about that in a moment).

This particular bag is small, it holds 100 grams which is 3.5 ounces. The retail price is pretty steep for a sugar candy, I paid over 2 Euros for mine in Europe and it appears that the American version will be prices around $2.50 to $3.00 per bag.

The pieces are consistent and attractive. They’re not slickly smooth, but they are shiny. The yellow is creamy and the white is stark and bright. (The green ones are from the European mix.)

The white ones are Peppermint and I was hoping they’d be similar to Skoolkrit, which I love so much. The licorice center is soft and chewy but not deeply flavored. It’s a bit doughy, like Panda can be, but missing the dark molasses notes. The licorice flavors are exactly that, the mellow and lingering sweetness of the licorice root. Though they have aniseseed oil in them, there’s less of that flavor in the profile. The mint shell gives is a fresh start and finish. It’s crunchy and sweet as well, but doesn’t really stick with me after consuming.

The lemon was a bit more of an unconventional combination. It was definitely sweeter to me with a lemony start that reminded me of icing. The licorice just seemed sweeter in this version.

Both are fun to eat, but I kept waiting for some stronger licorice flavors that I was relieved when the bag was empty and I could move on to something else.

The European bag I picked up of the Panda Liquorice Comfits is unflavored, as far as I can tell, though I did get a bit more of a floral note from the green ones, but natural colorings can do that.

Without the flavored shell, you’d think they’d have more of a licorice punch, but it was the same thing. Too sweet, not enough rich burnt toffee notes.

I don’t expect that I’ll pick these up again. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who will like these and I expect for parents who want a great family licorice, this is a good place to start, especially with younger kids who are turned off by strong flavors.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I like Good and Plenty better, I certainly prefer the price.

Related Candies

1. Natural Vines - Black Licorice
2. Panda Soft Herb Licorice and Licorice Cremes
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Hearts
4. Organic Finnska Soft Licorice
5. Kenny’s Licorice Pastels & Root Beer Twists
6. Good & Plenty (Fresh from the Factory)

Damla is a chewy candy made by Tayas in Turkey. They’re known throughout the Middle East and Europe and are even seen in ethnic stores here in the States from time to time.

Damla comes in a wide variety of flavors, including the most common fruits, which I tried: Raspberry, Strawberry, Orange and Grape. They come in single flavor packages and mixes. Each piece is individually wrapped with an inner wax wrap and an outer twist wrapper that features a picture of the fruit and color coding. Inside all the pieces are white, there are no colorings added to the candy. I got my sample bags directly from Tayas at their exhibit at ISM Cologne last month.

The chew is smooth and soft, similar to Starburst but a little more like HiCHEW from Japan. They’re not quite bouncy but have a great texture that doesn’t become grainy like some true taffy does. (This has gelatin in it, which I think is what keeps it so well emulsified.) The feature that sets them apart from those two though is the jammy filling.

Raspberry - I opened this package first and shared it around. These were fantastic, creamy and light with a decent berry flavor. The “sauce” center didn’t really do much except keep the candy moist, the taffy outside was more than flavorful enough.

Strawberry - sweet, floral and lightly tangy with a faint creamy note towards the end like cheesecake.

Cherry - this one came in a purple package and at first I thought it was blackcurrant. This is not the standard American black cherry or wild cherry flavor. This is something akin to actual cherry. It’s woodsy and a little bit tannic. It’s strange and something that I actually liked.

Orange - I was expecting great things from this but the orange ended up being very ordinary. Not that this is a bad thing, it was a lot like a softer Starburst - intense and fruity with mostly juice notes and a light creamsicle finish.

I enjoyed these, especially since the flavors seemed so clear and distinct and they didn’t feel the need to use artificial colors on them. I like getting single flavor packages because I usually don’t like every flavor in a mix as well. These are unique enough that I can see them making great inroads in North America just as HiCHEW has.

Here’s another review from Candy Addict.

I couldn’t figure out if these were Halal or not, but they do seem to contain gelatin so they’re not for vegetarians. The printing on the back was so tiny, I can’t tell you anything else except that they can do some tiny printing in Turkey.

Related Candies

1. HiCHEW Japan vs HiCHEW Taiwan
2. Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy - Chocolate, Vanilla & Strawberry
3. Strawberry Yoghurt Mentos
4. Eiffel BonBons
5. Russell Stover Organic Pecan Delight
6. HiCHEW Assortment

The Daim bar is a popular crunchy toffee bar covered in chocolate that originated in Sweden.

According to Wikipedia, the development tale is rather curious. Marabou, the preeminent Swedish chocolate company, approached Heath Bar back in the early 1950s for permission to license the Heath name and recipe to be produced for the Swedish/Norwegian marketplace. Heath said they couldn’t but did furnish the basic recipe so Marabou created the Daim Bar. The Daim went on to become quite a sensation, so much so that Hershey’s decided it needed its own crunchy toffee bar and copied the Daim in the US and called it Skor (along with the tag line of “The Taste of Sweden” in their launch advertising). The funniest part of the whole thing about Hershey’s marketing a copy of a Swedish candy that was a copy of an American candy was that Hershey’s ended up buying Heath Bar when they acquired Leaf Candy Company in 1996.

Marabou, in turn, was bought out by Kraft back in 1993 which distributes the Marabou chocolate products around the world. The easiest place to find Daim bars is at IKEA.

The bar does look a lot like the American Skor. It’s a smallish bar, flat and with a crisp buttery toffee center with a few bits of almonds in there. The milk chocolate coating is a little thicker on top with some attractive swirls and waves.

At only 28 grams (about .99 ounces) it’s a small bar but provides a lot of crunch.

I’ve bought this bar at least three different times for review on Candy Blog and each time I’ve managed to eat it before reviewing. (The photos here are from a 2008 episode where at least the bar made it into the studio for documentation.)

While I was in Europe I was pleased to see Daim widely available. Not only does it come in the familiar bar format, the toffee chips are also used in other co-branded confections, like a version of the Milka Bar (Jim’s Chocolate Mission has a review)

Since I knew I could find another bar in the States if I wanted it, I picked up this 100 gram (3.5 ounce) bag of Daim. The package says nothing else on the front - no description, no brand name ... just Daim. Not even the fact that this is not a bar but little chocolate covered nuggets. I guess the picture on the front says it all. My guess is since Daim is available in so many countries, it’s just confusing to say things, why not show them? The back of the package features micro-printing to accommodate at least 8 different language versions of the ingredients and still no actual name of the product. So I’m going to call these Daim Nuggets.

The little pieces are actually better, in my opinion, than the bar. I loved them. The chocolate is certainly not of excellent quality but good enough for this purpose. It’s milky and sweet and just creamy enough. It seals in the crunchy pieces of toffee to keep them from getting sticky and syrupy.

The toffee has a light burnt taste to it, plenty of milk and a touch of salt. It’s crunchy and every once in a while I think I got a little bit of an almond. The toffee is cooked to perfection - it’s crunchy but not too hard (having small pieces helps) and also doesn’t get tacky or stick to my teeth in large clumps.

I bet this is great on ice cream or added to cookies, of course it would need to come in larger bags, because this one is empty.

Other Daim reviews: Chocablog, Jim’s Chocolate Mission and Candy Addict.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Almond Toffee
2. Godis Gula Snoren (Toffee Laces)
3. Lindt Excellence Toffee Crunch
4. Roca Buttercrunch Thins
5. Valerie Toffees & Nougats
6. See’s Peanut Brittle Bar

These are probably larger than you think they are, about the size of a shooter marble.

I haven’t actually eaten them yet, I just liked the way they looked. (I don’t know who made them, just that I picked them up at the French Pavilion at ISM Cologne.)

Caramels are best when they’re made fresh with only a few ingredients. There are decent caramel simulations found in commercial stores, but the true stuff cannot be readily imitated with the shelf life necessary for large scale business.

These small boxes from Helliemae’s Caramels contain a half a pound each; they’re like little sugar and dairy bricks. The caramels themselves are made from the classic ingredients and nothing else - sugar, butter, cream, vanilla and sea salt.

Each caramel is a large square, about 1.3 inches across and a little less than an inch high. They appear to be molded instead of cut, because they have slightly angled sides, like ice cubes. The Classic Salt Caramels have a generous dusting of flaky sea salt on top.

When I first bit into them I was impressed by the smooth texture, firm chew that wasn’t too tough. They’re a bit sticky but when consumed with some hot tea or coffee that dissolves quickly. But the salt on top was too much for me. The caramel itself was perfectly salted to begin with ... a few grains up there would have done me fine, but it wasn’t a flurry, it was a blizzard with consistent accumulation.

I’m a bit more sensitive to salt than many of my pals, so I handed some off and found the same comment - far too salty. So for the rest of them I found myself scraping the salt off as completely as possible or eating from the bottom and discarding the crusty tops. 7 out of 10

I was also given a single sample of the Cardamom Caramels. Cardamom is a hard spice to use, especially with a confection like caramel which tends to boil away the intensity of flavors. In this case the cardamom is added as a coarse powder of the seeds of the pod itself. The cardamom has flavor notes of pine, bergamot, lemon, vanilla, nutmeg, cola and eucalyptus. In some candies I’ve had the cardamom seeds can be intense and distracting though still imparting an amazing flavor that still manages to make up for it by being so engaging. In this case the grain was smaller than ground espresso so it was virtually unnoticeable. The flavor was citrusy and really brought out the vanilla and toffee notes.

In this case there was no salt on top, so I was quite pleased. 9 out of 10

The final flavor I tried was another half pound sampling of the Coffee Caramels. These were pure perfection. The coffee flavors were intense but smooth, like a fine espresso with the perfect head of creama. They were bitter and had loads of toffee and roasted java notes but also an appealing tangy note of woodsy coffee that rounded it out.

Since there was no salt on top, I found this to be exactly how I like my caramels. 9 out of 10

Fresh caramels need to be consumed immediately. I ate and shared the majority of these within two weeks of getting them, but the few that I saved for review did kind of lose their mojo after about three weeks - getting sticky and grainy around the edges. I liked that the format that was easy to bite and that the wax paper was easy to unwrap. A chocolate coated version might be stupendous, especially if it was a super dark that offset the sweetness and salt.

They’re a bit expensive for me but for an impulse item if I lived in the area and saw one at the cash register at the store of a cafe, I would definitely go for one even at $3 a pop.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
2. Bequet Gourmet Caramels
3. Grandma’s Caramels
4. Das French Salted Caramels
5. Fran’s Gray Salt Caramels

While I was sorting my candy from the ISM Cologne trade fair, I usually grouped products together in little baggies according to the manufacturer. At one point I found that I had a lot of little cream fudge pieces that had pictures of cows on them.

I reviewed this version of Polish Cream Fudge last summer.

One of the earliest international candy obsessions I developed because of Candy Blog was HiCHEW. They’re made by Morinaga in Japan and come in a wide variety of fruity flavors. The packages are flat, contain only one flavor and feature individually wrapped pieces that are easy to share.

They’ve been popular in Japan for since 1975 (and existed in different formats for at least 40 years before that). Lately they’ve become more widely available in the United States and Canada, starting with large metropolitan areas with large Japanese populations. Now they’re pretty commonplace here in Los Angeles, I can get them at 7-11 or Target and the packaging has been Americanized with English wrapper and full nutrition facts.

The American ones are made in Taiwan and feature slightly smaller packages at 1.76 ounces and sporting a price of about $1.00. The flavor set is rather ordinary with strawberry, orange, green apple, mango, lemon and melon (and sometimes banana) available. The Japanese also come in similar flavors with seasonal or limited edition varieties coming out all the time.

I decided to pick up a package of each and really put them to the test.

Major differences:
Size: Japanese is 2.01 ounces - Taiwanese is 1.76 ounces
Pieces: Japanese have 12 pieces in a package - Taiwanese have 10 pieces
Inner Wrapper: Japanese have foil wrapper with Morinaga logo - Taiwanese have blank waxed paper wrapper
Ingredients: Japanese have all natural colors, artificial flavoring and use Agar-Agar as a jelling agent - Taiwanese use natural coloring (carmine), natural flavors and gelatin as a jelling agent.

The Taiwanese version is more intensely pink in the center. The chew is stiff at first, but still smooth. It’s slightly tangy and has a good strawberry flavor that errs more on the tart side than the floral sweetness though it does get a little jammy towards the end with cooked strawberry notes. The chew lasts a long time and never gets grainy.

The Japanese version is a little softer and chewier. The flavor is also a well rounded berry with good sweet and sour notes, a little hint of floral and a creamy component (which might be attributed to a splash of yogurt in there). Instead of strawberry jam it was more like a strawberry smoothie.

Given a choice, I would pick up the Japanese version. Yes, I like to be able read my packages, but I also like my flavors bold and as authentic as they were originally conceived. I feel like the Taiwanese HiCHEW is like the Turkish Haribo Gummi Bear, not as good as those made in their homeland. However, I love the fact that this candy is able to get a wider audience. It’s a good introduction and perhaps die hard fans will work towards getting the real thing released in North America.

Related Candies

1. HiCHEW World Fruit: Dragonfruit, CamuCamu, Durian & White Peach
2. Festival HiCHEW: Candied Apple & Cotton Candy
3. HiCHEW Aloe Yogurt
4. HiCHEW Yuzu & Valencia
5. HiCHEW Assortment
6. HiCHEW Grapefruit