See’s Candies is a classic American confectionery company that makes good quality chocolates. They’re sold almost exclusively at See’s Candies stores, which are mostly found in malls, and mostly in the Western US but they’re also available online and from the occasional educational fundraiser.

Though See’s is known for their chocolates they also make a unique line of lollipops that are like a hard caramel on a stick. Over the past five years they’ve created seasonal varieties with more trendy flavors like Pumpkin Spice and Orange Creme. I wasn’t at all surprised to see the announcement that in additional to their Pumpkin Spice and Orange Chocolate this fall, they were also bringing out See’s Caramel Apple Lollypops.

Their pops are available singly at the stores or in bags of 8 online. If you’ve never had a See’s lollypop, they’re about 3/4 of an ounce block of hard caramel with a stick. The shape is blocky, about 1 inch wide and 1.5 inches tall.

It smells like apples, not the green apples of Jolly Rancher, but more like apple cider.

The flavor is immediately caramel and a little dash of salt with a note of apple peels. There’s no tartness, no tang; the apple flavor is less of a caramel covered apple and more like an apple pie with caramel sauce. The wonderful part of these lollies is that the dissolve is so smooth and it feels a lot more filling that its 70 calories might have you believe.

I enjoyed them quite bit. The items that detracted are the same problems I always have. The paper stick gets soggy and more often than not, the caramel block comes off the stick while the piece is really too big to hold comfortably in my mouth. Often there is a series of holes within the candy running its length which makes sucking on the pop problematic because it’s more like a straw where you suck in air than speed up the dissolve of the candy. See’s makes mini versions of their classic flavors, but not of the seasonal, limited edition ones.

Related Candies

1. Shurms Soft Candy Chews: Caramel Apple and Caramel Coffee
2. Wonka Laffy Taffy Caramel Apple (Limited Edition)
3. Twizzlers Caramel Apple Filled Twists
4. Charms Super Blow Pop Caramel Apple
5. Russell Stover Big Bite Caramel Apple
6. Tootsie Caramel Apple Pops
7. See’s Lollypops
8. See’s Pumpkin Spice & Root Beer Lollypops

Smarties are little tart wafer candies that have been made for 65 years. They’re a little bland but pretty much irresistible and ubiquitous starting around Halloween each year.

To backtrack a little bit, this category of candy is called Compressed Dextrose. Dextrose is just a fancy way of saying sugar, but not the regular table sugar we’re used to, which is sucrose. Dextrose is the dry form of glucose, the same stuff in corn syrup. Dextrose is the basis of a lot of compressed tablet candies, like SweeTarts, Spree and Runts as well as Smarties.

Glucose so bio-available that you can absorb it into your bloodstream sublingually. Many parents use Smarties as emergency glucose tablets because they’re readily available, easy to portion, inexpensive and not hard to get a child to eat. I’m quite fond of Smarties, but that straight glucose often goes straight to my bloodstream and the subsequent crash means I rarely buy a whole bag. The Double Lollies are preferable conceptually, then, because they’re only 8 grams each. Since they’re usually sold by the piece and more expensive than the rolls, this naturally limits my indulgence.

The regular sized lolly has been around for years, though I can’t say for sure that I was always eating the Smarties brand. The Smarties Double Lolly is two flavors. Though they’re probably in several flavors, I could only find orange and yellow.

They’re chalky and dry, but have a pleasant citrus flavor overall. They’re tangy and grainy, dissolve quickly but leave a powdery mess if biting the small pop doesn’t go well. I don’t find sucking on it goes very well. The chalk is absorbent, and while that’s fine for hard candies, I don’t like seeing my lollipop now darkened and cooled by my spit. (Hence my biting usually.)

Interestingly the website for Smarties says that the Double Lolly is free of gluten (from wheat, barley, oats and rye), milk, egg, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts or soybeans. However, it does not say that for the Mega Lolly.

I bought two of the Mega Lollies, one was lemon and orange and the other was orange and grape. The grape smelled floral and soapy. The pop itself is too big to comfortably fit in the mouth, so even if I were the type who liked to suck my regular Smarties lollies, the Mega just wasn’t going to work. It’s too dry, too awkward. Biting produced a mess of powder.

Ingredients: Dextrose(Contains Corn Syrup Solids and/or Maltodextrin), Citric Acid, Calcium Stearate, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Colors (Red 40 Lake, Yellow 5 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake,  Blue 2 Lake).

The odd part about the ingredients is the Calcium Stearate. It’s a flow agent and keeps the powder from caking. But the side benefit to this ingredient is that it contains large amounts calcium - a single Mega Lolly has 6% of your RDA.

Too big, too dry, not a good value and not enough control. The classic size doesn’t have most of those challenges, but I’ll stick to the rolls of Smarties tablets.

Related Candies

1. Astro Pop (Original Flavor)
2. Mystery Smarties
3. Tropical and Xtreme Sour Smarties
4. Runts
5. Kasugai Fruits Lemonade
6. Oak Leaf Candies
7. Giant Pixy Stix

One of the fun things about candy is that it makes a great gift. But it’s not terribly special to grab some pick-a-mix at the local candy shop and drop the twist-tie plastic bag on someone’s lap and consider it a present. Churchill’s Confectionery recognizes that half and sticks their candy in decorative tins.

The company offered to send me a sample of their line. I’ve actually had Churchill’s before, I have a little red London bus tin that doubles as a bank on my desk at work. So when they offered, I thought it would be good to have some fresh candy to try.

They sent two tins, one was this classic looking embossed Carousel tin that holds English Toffees and Vanilla Fudge and another tin that held three trays of biscuits (cookies). I don’t review cookies ... but I did eat them. The tin holds 14 ounces, which is separated into two 7 ounce bags of candy. So it’s not quite the lush look of a tin full of candy until you dump the cellophane bags into it, but they do stay fresh.

I’ve never quite understood fudge, and this version does little to help me out. Fudge is basically a mixture of sugar and butter ... though modern versions use more advanced ingredients. Many candies have the same ingredients; it’s the texture of fudge that differentiates it from caramel or toffee. Fudge has a slight grain to it, on purpose, which is reintroduced by carefully heating it to a precise temperature and then allowing it to cool partially before stirring. Stirring too soon will make the sugar crystals too large and not stirring enough just makes the texture incomplete. (More in this excellent and slightly technical explanation.)

Ingredients: Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Sweetened condensed milk, refined vegetable oil, clotted cream 2.8%, butter, emulsifier: soya lecithin, humectant: glycerine, natural flavour, salt.

The great thing about fudge is that it’s a wonderful blank slate for so many other flavors, including chocolate or pecan penuche. As this is Vanilla, it’s actually a blank slate. You can see that the ingredients are decent enough. The pieces are well formed and the color is of a camel-colored coat. Churchill’s has mastered the smooth texture style of fudge (I actually like mine a little grainy). It smells sweet and buttery but has no browned sugar notes (And has no brown sugar ingredients, either.)

The pieces are nice little rectangles, wrapped in silver mylar. This vanilla fudge is extremely sweet with only a slight note of actual vanilla bean. A little note of the woodsy bourbon would be nice, or some deeper toasted sugar notes would have pleased me. Overall, this is too sweet. And coming from a person who actually eats sugar lumps from time to time, that’s saying a lot.

I could really only eat these with a very strong cup of coffee or some salted nuts. They’re just too sweet straight.

Rating: 6 out of 10

One of the oddities in the confection world is how the same candy is called different things in different places. What’s even more vexing is when the new word means something else completely. Take toffee. In the United States we know toffee as a hard, crunchy, caramel brittle. But in the United Kingdom, for the most part, toffee is actually what we call caramel. However, I didn’t need anyone to tell me what this was ... I know a caramel when I see one.

They’re nice rounded pieces wrapped in gold mylar, with a soft milky scent. They’re about the size of Coffee Nips, and if Coffee Nips were chewable, that’s what they’d be like. They’re extremely smooth. The chew is stiff but not sticky or tough. The flavor is a bit salty with burnt sugar notes. It dissolves away to nothing with very little left stuck to my teeth.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Both recipes include milk and soy ingredients and may contain traces of nuts. The glucose syrup is also from wheat, so I don’t think it’s gluten free.

There are a wide variety of tin designs available from Churchill’s. They’re very traditional but do feature a few classic tourist items (like the double decker red bus). I don’t think it’s something I’d buy for myself, but with the right contents and design, I could see them as a good quality hostess gift or thank you item.

Related Candies

1. Lovely Candy Chewy Original Caramels
2. Hershey’s Lancaster Caramel Soft Cremes
3. Sugar Daddy
4. See’s Double Caramel
5. Helliemae’s Salt Caramels
6. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
7. Coffee Nips

Twizzlers Filled Strawberry Bites have been out for a while, part of the morsel trend. Though Twizzlers already come in Nibs, this version of the fruity twists has a little twist of its own.

Back in 2005 Hershey’s introduced Twizzler Twerpz which were little snips of Twizzlers (orange and strawberry) filled with a sour paste. They didn’t make it very long, but did have some strong fans who continue to post on that review hoping Hershey’s would revive them. More recently Twizzlers brought out Sweet & Sour Filled Twists which were full twist length in cherry and lemon.

In this case, the little Bites, or niblets, are about a half an inch long. They’re cut from the extruded strawberry twist and filled with more strawberry-flavored goo.

The packaging for this King Size bag is a little odd. I understand the goal is to create a candy bowl, but I don’t think it succeeds. The package is gusseted on both the top and bottom and the opening for the package is in the middle of the pleats on the top. That all worked fine when I opened it at first. However, later on I wanted to read the nutrition information, which was covered by a flap, I tried to lift the flap and ended up pulling the whole seam apart.

The packages also don’t sit well on the shelf, they look slumped and hard to read. It’s a great idea, and I really hope they’re able to overcome some of these challenges. I think cookies have really solved this with the snack and reseal flaps.

The pieces smell like strawberry - sweet and floral. The chew is like a regular Twizzler, but a little softer. The filling is lightly tangy and has no chew of its own, really no other properties except that it’s soft (I believe it’s a jelly made from pectin). The size of the pieces is good, it’s easy to eat one or two at a time. The chew has a little bit of a pasty quality towards the end, which is remedied by eating another.

I ate them all, but I don’t think strawberry would be my favorite flavor from Twizzlers. I can’t see them making this in black licorice (what would the filling flavor be?) but raspberry or chocolate might be fun. They’re easy to munch on and are a better format for movie sharing.

Related Candies

1. Twizzlers Caramel Apple Filled Twists
2. Twizzlers Chocolate Twists
3. Halva Finnish Soft Strawberry Licorice
4. Newman’s Own Licorice
5. Mentos Jam Filled
6. Twizzlers Sweet & Sour Filled Twists
7. Cinnamon Fire Twizzlers
8. Twerpz

Shurms Soft Candy Chews are made in Michigan and gluten free. But that’s not what sets them apart from other artisan-style candies.

Shurms are unique in the candy world, at least in my experience. The company offered me a couple of samples and I was eager to try their Caramel Coffee candies, but also figured I should try their Caramel Apple because it’s the season for such things.

They came in a 10 piece box (3 ounces), which retails for $4.59. They’re sold on the web and locally in Michigan.

Since this is the season of Caramel Apple candies, I have to say that this is a unique item and deserves attention on its own. It’s amazing to look at, though kind of hard to capture with the camera. The green candy is translucent, perhaps even glowing in the dark. It’s very green (of course those are food colorings doing that) while the caramel part is the color of over-milked coffee.

The Caramel Apple consists of two layers. The green layer is a pectin based jelly candy on a base of traditional soft caramel. It smells, well, lovely. The caramel has a good toffee note to it and a little butter and then there’s the fresh scent of apple.

The candy is soft. There are a few ways to eat it: pop the whole thing in your mouth at once, eat the layers separately or bite through both layers. I opted mostly for the latter. The pectin layer is an fascinating candy in and of itself. It’s firmer than a jelly, chewier than a gumdrop and a bit on the sticky side by itself. The green apple flavor is mild but well developed with both juice notes and a sort of apple peel flavor in there as well. The texture reminded me of Botan Rice Candy. The caramel is soft and has a light salty note and excellent toasted sugar elements.

It’s an interesting textural experience. The sweetness of the pectin layer is offset well by the salt of the caramel. The sticky melt of the pectin is broken up by the fat in the caramel. It’s not a candy I ever would have thought of.

The Caramel Coffee are a little different, since there’s no fruity tartness to cut through the sweetness. However, there is the bitter note of coffee. The pectin layer here is a deep brown and glossy, but not transparent at all. It smells like caramel, there’s no hint of the coffee. The pectin layer is definitely coffee, but very sweet. There’s a light acidic hint to it. The caramel is sweet and salty but also has a rum vibe going on. The whole thing has a satisfying chew and textures, but is missing something for me.

I appreciate how different this candy is, but curiosity doesn’t fulfill me. It’s great that these are gluten free and I do admire the limited but appropriate flavor combinations they have. There’s also a cherry and caramel version. (Gluten free but contains milk and soy.)

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Big Bite Caramel Apple
2. Sugarfina: The Chocolates
3. Sunkist Fruit Gems
4. Ginger People Spicy Apple Ginger Chews
5. Sweet Earth Bittersweet Chocolate Drops & Coffee Caramels
6. Meiji Poifull
7. Russell Stover Pectin Jelly Beans
8. Coffee Nips

Albanese Confectionery is a small family-run confectionery company in Indiana. They started in 1983 and though their candies encompass chocolate covered nuts, nut mixes and chocolates. But in the past ten years, Albanese has become known for their extensive line of gummis that not only come in a wide variety of flavors, but also in some innovative shapes.

I finally picked up Albanese Rainforest Gummi Frogs at Lolli & Pops, since I was able to select them from the bulk bins instead of buying a 5lb bag on the internet (there were probably other options in between). There are three different flavor combinations: blue raspberry & orange, strawberry & grape and, sour lemon & sour green apple.

The pieces are quite large, about the size of tree frogs I was familiar with seeing in Northern California.  (One lived in the shower of a house I shared in Arcata Bay bottoms.) The gummis weigh about a half an ounce each. They’re two inches long and their armspan is 2.5 inches.

My first little buddy is the blue and orange one. The blue body is blue raspberry with orange legs. The flavor has a wonderful sour bite to it, and a good pliable chew that’s not too tough. The legs are juicy, like an orange gummi should be, and a little more sweet than the body.

The yellow and green one is sour lemon and sour green apple. The green apple legs are absolutely sour, and it seems to emerge the more you chew. The flavor goes on, all the way until it’s completely dissolved. The green apple flavor is very Jolly Rancher. The lemon is equally good, with strong zest notes as well as that metallic Country Time Lemonade powder flavor. (I used to eat lemonade mix as a kid because it was cheaper than Fun Dip.)

The final frog has purple legs and a red body. The red parts are strawberry. It’s nicely tart and chewy, but not too tough. The legs are grape, and those have the same tart note, the flavor takes quite a while to develop and is very mildly “grape soda.”

The pieces are quite large and two is more than a serving as far as I was concerned. I liked the flavor combinations and the molding and design is well done. I can see children and adults enjoying these. They’d also fit well in theme parties or as decorations. It might be fun if Albanese considered wrapping them individually for Halloween treating.

Note, I did not have the nutrition information for the Rainforest Frogs specifically, so I used the Gummy Army Guys. I think that Albanese should include the ingredients and nutritional information on their website, since so many of us buy their candies in bulk bins and do not have access to that information otherwise.

Related Candies

1. Haribo The Smurfs Gummi
2. Wonka SweeTarts Gummies
3. Albanese Chocolate Dipped Gummi Bears
4. Trolli Gummi Bear-Rings
5. Candy Source: Albanese Candy Factory
6. Albanese Gummy Army Guys
7. Flix Sour Gummy Pop Corn
8. All Gummies Gourmet Fruity Fish (Swedish Fish knock-off)
9. Albanese Gummi Butterflies

Wonka Laffy Taffy Caramel Apple (Limited Edition) is part of the new flavor craze for Halloween. The package is loud and strange, as are many Wonka designs. It features the purple Wonka branding around the sides, but the center is a banded swirl of browns on the top and greens on the bottom. It speaks more of wood grain than apples and caramel to me, but at least it did stand out on the shelves.

For those who have never had it, Laffy Taffy (once known as Tangy Taffy) is simply a taffy chew. Instead of the nuggets or rods that come in twisted waxed paper wrapers that you’d get on vacation, Laffy Taffy comes in little bars that form fit the candy. They come in a variety of fruity flavors, but the key aspect of Laffy Taffy is that it’s tangy. Instead of just sweet and flavor, there’s also a tart note to the chew.

For the actual taste of Tangy Taffy ... imagine if you will, a fruit flavored caulk. Add some citric acid. Add some coloring. You’re getting close…
Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond

The little snack sized bars are larger than a regular taffy piece, they’re really two bites. Each clocks in at about 35 calories and doesn’t take into account the energy you expend chewing. The wrappers feature bad jokes, usually two, depending on how well the wrapper is glued together.

The pieces are soft and easy to remove from the package, though you have to destroy the wrapper completely in order to do so. The color is strange, like hot chocolate and not at all what I would have expected.

It does smell sweet and creamy. The flavor on the tongue, though, is immediately tangy with a rather authentic, if overly tart, apple flavor. The caramel part comes in as the chew goes on and the sour fades as a real caramel note, a sort of toffee/toasted flavor.

What I was hoping for was a stripe of apple taffy and a stripe of caramel flavored taffy, and you’d mix them together as you chewed them. Instead it’s a fully mixed experience, like the kind a baby bird would get if momma birds at caramel apples.

The most successful candy I’ve had to date that emulates a caramel covered apple are the Tootsie Caramel Apple Pops - which are an apple flavored lollipop covered in actual caramel.

There’s no statement about gluten, nuts or peanuts, but the wrapper does say that the candy contains soy.

Related Candies

1. Twizzlers Caramel Apple Filled Twists
2. Charms Super Blow Pop Caramel Apple
3. Werther’s Original Caramel Apple Filled
4. Mehlenbacher’s Taffy
5. Wonka Laffy Taffy
6. Tootsie Caramel Apple Pops
7. Bonomo & Doscher Banana Taffy
8. Milk Maid Caramel Apple Candy Corn

Warheads Sour Jelly Beans are available year round. I picked up this theater-style box at Target.

I’m fond of sour jelly beans, though I pretty much stopped being interested in other brands after Gimbal’s came out with their Sour Jelly Beans. I like the sourness, but I also enjoy the actual flavors in those beans. But I noticed that Warheads Sour Jelly Beans has a Sour Meter on the front and only rates these as Sour ... which is more than Tart and less than the highest level of Extreme. So, on the 4 point scale with 4 as the most acidic, these are a 2.

There are six flavors in the box: Orange, Watermelon, Lemon, Blue Raspberry, Cherry and Green Apple.

These beans look different, like colorful, rugged pebbles. They have a sort of powdery look to the outside, which I took to be some sort of a sour coating ... which makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

They’re constructed much like regular jelly beans: a jelly center, then a sort of grainy coating and then a hardened shell. Though they look like they’d be soft, like a Spearmint Leaf jelly candy, they’re actually a bit crunchy on the outside.

Blue Raspberry is quite nice, which is good because I had far more blue beans in my box than any other color. It starts out quite sour but then the flavor has a good mix of the floral berry flavors, a note of grassy seeds and then a sweet finish. It’s artificial, but in the comforting way.

Orange is a little less tangy than I’d hoped. It starts well, with a juicy note and then finishes with some good zest.

Watermelon are soft pink and not easy to tell apart from the cherry in low-light conditions (such as a movie theater). The flavor is bizarre and unappealing to me. It’s sour, like a watermelon rind and some fake melon flavors in there, but then it’s just sweet and bland. It’s not that this doesn’t capture watermelon well, it’s that I wonder why anyone really wants watermelon candy as the actual stuff is more about the textures and large amounts of water.

Green Apple is admirably nuanced. It starts out with a good tangy bite and a note of apple juice, then it goes into the fragrant artificial green apple flavor. It’s not very sour, but still well balanced.

Cherry tastes like sour powder on top of some flavored lip gloss. Not my sort of thing and certainly not sour enough to be called Warheads.

Lemon starts out with a nice tangy bite that’s almost salty. That’s the best they got, however, most tasted like vinyl packaging or, worse, something stored under the kitchen sink adjacent to cleaning supplies. I don’t know what went wrong with these, but a sour lemon candy should be the best flavor in any assortment.

The beans are odd, the texture is different enough to distinguish them from the otherwise superior Gimbal’s Sour Jelly Beans (which are hard to find) but not quite the same as the Nerds Jelly Beans. If they’re similar to anything, it would probably be Sour Patch Kids, which have the same sour outside then sweet inside. The flavor assortment was not quite to my liking, though I’m sure others will appreciate the Green Apple and Cherry. They’re good candy, just not good for me.

Related Candies

1. Sour Punch Punchies
2. Gimbal’s Sour Gourmet Jelly Beans
3. Tootsie Sour Dots
4. Warheads QBZ
5. Wonka Nerds Jelly Beans
6. Sour Patch Kids
7. Wonka Sour Nerds
8. Warheads Juniors Extreme Sour