Mars has introduced White Chocolate M&Ms a couple of times in the past, most notably the M&Ms Pirate Pearls tie in with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

This new Easter version of M&Ms White Chocolate is a little different in all the right ways.

The first thing is the appropriateness. White Chocolate is inextricably tied to my memories of Easter. The white confection works so well with pastel colors, it’s milky sweetness just embodies the sugary overload of the season.

I picked up this bag at Target, it’s over a half a pound but still a little pricey at $3.19 for the bag at regular price. Though they’re Easter themed, with the Red M&M wearing a furry white rabbit suit on the package, it’s just the colors. There are no little icons on them like M&Ms has done in the past with the holiday versions.

The morsels are larger than regular M&Ms. I’ve come to expect this with the limited edition M&Ms. The Dark Chocolate Mint M&Ms are also oversized and part of me wonders if they’re just using the former Mega M&Ms production line or the M&Ms Premium.

The large size and thick shell means that there are a lot of textures going on, and each gets to shine. The shell is crunchy and crisp. The light coloring means that there’s no perceptible off flavoring from the colors for me. The centers are smooth and creamy. When I say cream, it’s like it’s real dairy cream. Instead of tasting like frosting, these taste more like vanilla pudding. The white chocolate has both a lot of cocoa butter and milk solids in it. Cocoa butter is the second ingredient, so it’s quite light without being overly sweet or greasy.

While I wasn’t blown away by the earlier Pirate Pearls, this larger size and less sweet flavor is really quite good. Granted, you have to like white chocolate in the first place, but for a mass-marketed white chocolate product, Mars has addressed a lot of the confections shortcomings quite well.

The package lists possible allergens as peanuts, almonds and wheat and it’s definitely made with dairy and soy. Mars has not released any information about going fair trade or ethically sourcing their current American cocoa products, though they’re planning release of ethically trade chocolate products in Europe. (More on that here at Change.org.)

Related Candies

1. Dove Promises White Chocolate
2. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
3. Cookies ‘n’ Creme Showdown
4. M&Ms Premiums
5. See’s Hollow Eggs with Novelty
6. M&Ms Line
7. Green and Black’s White Chocolate

This is another one of my re-reviews this year for Easter as I’m getting reports that the product has once again changed.

Brach’s has gone through a lot in the past few decades. Like many American candy companies, it was started by a real guy who put his name on the brand, Emil J. Brach, in Chicago, Illinois. In my lifetime though the company has been through many hands. It was owned by American Home Products, who sold it in 1987 to Jacob Suchard which was bought up by Callebaut in 2003. Callebaut sold off Brach’s to Farley’s & Sathers in 2007. Farley’s & Sathers have since tried to make over the brand to restore it to its roots and classic recipes.

The Fiesta Malted Milk Eggs of my recollection have always been pastel colored, speckled and the size of a small pecan in the shell. Last year I picked them up and they were white but more importantly, they actually used real milk chocolate which has become a rarity for an Easter malt product. Still, they weren’t great.

What makes the Fiesta Malted Milk Eggs different this year is the amazing size of them. They’re large: absurdly, ridiculously and tooth-dangerously huge. Most are about 1 1/2 inches long. The nutrition facts panel is exactly the same as last years, saying that each egg is about 0.275136903 ounces each. But I’m calling shenanigans on that, these ovoids are at least a third of an ounce, if not heftier. The nutrition panel does actually have one anomaly, it says that the suggested serving size is 39 grams and the calories are 160. But that works out to 113 calories per ounce, which is pretty low for a chocolate product.

I had to crack them on a hard surface first to eat them. The shell is very thick and trying to bite them was downright dangerous to my choppers. (And I often ended up with a slobbery and sticky mess, as well.) Think of them as an Everlasting Gobstopper that instead of having a SweeTart at the center, has a malted milk crisp. The shell with the real, but poor quality, milk chocolate coating comes apart from the malted milk crisp center quite easily. So I ate most of these in pieces. I’d pull off the shell and eat that, reserving the malted center for last. They were well protected by the shell, so they were dry, crisp and melted easily on the tongue. They’re milky and barely sweet with that inimitable malty flavor.

I love the fact that there’s so much malt inside, but the chocolate is just plain weak and the space-age strength of the shell was not exactly a selling point. I was actually wondering if one of those soft boiled egg cutters would be of use. (True candy needs no tools, assembly or dis-assembly.) I have to downgrade them to a 5 out of 10.

Related Candies

1. Wonka SweeTarts Chicks, Ducks & Bunnies (2012)
2. Brach’s Fiesta Malted Milk Eggs
3. Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate Malted Milk Eggs (Plus a Bonus)
4. Necco Conversation Hearts (Sweethearts) 2010
5. Brach’s Fiesta Eggs
6. Mighty Malts
7. Jelly Belly Chocolate Malt Balls

Ferrara Pan is introducing quite a few new products lately, especially for the holidays. I noticed this last year when I saw a more generic item on the shelves called Ferrara Pan Chicks & Bunnies Jelly Candy. This year I didn’t see that product on shelves again, instead I found what seemed more exciting and actually got my mouth watering: Lemonhead & Friends Jellies in Fun Springtime Shapes.

It’s a super simple classic candy, a moist, jelled sugar in fruit flavors coated in crunchy sugar.

The name Lemonhead brings to mind a sweet and tart candy, that’s layered with bursts of flavor that includes zest, tartness and sweetness. Let me just start off saying, there is nothing Lemhonheady about these. The assumption I made was that these sugary coatings were also tart. There’s not one iota of tartness in these. But let me move on and tell you what you do get.

The pieces are huge. Larger than I expect something like a jelly to be, though they’re probably about the same weight as a jelly orange slice, they just seemed more than two bites big. They come in two shapes, chicks and rabbits.

Green = Green Apple: this was strange. It was like the artificial banana equivalent of green apple. A strange vaporous version with a slight acetone burn to it. It was all sweet and no tartness, so the flavor was missing a lot of the key flavor oomph.

Red = Cherry: was sweet and almost floral. It was a like a rose flavored version of fake cherry. The bitter aftertaste of the artificial colors was quite noticeable in this rather dark red jelly candy.

Purple = Grape: this has so much going on for it from the smell. It was like a grape soda in the shape of a chick ... until I bit into it and it was all promise and no delivery. The inky grapeness was there as a scent, but there was no malic acid tartness to go along with it. The artificial coloring also gave it a weird aluminum note.

Yellow = Lemon: citrus flavors always go so well with jellies because there are a few flavor notes that go beyond the tangy juice. In this case the zest is dead on, though a little bitter and the sweet floral notes are present. It’s a smidge on the grapefruit side, but I still enjoyed it.

Orange = Orange: like the lemon, this had two components, a note of the orange peel and a bit of floral soapiness. It wasn’t as strong as the lemon, but the balance is good and placed this one among my favorite three flavors.

Pink = Watermelon: was completely unexpected. I thought this was going to be strawberry. The flavor is strange, it reminded me of fresh laundry from the dryer ... there was a sort of static cling smell (I can’t really explain it) and a sweet floral note rather like strawberry and limes.It was really dreadful and bizarre.

The Ferrara Pan more generic jellies were far less expensive and didn’t promise me anything, so I couldn’t be disappointed. The Lemonhead & Friends Jellies captured me with the idea that they were like Lemonheads, that they were going to be tart. That’s an interesting proposition. On the other hand, these fruit jellies do come in some more unusual flavors - I’ve never seen Watermelon or Green Apple jellies before. So if you’ve always hated the tartness of Lemonheads, here’s an opportunity to partake of the brand.

If you’re looking for the best sour jelly, try the Gimbal’s Sour Lovers.

Related Candies

1. Ferrara Pan White Hot Red Hots Jelly Beans
2. Gimbal’s Sour Lovers
3. Lemonhead & Friends Jelly Beans
4. Brach’s Cinnamon Jelly Hearts
5. Spearmint Leaves
6. Russell Stover Pectin Jelly Beans
7. Harry & David Fall Leaves Fruit Gels
8. Chuckles

Little Meiji Apollo chocolates are little mountains with a base of milk chocolate and a snowcap of strawberry flavored white confection. They’re cute, like the tops of an edible crayon.

It’s exciting to see a new Cadbury product for Easter. The Cadbury brand is so inextricably tied to Easter is many American’s minds because of their iconic products like the Cadbury Creme Egg and the Cadbury Mini Chocolate Eggs.

This year Hershey’s in the United States is rolling out the Cadbury Chocolate Creme Egg. (I didn’t see that these are for sale in the UK.) They’re made by Cadbury Canada, not imported all the way from the UK by Kraft.

They’re only 1.2 ounces these days, but I think that’s actually a good size for such a thing.

If there’s one thing that Cadbury Creme Eggs mess with, it’s the definition of creme. I consider a creme to be creamy, something with a bit of fat in it, something that’s smooth. The traditional Creme Egg has a fondant which is actually smooth, but doesn’t rise to the level of something that’s actually creamy. It doesn’t melt in your mouth, it dissolves.

These eggs are not a ganache center, instead it’s a smooth fondant. I expect little from a Cadbury chocolate ingredient-wise; I know it’s a lot of sugar. But I was dismayed to see that the ingredients included things like palm oil and high fructose corn sweetener. (And it’s not easy to see those things, it’s printed on the foil but not on the website, so I had to carefully flatten the foil, then photograph it and zoom in to read it.)

The Cadbury Chocolate Creme Egg gets closer to that creamy ganache that I would hope it would be, but misses a bit. Basically, if you love chocolate frosting, you’ll love the Chocolate Creme Egg.

It was pretty good. Much better, in my opinion, than the traditional plain fondant version. The fudgy center has plenty of cocoa in it, and it is quite smooth, like a rich tub of frosting. There may even be a little salt in there, which offsets the sticky, sickly sweet milky chocolate The cocoa notes of the filling are more like a Tootsie Roll than a chocolate truffle, but that’s just fine for Easter.

I like this addition to the Cadbury Egg offerings.

There’s no statement about the ethical sourcing of the chocolate, though Cadbury is going Fair Trade with many of their UK chocolates. It’s made on shared equipment with peanuts and tree nuts. I couldn’t find a gluten statement.

Related Candies

1. House Brand Creme Eggs
2. Cadbury Popping Mini Eggs
3. Russell Stover Eggs
4. Cadbury Canadian Creme Eggs
5. Cadbury Orange Creme Eggs
6. Cadbury Eggs: Creme & Caramel

Easter is my favorite candy holiday. It has a large number of candies that are unique to the holiday, so I tend to look forward to this time of year the most. Some of these seasonal candies aren’t exactly my favorite, but I know some other folks like them and I should probably give them a try.

I picked up Brach’s Chicks & Rabbits Marshmallow Candy which features their new logo and package design. It promises that this is An Easter Basket Favorite on the front and on the back of the package it says that This chewy, banana flavored candy is perfect for sharing with family and friends.

They come in two shapes and three colors: orange, yellow and blue. The Rabbits look like grey aliens, with their large vacant eyes. The Chicks (not pictured) look like some sort of fetal creature. At first I thought I just got a bad handful, but I dumped the whole bag out and they all looked like that. So I’ll stick with the Rabbits.

They’re Circus Peanuts. Pretty much the same shape and size as Circus Peanuts with the same artificial banana flavor (a cross between fingernail polish remover and yellow cake. They’re achingly sweet and only slightly “marshmallowy.” They’re airy and light, but not bouncy like most marshmallows, it’s like a cross between a mellocreme (candy corn) and nougat (3 Musketeers). There’s quite a bit of grain to the sugar and a chemical scent that I can only describe as “solvent” that has that same cooling effect on the tongue and lung choking caustic burn. You know, artificial banana. The orange ones had a horrible aftertaste, I’m guessing from the artificial colors, so I liked the yellow ones better.

These were soft and fresh, but I usually prefer my Circus Peanuts a little firmer and slightly tacky so they’re quite chewy. But my interest level in these is not high enough to invest in the preparation required (leaving them out with the bag open) to get them that way.

These marshmallow type candies are the pre-cursor to the marbits found in sweetened breakfast cereals, so you can always cut them up with some scissors, let them dry in a warm oven and add them to your plain Cheerios or Chex for an added boost. Otherwise, I recommend using the bunnies as decorations and possibly using the chicks for experiments (they’re just so ugly).

Related Candies

1. Kraft Jet-Puffed Marshmallows + Vanilla, Cinnamon Bun, Strawberry, Chocolate Royale, Gingerbread
2. Ice Cream Flavored Dippin’ Candy - Banana Split
3. Bonomo & Doscher Banana Taffy
4. Hello Kitty Pineapple Marshmallows
5. Whitman’s Marshmallow Eggs & Carrot
6. Hiding Eggs
7. Circus Peanuts
8. See’s Scotchmallow Eggs

When Jolly Ranchers hard candies were introduced in 1949 their original name was Famous for Flavor; that certainly describes what has set Jolly Ranchers apart from other candies for all these years.

Jolly Ranchers probably single-highhandedly made hard candies cool for kids. The flavors are bold and fresh and more intense than most others available back in the seventies when they went national and really still to this day. The brand has obviously branched out with chews, gummies and jelly beans. But their core product remains their individually wrapped hard candies in flavors like green apple, cherry, blue raspberry and watermelon. (One of my favorites has always been the Fire Sticks, though they’re not made any longer.)

The candies come packaged in a variety of formats. They should be available as little packages in vending and convenience stores as well as this peg bag that holds 6.5 ounces. Each piece is individually wrapped. Instead of the twist clear wrappers, these have sealed ends. The new logo design is bold and appealing, but the color difference between the watermelon pink and the cherry pink is quite faint. (Though the names are also printed on there.)

They’re about 7/8ths of an inch. The construction is interesting, it reminds me of the Jolly Rancher chewy center lollipops. There’s a chewy center, kind of like a Starburst and a hard candy shell. The shell is different from the texture of a regular Jolly Rancher. It’s not transparent, it’s milky and doesn’t have that same smooth melt and light pliability.

Cherry (Dark Pink) is the flavor I wanted to get out of the way, as it’s usually my least favorite but a good time to concentrate on the qualities of the candy. The candy rod is pretty thick, though it’s called crunch and chew, I don’t recommend biting into it right away, I suggest dissolving it a bit. The cherry flavor is strong with both tartness and a sweet woodsy but artificial flavor. Crunching brings an interesting set of textures. The chew in the middle was quite sour but worked well with the crunchy bits of hard candy. I suppose you could be patient and let the hard candy dissolve completely ... but the product is called Crunch ‘n Chew.

Green Apple (Green) is the flavor that I most associate with Jolly Rancher. It’s good, it’s nicely rounded with both that artificial green apple plus a helping of apple juice and a little bit of dried apple. The center is chewy and much more mild, almost milky.

Watermelon (Pink) is quite artificial and reminds me of scented lip gloss. It’s tangy with a good dose of that fake watermelon. The chew inside is also tart and has a weird sort of plastic flavor to it, kind of like Play Doh smells.

Blue Raspberry (Blue) is rather berry flavor. It’s not quite as intense as the standard Jolly Rancher clear hard candy, but has a well rounded flavor that pulls in flavors of seeds and boiled jam all with a tangy backdrop.

They’re just not my style. The part I like most about Jolly Ranchers is their incredibly smooth dissolve, no voids and with a sort of syrupy thickness to the flavor. This was just another hard candy with a weird plasticy chew at the center. If I were 11 and someone gave this to me, I might like it. But as a grown up, I think I’ll probably just stick with the Cinnamon Fire or Wild Berry flavors.

Contains gelatin, so not suitable for vegetarians. Made in Brazil, no statement about gluten or peanuts/tree nuts but does contain corn starch, sulfur dioxide and soy.

Related Candies

1. Jolly Rancher Tropical Fruit Chews
2. Jolly Rancher Awesome Twosome Chews
3. Mentos: Juicy Orange, Lemon Lime & Watermelon
4. Chewy Sour Extinguisher
5. Starburst Sours (New)
6. Jolly Rancher Double Blasts
7. Jolly Rancher Fruit Chews

Bees & Beans is a Portland, Oregon artisan candy bar maker. Faith Dionne says, “These are candy bars that you can feel great about eating.” I found the bar at BiRite Market in San Francisco’s Mission District, one of the best places I know to find artisan candy.

The Honey Bar is Honey caramel, salted filbert and honey nougat, hand dipped in dark chocolate with a sprinkling of sea salt.

Many of the ingredients are organic and, as much as possible, they are sourced locally in Oregon.

Sugar, honey, 70% chocolate (cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, non-GMO soy lecithin, vanilla bean), organic cream, filberts, organic butter, egg whites, salt, vanilla extract, dried barley malt extract.

Based on the ingredients list, I believe this chocolate is sourced from Scharffen Berger. The Bees & Beans site says that they use both Theo Chocolate, which is fair trade, and Scharffen Berger, which is not, and is owned by Hershey’s. (Theo does not use soy lecithin.)

The construction of the bar is interesting, the caramel is on the bottom, the nougat on the top, then a coating of very dark chocolate sprinkled with sea salt. It looks just like a candy bar.

The nougat is almost marshmallowy. It’s soft and fluffy and has a bit of a pull when bitten, a silky sort of chew without any hint of sugary grain. The caramel is soft, not too chewy as to make the bar fall apart when bitten. There’s a sprinkling of salt on top, but also a fair amount of salt, as far as my tongue can detect, in both the caramel and the nougat. The filberts are only lightly toasted but have an excellent crunch, almost like a macadamia nut instead of like a hazelnut.

There is no perfect analogue to this in the mass-manufactured candy bar offerings in the United States. (Perhaps the European Nestle Nuts would be similar.) The textures are great and the ingredients are top notch. The prevalence of the honey flavors also sets this apart from so many other candies that might use honey but not enough to make it part of the texture and flavor profile to this degree. The short shelf life is an issue for folks like me who like to stock up (they sell the bars online in quad packs), but I was lucky to pick mine up a month ago and still eat it within its 2 month window of freshness. If I had to chose between this bar and the See’s Awesome Nut & Chew bar (which is all nougat and no caramel), it’d be hard. Bees & Beans makes several other bars that all sound fantastic, including a seasonal Malt Bar that I’ll have to order soon.

Related Candies

1. Double Dutch Sweets: The Ramona Bar
2. Rococo Bee Bars
3. Loukoumi Artisan Confections
4. Look! and Big Hunk
5. Nutpatch Nougats
6. Soubeyran Array
7. See’s Awesome Nut & Chew Bar