I popped into See’s yesterday to see what was new for the summer. The Root Beer Lollipops are back in stock (through mid-August), so if you were a fan of those (mini review here), then pop by for your fix.

I realized that I’ve never reviewed the See’s Lollipops in their classic array. The nice thing about them is that they’re summer-proof but also that they’re pretty cheap.

On top of that, they’re creamy and satisfying, last really long but only 70 calories each. They come in four regular flavors that are available singly (don’t forget your free sample!) or by the box: Vanilla, Chocolate, Butterscotch & Cafe Latte.

Vanilla Lollipop

Vanilla looks like a block of nothing. The color is a creamy white, the texture & tint of glossy trim paint.

It smells sweet and vaguely like French vanilla ice cream. The flavor is like a toasted marshmallow - a sweet vanilla with a little hint of bourbon and butter.

It’s a smooth pop with a slightly oily dissolve, which only supports that feeling that I’m eating solid ice cream. It’s sweet, but doesn’t feel cloying or sticky. The pop lasts a long time, too.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Chocolate Lollipop

The chocolate pop doesn’t look like much. It’s not quite shiny ... it’s not really matte either.

It smells like brownie batter.

The texture starts smooth but quickly degrades to an oddly rich but chalky experience. It’s like the mud at the bottom of the cup of hot chocolate. Not that I don’t love that mud, but in this case the texture is rather rough like a cat tongue. 

It’s rich, and does deliver quite a bit of the chocolatey experience without melting. But the chalky/sand paper never quite thrills me.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Butterscotch Lollipop

The color is lovely, like a rich caramel.

The immediate flavor on my tongue was salt. It was very salty to me, but perhaps that was because I was eating the vanilla one right before that.

The texture is ultra smooth, and has the same creamy & buttery melt. The caramelized sugar notes were good but the strongest flavor by far was salty butter.

I liked how smooth the block is, though this is one that I noticed how awkward the pops are in the mouth. It takes a while to smooth away the corners. Over the years this has been my favorite pop mostly because of its simple & true flavor but also the super-slick texture.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Cafe Latte Lollipop

This was the “softest” pop of the bunch. It was a little sticky from the humidity, which gave it a caramel consistency on the outermost layer.

The scent is like dark roast coffee or espresso, but the flavor is like coffee with lots of milk and some sugar in it. There’s a slight coffee bitterness to it, but for the most part it’s like a Coffee Nip with a stick in it.

I appreciated the silky texture and the stick prevented me from gluing my teeth shut as I often do with Nips or Coffee Rio.

Rating: 7 out of 10

A mixed box is a great addition to a vacation when you need a little pick me up, or something to keep you occupied at the office when wrangling endless spreadsheets of metadata.

Related Candies

1. Das Lollipops
2. See’s Cinnamon (Hearts & Lollypops)
3. Coffee Rio
4. See’s Pumpkin Spice & Root Beer Lollypops
5. Coffee Nips
6. Tootsie Rolls & Fruit Rolls
7. See’s Scotchmallow Eggs
8. See’s Awesome Nut & Chew Bar

I’ve known about Zingerman’s classic candy bars for quite a few years, but finally found a local source for them a few days ago. I really wanted to see them in person, because while the Zingerman’s website is so fun & quirky with their little illustrations, I’d like more than a picture of a box when sinking $7 for a candy bar (yes, that’s what they are on their website).

I got the What the Fudge? and Ca$hew Cow Zzang! Candy Bars. The box heralds that they’re “taking candy bars back 100 years!” which I’m guessing they think that’s a good thing.

The boxes are smaller than I expected, 4.5” long and 1.25” high/wide. But the label says that the WTF? is 3 ounces. I looked at them out of the package and I thought there was no way it was 3 ounces, that’s more than a Snickers bar! (But sure enough, I used the postal scale at the office and they both came in at about 3 ounces even after I took out my photo-bites.)

So the fact that they’re sizeable almost makes up for the sticker shock - at least at the Larchmont Larder they were $3.95 each.

The What the Fudge? Zzang! Candy Bar looks deceptively plain out of the wrapper. The box says: Milk chocolate fudge, Muscovado caramel, and malted milk cream dipped in dark chocolate.

Biting into it, I didn’t seem that complex. In fact, I didn’t think it tasted like much more than sweet, sweet fudge covered in chocolate.

The top layer of malted milk cream was smooth, but a bit frosting-like. The milky flavors came across distinctly when I pulled the parts of the bar apart, but I didn’t really get much malt. The milk chocolate fudge is sweet and doesn’t have much chocolate punch but has a melty smooth texture with a slight grain. The “caramel” isn’t quite a gooey caramel, it’s more of a grainy buttery layer with some distinct molasses notes of the Muscovado sugar.

Most importantly, because of these extremely sugary innards, the chocolate coating is a very dark, rather bitter bittersweet chocolate.

The package says the serving size is the full 3 ounce bar, which is far too much for me in one sitting. (The box also had the cryptic tally of 260 calories for the full bar, which is pretty much impossible for any candy that contains fat ... and chocolate was the first ingredient ... I’d go for something along the lines of 130 calories per ounce for this bar, bringing the total to 390.)

The Cashew Cow Zzang! Candy Bar, as you can tell, was a little bloomed when I got it home. Happily the texture of the dark chocolate coating did not seem to suffer too much from the slight. The bar consists of Milk chocolate, cashew butter gianduja, cashew brittle & roasted cashews dipped in dark chocolate.

Though this bar is only reputed to be 2.5 ounces, it’s actually larger than the WFT? bar. (Also, when I weighed it after my bite, it still came in at 2.8 ounces, so their manufacturing process is a bit generous.)

It smells dark and toasty.

Instead of the layered order of the WFT?, the Cashew Cow is a muddled combination affair on the inside. The general look of it is a fluffed gianduja with some inclusions of nuts & crisped rice.

The center does have lots of textures going on: shards of brittle, cashews and crisped rice - all with varying degrees of crunch. The nutty background flavor is cashew with some buttery bits and the malty crisp of the puffed rice. And then the salt, there’s a lot of saltiness.

Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I found it a bit chaotic. It definitely wasn’t as sticky sweet as the WTF? bar, but this one seemed a bit too hefty for me as well.

The good thing was that both bars were distinct and unique ... I didn’t feel like saying “this is like a Milky Way” or “that’s like a Butter Brittle Hazelbar.” At $7 a bar, I’d be miffed ... at $4, I felt like it was a fun ride. I still prefer the BonBonBars as far as upscale candy bars go ... but again, these are nothing like those so it’s never going to be a one for one comparison and it might just all be about personal taste.

Here’s Victoria from Candy Addict’s review of these two bars, CPB Gallery reviewed & photographed the Original bar and Chocolate Ratings reviewed the Original and Cashew Cow.

Related Candies

1. Q.Bel Crispy Wafer Bars
2. Short & Sweet: Hazelnut Bites
3. 3400 Phinney: Fig, Fennel & Almond and Hazelnut Crunch
4. BonBonBars: Malt Ganache & Scotch
5. See’s Awesome Nut & Chew Bar
6. Lake Champlain Five Star Bar

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

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

The Werther’s Original line has really expanded over the past few years. Known best for their classic toffee/hard caramel candies they’ve expanded into caramels and chocolate. Their newest product, Caramel Dreams combines the two.

The package says: Rich Creamy Caramel Covered in Smooth European Chocolate.

The bag is an interesting soft matte mylar. My bag was puffed up from a lot of air, which I assumed was to like the air in a bag of potato chips - meant to protect the contents from getting smashed. And it did its job well. Each little piece I picked out looked pretty close to perfect.

Each little molded chocolate is wrapped in the classic golden folk/cellophane wrapper that Werther’s is known for.

They smell a little milky, a bit like Cadbury chocolate. The caramel center is quite liquid and gooey, so I don’t recommend biting into them expecting a chewy caramel. They’re best enjoyed popping the whole thing in the mouth.

The caramel center is smooth, a bit thick & sticky with a slight salty note to it. It’s more on the milky side of caramel than toasted sugar flavors.

They’re very pretty, well crafted and decently priced. If you’re a fan of Rolos, Cadbury Caramello or Dove Promises Caramels you might also find these to your liking. I think I’ll stick to See’s or perhaps something a little more nutty like Snickers for my caramel needs or just some Sugar Babies.

The other varieties in this line are CaraMelts and Caramel Mousse. (Candy For Dinner has photos of CaraMelts & Caramel Mousse.)

Related Candies

1. Caramilk Deluxe
2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels
3. Big Mo’ Bars: Peanut Butter & Creamy Caramel
4. Dove Promises (Caramel & Almonds)
5. Werther’s Original Chewy Caramels
6. Sugar Babies
7. Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels
8. Head to Head: Rolo vs Caramel Kisses

Cadbury is a dominant chocolate brand around the world. (See this article from Business Week that shows it as the #2 chocolate on the planet.)

What’s especially fun about Cadbury chocolate is the little variations depending on the country. One of those is the Australian set of candy bars. I picked up this single serve bar of Dairy Milk Snack after seeing it in Sera’s photo stream last year (I didn’t really want the big size bar).

It’s a simple concept - a segmented bar with different flavored fillings in each piece. (Note that the large bar has only five segments.)

The first thing that sets this little bar apart is that each piece is coded with the contents. Though the package didn’t say what the fillings are (and please, why?) I did figure out the pineapple one immediately and took a good guess at the strawberry and orange.

The flavors in all are: caramel, pineapple, coconut ice (I have no idea what that is), strawberry, Turkish delight and orange.

My bar was fresh, unmarred and in great condition.

Caramel - I thought it’d be like the Caramello, but it’s a little firmer, a little thicker. The chocolate outside is rather strange - it has a good snap, but not a very good melt. It’s a bit stiff, a little chalky. The flavor is recognizably Cadbury with a strong powdered milk flavor and a gentle malty cocoa taste.

Pineapple - has a light tangy pineapple scent. The fondant is thick, it has a good sheen to it, but it doesn’t flow. The flavor is sweet and has a tangy pineapple bite. It’s an odd combination with the musky chocolate, but I enjoyed the change of pace.

Coconut Ice - honestly I don’t know what this is. It’s pink and it’s crumbly and has a slight sweet flavor that I can’t quite place. If it’s supposed to be coconut, it’s missing that completely.

Strawberry - the fondant is smooth, but a little more crumbly than the pineapple. Fragrant and floral, there’s not tart component. Rather authentic tasting and pleasant.

Turkish Delight - wow, they went all out for the rose here. The texture is quite soft, more like a jelly than a firm paste. The floral notes are pungent with a slight tangy middle note that dissipates quickly. I rather liked it, but I can tell that this would be quite off-putting for many Americans and other cultures not accustomed to floral flavors.

Orange - I had hoped this would be the winner piece, but I found it rather bland. The fondant was too firm and lacking a distinctive zest.

Just as a little touchstone, I picked up an American Cadbury Dairy Milk bar to compare the flavors, and I do find that I prefer the stickier, fudgier texture of the Hershey-made version, but that may just be what I’m accustomed to.

It’s a fun bar and honestly I’d probably enjoy a whole bar of the pineapple or Turkish delight, the rest of the flavors just didn’t feel like they were the best that Cadbury could muster. (I know they can do better with the caramel & chocolate combination.) For the money, especially since I’m paying import prices, if I felt like boxed chocolate candy, I’d be better off getting some Russell Stover or finding a See’s or I’d probably even choose a Whitman’s Sampler of this.

One of the best things I can say about Cadbury right now is that they’re making a huge effort to go Fair Trade with their chocolate though it’s going to be a long process.

Some other reviews: Jim’s Chocolate Mission, Chocolate Reviews,  Sera at The Candy Enthusiast.

Related Candies

1. Cadbury Crunchie
2. KitKat Temptations: Hazelnut & Coconut
3. Cadbury Eggs: Creme & Caramel
4. Sky Bar
5. Cadbury Twirl and Snow Flake
6. Violet Crumble

Besides the regular chocolate covered nuts that Brach’s has been making for about a hundred years, Brach’s has more recently branched out into more than the old fashioned pick-a-mix items.

the new Indulge gable-box line includes some boxed chocolate items (like Cherry Creme Clusters) as well as the standard bridge mixes and chocolate covered nuts.

I picked out these two from the samples that Farley’s & Sathers sent me: Coconut Almond Escape and Caramel Almond escape because they both have almonds at the center but were definitely outside of the normal panned nuts offerings.

Besides the color coding of the boxes, it’s hard to tell the candies apart from the pictures on the package ... they’ve obviously taken some artistic license or are able to produce identical candies in both dark and milk chocolate. (Click to see it a bit bigger on Flickr.)

Coconut Almond Escape is called Rich, creamy, coconut covered almonds coated in luscious dark chocolate.

They make it sound simple but it’s really not. There is an almond at the core and there is a “sweet chocolate” coating (which has lactose as the second ingredient after sugar and before chocolate & cocoa butter). But that white stuff in between goes like this:

sugar, vegetable oil (palm & palm kernel), nonfat milk, titanium dioxide, soy lecithin, vanilla, gum arabic, corn syrup, modified food starch, salt, coconut oil, natural and artificial colors

So that “coconut covering” has very little actual coconut in it ... as far as I can tell the smallest dash of coconut oil and maybe that natural flavoring.

They certainly smell coconutty - like suntan lotion. The pieces are glossy and large. The almonds are crunchy and nicely toasted. The white cream is soft and has a good melt on the tongue ... not quite fondant and rather salty. Sometimes I get a fake butter flavor from it, which turns me off. The whole effect is rather good otherwise and rather different.

I was hoping for the elusive Dark Chocolate Almond Joy experience, but without actual coconut flakes, all the chewy texture is provided by the almonds. It tastes rather fake, but the hit of salt gives them a good munchability. But on the other hand I’m hesitant to recommend a candy that has more coloring (titanium dioxide in this case) than salt. But I don’t know what my daily recommend intake of titanium is. Maybe it makes my cell phone reception better. Or makes me impervious to UV radiation.

Caramel Almond Escape is Rich creamy, caramel covered almonds in luscious milk chocolate.

I should have photographed these two candies together to show the difference in size. Most of these are about the size of a Peanut M&M.

These milk chocolate pieces look great otherwise, very nicely panned they’re shiny and smooth. I was rather surprised when I opened the package that they smell like maple.

I was hoping for a nice chewy caramel, but probably expecting a Brach’s Milk Maid Caramel.

Instead it’s more like a maple fudge instead of anything resembling a caramel. And it’s an awful like like fake maple.

The nuts are crunchy, but their tiny size leaves the proportions here a bit off as well. I’ve been eating the, but I have a hard time believing that I’d buy them.

Rating: 4 out of 10

It’s nice to see Brach’s bringing production back to the United States, but I’d like to see some less convoluted recipes ... or I’ll just stick to the Bridge Mix, Candy Corn and Spearmint Leaves that they do so well.

Related Candies

1. Brach’s Indulge Cookie Nibbles
2. Marich Easter Select Mix
3. Brach’s Chocolate Candy Corn & Halloween Mix
4. Almond Joy
5. World’s Finest Continental Chocolate Almonds
6. Sconza 70% Dark Chocolate Toffee Almonds
7. Dove Caramels & Chocolate Covered Almonds

If there’s one thing I think that’s might pull our government out of the red, it might Mars excessive registration of trademarks for their limited edition & marketing tie in candies.

For the new Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie this summer, Mars has created a line of collectible M&Ms packages that feature different characters from the Transformers pantheon plus M&Ms in Transformers-styled outfits.

The seven packages:

(Yeah, I’m missing some package images, but that’s all that came with the press kit Mars gave me ... how odd.)

What I think is most interesting about this is that the package is the only thing that’s different (besides, of course the Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms). Open up the packet of the M&Ms (mine was Bumblebee 2 of 7) and there’s no fun new design of the M imprint with a twist on the Transformers like they did with Pirates of the Caribbean Pirate Pearls, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull and Shrek II (basically Mega M&Ms).  The Star Wars ones, though introducing Dark Chocolate M&Ms, did not have fancy imprints.

What is good news is that the packages are no smaller. With many of the limited editions what you get in addition to “specialness” is less. The Milk Chocolate Chocl-O-Bots packages have the same 1.69 ounces as the standard Milk Chocolate M&Ms.

The only truly transformed product for the movie tie-in is the Snickers Nougabot (tm). Due to physical laws of the conservation of matter, the energy required for the transformations, the bar is smaller than an unTransformerized one. *

From the outside the packages look rather similar. (Click to enlarge to read the ingredients if you wish.)

This isn’t the first time Mars has mucked with the nougat for a movie. Back in 2007 they turned it green for Shrek but left it the same size, because really, how could a Shrek-ified candy be smaller? The traditional bar is 2.07 ounces and the Nougabot is 1.83 ounces.

The difference, otherwise, is really just the addition of Yellow #5. Considering how much some parents hate Yellow #5 (hint: enough to get it banned in Europe), it’s hard to understand why a candy which was formerly artificial coloring free would add it. Further, the Snickers website doesn’t list the Yellow 5 on the page for the Nougabot bar (sorry, can’t link directly to the page because of stupid flash & beware of annoying sounds).

So how does it taste? About the same. The flavor seemed a little “darker” but I don’t know if that was the caramel batch ... sometimes even big factory candies like Snickers can vary from day to day.

The only thing I liked about it is the same thing that I prefer about the Snickers Dark, that there’s one less bite in it. Because honestly I think that 1.83 ounces is the perfect size for a Snickers bar.

* My theory of this kind of violates the whole world of Transformers and many other fantasy, action & sci-fi movies where small things turn into big things without the perceivable addition of extreme amounts of energy. Anyway, in order to turn back and forth without loss of mass, you’d need lots of energy to turn into matter ... conversely to shrink you’d need to have a way to store a huge reservoir of energy (if you wanted to grow again) or release it. I’ve always wondered if Alice became super-dense when she shrank and puffy, aerated & light when she grew.

Related Candies

1. Reese’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Bats (Dark Knight)
2. Snickers Adventure Bar (Indiana Jones)
3. Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road Bar
4. Snickers Nut ‘n Butter Crunch
5. Elvis Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Cup
6. M&Ms Line
7. Snickers Xtreme