It’s a great time to be alive as a candy eater. Though some folks lament the loss of the regionally made candy bars, there’s so much more diversity when it comes to sweets as long as you know where to look. There are artisanal versions of popular candies, crazy new flavors, and incredible combinations as well as candies that cater to specific dietary restrictions.

I’m pretty pleased to see that there are more options for organic and all natural candy bars than ever before with products from Justin’s Candy Bars, Ocho, Angell and Eli’s. The other new entry into this marketspace is Amy’s Organic, with their exhaustively long-named bars. Today I have the Amy’s Organic Andy’s Dandy Crispy Candy Bar which features rice crisps, almonds & caramel covered in chocolate. Though some of the bars in the Andy’s Dandy line are organic versions of existing bars, this one really has no match in the hypermegaglobal corporate candy world.

Like the other bars, this is actually a pair of bars. I like this approach, as it gives me the opportunity to save some for later or share. It also means that the chocolate coating is a more consistent ratio for more of the bites, since the bar is shorter. The dark coating is smooth and creamy, it has a nice flavor of it’s own that’s a little green (olive notes) but holds up well to the light, malty cereal flavors. The texture is not as airy as a Whatchamacallit and the almonds are just pieces in there, not an almond meal (like peanut butter) or whole nuts. The brown rice has less of a malt note than regular crisped rice, but it’s also barely sweet. It’s crunchy but gets a bit of a chewy texture of its own later. The caramel layer is barely perceptible, it does more to just hold it all together.

The effect of the bar is great, it’s crunchy but not too filling. It tastes more chocolatey than a Whatchamacallit, though I miss any sort of almond note to it, it’s really just there for an extra durable crunch.

The bars are free of GMO ingredients, gluten and preservatives. Made on shared equipment with other nuts, seeds and wheat. They contain soy, dairy and almonds.

Related Candies

1. Amy’s Organic Andy’s Dandy Creamy Candy Bar
2. Amy’s Organic: Andy’s Dandy Chewy Candy Bar
3. Eli’s Earth Bars - Dream Big Bar
4. Theo Salted Almond Dark Chocolate
5. Justin’s Peanut and Almond Candy Bars
6. Organic Moo Milk Chocolate with Crisped Rice & Corn Flakes
7. Crisp Angell Organic Candy Bar
8. Crispy Cat

Shopping at Target around a holiday always yields an exclusive candy item. This season it’s Dove Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Promises.

I was surprised that Dove hasn’t done these in the past, as it seems like a ideal flavor infusion for their marketing. They’re a Dark Chocolate piece infused with artificial hazelnut flavor. That doesn’t actually sound that good, but I was willing to give it a go.

The pieces are wrapped in dark brown foil and like all of the other Promises, the foil has a little affirming motto printed inside. At least three of mine said, “hug someone today.”

They’re beautiful to look at and smell alluring. It’s easy for artificially flavored candies to overdo the smell, especially with dark chocolate products, but this started with a good balance. It’s a toasty scent of maple syrup, coffee and hazelnut with a sweetness to it. The melt is very good, smooth but with a little bit of a dry finish to it. The hazelnut is just a flavor, a note of roasted nuts and a trace of toffee sweetness. It’s not overpowering or too fake. It would be great to have real crushed hazelnuts in there, like the Almond version, but I can see that the goal here is really about the texture.

They’re quite rich, in fact, they clock in at 156 calories per ounce, so there’s lots of cocoa butter and dairy butter fats in there. I found that two made an excellent treat, but were still a little on the sweet side for me as a dark chocolate product.

Back in July of 2012, I reviewed the Target exclusive Dove Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramel Promises and was later called by Dove (Mars) representatives to let me know that their Dove line was converting to Rainforest Alliance certified cacao, starting with the Dark Chocolate. To date, I’ve only seen the Dark Chocolate, there have been no subsequent roll outs of the certified sustainable cacao on anything but the plain dark chocolate. The Mars website still says they’re on target for all cacao sourced through traceable channels by 2020 and should hit 35% by the end of 2014.

Dove Dark Chocolate Promises contain soy and dairy and are made in a plant that uses peanuts and tree nuts. (Some Dove chocolates are made in nut free environments, so be sure to check the labels.) There’s no statement about gluten.

Related Candies

1. Dove Mint & Dark Chocolate Swirl Promises
2. Dove 71% Cacao Silky Smooth Dark Chocolate (Rainforest Alliance)
3. Ghirardelli Squares Milk & Hazelnut Crisp
4. Dove Sea Salt Caramel Dark Chocolate Promises
5. KitKat Hazelnut Cream
6. Fling: Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate & Hazelnut
7. Dove Milk Chocolate Pecan Pie Caramel Promises

Ghirardelli Dark & Mint is part of a new line of small, single serve bars introduced by the California-based chocolate maker.

I found the bars at Walgreen’s on a dedicated display for Ghirardelli just before Christmas. They also come in Milk & Caramel, but that day I had a craving for something sophisticated and not-too-sweet.

The bar is square, which echos the little pieces, but a little thicker than their usual filled confections. It’s 1.3 ounces, so it’s right there as a single serving (it’s 170 calories) and I picked it up on sale for $1.00.

They’re about 2.75 inches square, and sectioned into four pieces. Each piece is well segmented, meaning that you can snap it apart easily and the reservoir of minty fondant is completely contained.

The bar has a rich cocoa smell, it’s a bit woodsy and herbal with a nice hint of fresh peppermint.

The fondant is creamy and flowing, but quite liquid. It’s very sweet but has a well rounded peppermint flavor that’s more like peppermint tea than straight peppermint oil. The dark chocolate isn’t too intense but has a bittersweet quality that keeps the whole thing from getting too throat-searing sticky. The wrapper doesn’t say what the cacao content is, but I’d put it at about 60%.

It’s not a revolutionary bar, but the convenience of a single serving for just a buck is nice. I like the big 3.5 ounce bars, but I don’t like the monotony of eating a whole one and it’s often hard to get enough consensus in this “too many choices” world for everyone to want that chocolate bar at that moment with me. I’d like to see this line expanded. I like the Ghirardelli style much better than Dove or Hershey’s at this price point, but sometimes I want a milk chocolate and crisped rice bar.

Related Candies

1. Ovation Mint Filled & Pumpkin Spice Oranges
2. Ghirardelli Squares Milk & Hazelnut Crisp
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Honey Mints
4. Dove Cookies and Creme + Ghirardelli Cookies Jubilee
5. Sun Cups Dark Chocolate Mint Cups
6. Ghirardelli Intense Dark Sea Salt Soiree
7. Ritter Sport Peppermint
8. Ghirardelli Luxe Milk Crisp

Amy’s Organic Andy’s Dandy Creamy Candy Bar is another bar in the new organic line from the famous ready-made food company.

The package describes the bar as Whipped Creamy Center with Caramel Covered in Chocolate. So, rather like a Milky Way Midnight bar.

The back of the package spends a lot of space telling you about what ingredients are in there, what ingredients may have been near the other ingredients and what ingredients are never in anything they make. It’s free from GMOs, preservatives, peanuts, eggs and gluten. Made from 99% organic ingredients (salt and water are the only non-organic items). It contains soy and dairy (made with rBHT free cows), but it’s also manufactured in a facility that processes tree nuts, wheat and seeds.

The two bars are a nice size. They’re one ounce each (a total of 2 ounces for the whole package). For comparison, a Milky Way Midnight bar is 1.76 ounces. The price for the bars is steep, I paid $2.49 for this, so twice as much as a regular Mars candy bar but actually larger. Inside the wrapper (which was devilish to open) the bars are set in a tray which protects them pretty well.

The bar just out of the package smells rich, like woodsy cocoa. Biting into the layers, it’s soft, not quite foamy but very forgiving. The fluffy center is less than creamy. It’s more like the nougat center of a 3 Musketeers. It’s airy and slightly grainy. It smells a little, well, cheesy. The caramel is unremarkable. There’s a malt note to the whole thing, but overall the center is quite sweet.

The dark chocolate is good, it’s at least bittersweet and cuts through some of the sweetness. The overall effect of the sort of the brewers yeast flavored center with the overt sweetness and lack of toasty caramel notes left me unimpressed. Granted, Milky Way has never been a huge favorite of mine, so the alternate versions I’ve had over the years are trying to measure up to something that I don’t care for in the first place. At this point, I’d say the other offerings in the Andy’s Dandy bar line are going to be more satisfying.

I knew from the first time I heard about this bar from Sweden that it was not for licorice haters. It’s called Marabou Black Saltakrits. It’s described (in English!) on the front as Milk chocolate with pieces of salty licorice.

When Swedes say salty licorice, they don’t mean sodium chloride, like the regular sea salt or table salt. They mean ammonium chloride which has a distinctly more metallic flavor profile and can give the licorice an ammonia note at times.

It’s marked as a king sized bar, and in Sweden that means 7.76 ounces ... they’re a unitary parliamentary representative democracy under constitutional monarchy, so they have a slightly more generous meaning for king-sized candy bars than we do here in our federal presidential representative democracy under constitutional republic.

This very big bar is about 8 inches long and 3 inches wide. As it traveled quite a distance to me (from its origin in Sweden to Kristian in Germany who packaged it up and sent it to the far side of North America) it was broken in several places, so photographing the whole was not very attractive.

Marabou is owned by Mondelez (Kraft) and this particular bar uses Rainforest Alliance certified cacao (30%). It doesn’t say anything else about the sourcing of the milk products or sugar. The bar contains soy and milk and may also have traces of almonds, other nuts and wheat.

The bar smells great, like sweet creme brulee and a hint of anise. The licorice was not at all what I was expecting. The bits are little little toffee shards, they’re crunchy, not chewy. There’s no molasses, so it’s a much more pungent licorice flavor than a mixed sort of Australian or American chewy flour-based licorice. If you’re familiar with cinder toffee or sponge candy, which has a note of sodium bicarbonate in it, you might find this familiar, too. The licorice has a sharp note that’s rather salty but sometimes taste more acidic. It’s sharp and sweet but overall pleasant in small bits, but large pieces are off-putting. The creamy and ordinary chocolate is great as a background, it balances it all out, though offers nothing in the way of actual cocoa flavors. It’s quite milky, which is also fine.

A few bites, and I like it. But more than a square and I definitely start getting an overabundance of the ammonia going and have to give it a rest. This is something I absolutely do not need a king sized bar of, I simple little one or two ounces would have sufficed. Still, it’s one of the best salted licorices I’ve had - I liked the crispy texture and quick dissolve.

Related Candies

1. Marabou Noblesse Crisps: Original, Dark & Orange
2. Theo Salted Almond Dark Chocolate
3. Toblerone Crunchy Salted Almond
4. Darrell Lea Dark Choc Liquorice Bullets
5. 12 European Licorices
6. Kookaburra Choc Coated Liquorice
7. Dutch Licorice
8. Salted Licorices: Djungelvral and Dubbel Zout

A couple of years ago I was treated to a small tasting of a new line of candy bars. They’re from Amy’s Kitchen, which already makes vegetarian convenience foods. I finally started seeing them on store shelves at the end of last year, even at major grocery retailers like Von’s, not just Whole Foods or Mother’s Market. I’ll have reviews of all four of the bars, but I thought I’d start with their unique offering first, the Amy’s Organic Andy’s Dandy Chewy Candy Bar.

The package says Soft caramel with pecans covered in chocolate. Well, that not only sounds good, it doesn’t sound like any other candy bar on the shelves.

All the bars in the line are color coded and feature the name large and in the middle of each wrapper.

Packaged in bright colors with distinctive artwork, Andy’s Dandy Candy will be easy to spot in stores. Amy’s mom, Rachel, who oversees all of Amy’s packaging, was inspired to reach out to artist Stanley Mouse, creator of the iconic Grateful Dead posters, to design the candy wrappers.Mouse’s use of brilliant, saturated color and unique typography capture the essence of a past era.

As you’d expect with an organic candy, they’re expensive. I didn’t see them selling for less than $2.29 a bar, and as high as $2.79.

They’re 3/4 of an ounce each, about 2.25 inches long and one inch wide.

The bite is excellent, it’s soft and chewy, with a stringy pull to the caramel that’s not too sticky. The pecans are small, but provide a lot of texture and maple-flavor. The milk chocolate is robust and stands up well to the rest of the ingredients. The whole thing isn’t too sweet, though it is rather milky.

There’s a lot of information on the wrapper. I love transparency. But it’s poorly organized. So here’s all the info provided, in order for people who read left to right, top to bottom. (I don’t, but I’ll list them that way.)

0 g of trans fat
No added MSG
No preservatives
No GMOS
No Bioengineered Ingredients
All dairy ingredients made with pasteurized , rBST hormone-free milk
[The ingredients lists everything as organic except the filtered water and sea salt]
Contains milk, soy and tree nuts
Made with Rainforest Alliance (tm) certified cacao
Made in a facility that processes wheat, tree nuts and seeds
Amy’s Kitchen does not use any peanuts or eggs
Gluten Free

So when I went looking for the peanut statement it wasn’t with the gluten free statement (which may or may not be contradicted by the wheat in the facility statement), it was on a separate line in different type. It’s a big old mess. Some are marketing statements, some are transparency statements, some are FDA mandated inclusions.

My issues with the back of the package aside, this is a no-compromise bar when it comes to taste and ingredients. It tastes like candy, but I feel like someone is putting a lot of thought and consideration into it behind the scenes. For this bar, the fact that it’s not even something that I can get in GMO form means that I’m more likely to reach for an Andy’s Chewy Bar in the future.

Related Candies

1. Justin’s White Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
2. Theo Salted Almond Dark Chocolate
3. Eli’s Earth Bars - Celebrate Bar
4. Justin’s Peanut and Almond Candy Bars
5. Double Dutch Sweets: The Ramona Bar
6. Organic Moo Milk Chocolate with Crisped Rice & Corn Flakes

It’s dark in the winter, so we can all use a little wake-me-up. Some coffee candy might just do the trick.

Trader Joe’s Chocolate Kona Coffee Truffles are well priced at $3.99 for six ounces. The truffles are individually wrapped and it appears there are about 20 in the zip top package.

In the Trader Joe’s repertoire of individually wrapped truffles on shelves now, there are the Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Salted Caramel (not really a truffle in my book) and the Candy Cane Truffles (sold in the winter). The new Kona Coffee Truffles definitely fill an niche.

The truffles are petite, only about 1.25 inches long, so really just one bite. The coating looks like dark chocolate, but the ingredients list all the chocolates: milk, dark and white. The filling is some sort of chocolate, Kona coffee, natural flavors and coconut oil. It’s firm,  might even be a bit crumbly if they’re very cold, but in the mouth they melt quite quickly.

It’s smooth, chocolatey, robust and has a hint of bitterness. The melt from the coconut oil is slick and silky. The coffee flavors are dark without too much bitterness, but very little sugary compensation going on. There may be a little hint of salt there, too. The only thing I didn’t like is the use of actual coffee grounds in there. They’re kind of crispy, but still a little distracting from the otherwise fully fat-laden melt.

These are a nice little item to keep nearby as a pick-me-up. Though they’re calorically dense, it’s only about 55 calories each ... so if you control yourself, two is a pretty nice treat.

Contains milk, soy and coconut. May contain traces of wheat, peanuts and tree nuts.

Related Candies

1. Lindt Hello Coffee Blast (Limited Edition)
2. Wow-Wee Maui Candy Bars
3. Mast Brothers Stumptown Coffee
4. Ritter Sport Espresso
5. Meiji Corot & CoffeeBeat
6. Javaz - Milk & Dark Chocolate Covered Coffee Beans
7. Coffee Rio
8. Mauna Loa Macadamia Kona Coffee Bar

In my candy swap late last year with Kristian of CandyBrain.de in Germany, I got a few unexpected treats. This Milka Amavel Konkitorei Schokoladen Torte was among them.

I appreciate how easy to find and inexpensive Milka is, but for my tastes it’s too sweet and relies too much on tropical oil laden fillings than actual cacao content. Fun for kids, but not necessarily the decadent treat I’m usually willing to pay the import premium for.

The Milka Amavel, if Google translate is to be trusted, is Loose cocoa cream on fine chocolate cake, covered with delicate Milka Alpine milk chocolate. I’m going to guess that loose cocoa cream (Lockere Kakaocrème) is actually something along the lines of a chocolate mousse (going with the alternate meaning of fluffy instead).

Inside the box are two individually-wrapped pieces. They’re 60 grams each (about 2.12 ounces). They’re thick, chunky squares of about 2.5 inches. It’s a weird size, because it’s more than a single portion, but less than two.

The domed pieces are nicely made, nicely molded with six sections and some little drizzly effects on them. They do smell rich and cakey, like brownies.

The bite is soft, inside is a base of a sort of dry cake base and a chocolate cream. There’s an immediate note of rum; I did notice the ingredients listed Alkohol, so I wasn’t surprised. The effect of the different textures is great. The cream of the filling makes up for the dryness of the cake and the rather fudgy Milka chocolate, with its note of hazelnut, does a good job pulling it together.

So, even though I said one piece was more than one serving ... I ate it in one sitting.

Nicely done, Milka. I have no idea if these are available in the United States, but you may see them in airports as Kraft (or Mondelez) is doing a pretty good job of getting these into gift shops in larger metro airports.

Contains milk and lactose, eggs, nuts, gluten, soy plus alcohol. No statement about other allergens like peanuts.

Related Candies

1. Milka Milkinis
2. Liddabit Sweets - Candy Bars
3. Godiva Cake Truffles
4. Milka Bars, Milka Drops and some Li’l Milka
5. Milka L’il Scoops
6. Bubble Chocolate (2010)
7. Milka Alpenmilch
8. Recipe: Peppermint Stick Layer Cake