Every once in a while candies get a revamp, so I like to revisit them. Here are a few that caught my eye.

Pretzel M&Ms were introduced in 2010 (original review) and have done well enough for Mars that they have continued as part of their regular repertoire, even getting seasonal color varieties for the holidays. I noticed a new version on shelves that advertised “now more pretzel taste.” Since I was able to find the previous version, I thought I’d taste them side-by-side. They have similar “best before” dates.

They look identical. The originals are on the left and the new version are on the right. Same colors, same shape, same size.

It is striking how much better the new ones are. The new ones are crunchier, taste lighter and airier yet have more of that malty, pretzel toasted coating. There was no difference I could see in the ingredients or in the new nutrition panel. They’re still a pretty low calorie candy treat, at only 150 calories per package, they’re pretty satisfying without being too fatty. (Of course the portion is only 1.14 ounces, but there’s a lot going on with the textures.)

The original rating stands at 7 out of 10. They’re not perfect and I still don’t think I’ve bought them since the first introduction (though I eat them when given a sample package, which happens once or twice a year). I still go for the Almond M&Ms when given the chance.

Hershey’s Rally Bar is a strange sort of candy bar in that it appears and disappears on store shelves with little notice. It’s a Hershey’s candy bar, first test marketed in the late 1960s, it was in wide distribution by 1970 across the country. The advertising theme was: Reach Me a Rally Bar, the Milk Chocolate Covered Nut Roll for the Man-Sized Appetite as well as the more gender-neutral The Crowded Candy Bar. This was one of the Hershey Corporation’s earliest attempts at advertising, before this they stood with the founder’s position that a quality product would sell itself. More about the Rally Bar on Collecting Candy.

The candy bar has no real package identity to adhere to in this reissue. This is what it looked like back in 2008 and this is what it looked like in 2004. The new one doesn’t even mention the name Hershey on the front. I picked it up at Walgreen’s as an exclusive item.

Though it was probably a chocolate candy bar when it was introduced, by the 2004 wrapper it was evident that this was a mockolate item. (Here’s my original review.)

This is smaller than the 2.2 ounce bar I tried back in 2008. This is 1.66 ounces (which is actually a good size for me). It smells like peanuts. The fudgy center is like a nougat, it’s soft and chewy with little flavor of its own. The peanuts are Payday-like, they’re crunchy, though not quite as salty. The chocolatey coating actually has a hint of salt, keeping it from being sickly sweet. Overall, it’s an okay bar but I don’t see it as that different from a Baby Ruth.

I stand by my previous rating of 6 out of 10.

There was a time when there were oodles of limited edition candies - not a month went by in the late Aughts that the major candy companies didn’t present a flavor twist on one of their tried and true candies. Snickers alone went through many iterations including: Shrek (green nougat), Indiana Jones (spiced nougat), Charged (caffeinated), 3X (chocolate nougat, chocolate caramel), Fudge (chocolate fudge instead of nougat), Xtreme (no nougat) and Nut n Butter Crunch (peanut buttery nougat).

The Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road changed up a few items in the standard Snickers Bar. First, they replaced the milk chocolate coating with dark chocolate. I approve. Second, they replaced the peanuts with almonds. I find this to be a good substitution. Third, they changed the lightly peanut butter nougat with a smoother marshmallow nougat. Definitively goes with the other two items. The structure is the same - nutty nougat on the bottom, caramel on the top and covered in chocolate. 

I gave these an 8 out of 10 rating last time (full review) and I fully endorse them again this time. The nougat is smoother than the 3 Musketeers style and the crunch of the almonds is great. It’s more of a variation on the classic Mars Bar, but I won’t quibble with Mars if they want to bring this back. (In fact, I prefer it to the standard Snickers Almond, which replaced the Mars bar).

Related Candies

1. Liddabit Sweets - Candy Bars
2. Pretzel M&Ms
3. Short & Sweet: Bites & Bites
4. Rally Bar
5. ReeseSticks (Revisit)
6. Revisit: Take 5, Sunkist Fruit Gems & Snickers Almond
7. Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road Bar

M&Ms Milk Chocolate Red Velvet are a Valentine’s limited edition available only at Walmart this year. (I bought mine on eBay.)

Red Velvet cake is made with buttermilk and vinegar plus some cocoa. It’s not a rich chocolate cake, just a lightly chocolate cake with a tangy note to it. The fact that it’s red is really inconsequential to the flavor. The color can be created naturally or using artificial food coloring. The cake is usually frosted with a cream cheese icing or browned butter icing.

Ingredients:milk chocolate (sugar, chocolate, skim milk, cocoa butter, lactose, milkfat, soy lecithin, salt, artificial flavors) sugar, cornstarch, less than 1% - corn syrup, dextrin, coloring (red 40, blue 2, blue 1, blue2, yellow 6, yellow 5), gum acacia, artificial and natural flavors.

I’m not much of a cake fan in the first place and Red Velvet is so low on my list that I’d probably prefer not to eat anything at all. Just to be really diligent about this, I went to Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery, and picked up a Red Velvet Cupcake to remind myself what the heck this is supposed to taste like. The Sprinkles website says that they’ve added extra cocoa to theirs and chose a cream cheese frosting. 

The cake is moist and bouncy with a good crumb. The cream cheese frosting is what really prevails here. It’s wonderfully smooth and fresh, the only hint of sugary grain is in the crust, but the rest has a pleasant tangy note to the milky sweetness. The cake itself has a sort of corn meal flavor to it, it’s slightly floral, not terribly sweet and overall ... just nice. Not chocolatey, a little on the vanilla side. But nothing I’d get really excited about.

Now that I had something to compare it to, I figured I was prepared to complete my review.

The pieces come in three colors: maroon, red and white. They’re the larger, chunky M&Ms, which are inconsistent sizes. Some are the size of regular M&Ms, but most are super-sized.

The centers are milk chocolate with a light tangy note to them. They’re not more chocolatey, and as you can see from the ingredients above, they didn’t alter their milk chocolate recipe to include buttermilk. They seem like they have more of a vanilla note, like poundcake.

If someone just gave these to me without any clue about the special flavoring, I wouldn’t have picked Red Velvet. At this point I’m curious about how different this will taste from the upcoming Birthday Cake M&Ms. (I’ll set some aside for comparison when those come out in May 2014.) I think it’s a nice idea for Valentine’s Day, a little less run-of-the-mill, but if Russell Stover has had a Red Velvet seasonal piece on store shelves for two seasons, perhaps they’re not really on trend, just slightly behind it.

Red Velvet M&Ms contain milk and soy and may contain traces of peanuts, almond and wheat (in addition to listed artificial colors and unknown artificial flavors). Though Mars has a plan for certified sourcing of their cacao, M&Ms have not yet been added to that list.

Since Mars’ M&Ms team seems to be running out of flavors, let me see if I can make some suggestions: Milk Chocolate Cappuccino, Milk Chocolate Cookies n’ Creme, Milk Chocolate German Chocolate Cake, Milk Chocolate S’mores, Milk Chocolate Banana, Milk Chocolate Chai Latte, Milk Chocolate Creme Brulee, Dark Chocolate Chili Pepper, Dark Chocolate Amaretto, White Chocolate Peanut Butter, White Chocolate Strawberry Cheesecake, White Chocolate Lemon Meringue, White Chocolate Key Lime. All of my previous reviews for M&Ms that actually exist are here.

Related Candies

1. Peanut M&Ms Intense 65% Cacao
2. Russell Stover Red Velvet Santa
3. Godiva Cake Truffles
4. Limited Edition Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms
5. M&Ms Premiums
6. 3 Musketeers Cherry & Raspberry
7. M&Ms Razzberry - Limited Edition
8. Cherry Almondine M&Ms

This fall Nestle announced it was launching Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups in January 2014. Butterfinger is an iconic American candy bar, combining peanuts and sugar and chocolate. The bar has been adapted into a half a dozen other formats and confections. There’s were Butterfinger BBs, Butterfinger Crisp, Butterfinger Snackerz, Butterfinger Stixx, Butterfinger Bites, Butterfinger Chocolate Bars and even the caffeinated Butterfinger Buzz.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Nestle decided to take on the cup format and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Nestle plans to go big with their launch of the Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups, with a full ad campaign including a commercial during the 2014 Superbowl.

There’s a couple of curiosities about these cups. First, they have no paper cups. They are fluted, but there’s no paper liner on the tray in the package.

The second thing is that they’re not round. The circular base is far smaller than the top, which is a rounded square. There’s quite an angle towards the top which means that the ratio of chocolate to filling changes at the perimeter versus the center.

The cups are described simply as Smooth & Crunchy on the package.

The filling is quite salty. There’s a creamy component that is very sweet, then the chunky, crunchy bits of Butterfinger centers. There’s a very strong artificial butter flavor to the whole thing, much stronger than an actual Butterfinger bar.  The chocolate profile itself is overshadowed by the butter flavor of the center, so it’s hard for it to contribute anything other than texture. That said, it’s pretty smooth though sweet. It’s certainly better than the coating on a Butterfinger Bar.

The ingredients are interesting, notably that they’ve removed the artificial colorings from this candy. (Butterfinger Bars have artificial yellow and red food coloring in them.)

Nestle Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups Ingredients: Milk chocolate (Sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, nonfat milk, milkfat, lactose, soy lecithin, vanillin), sugar, peanuts, peanut toffee pieces (sugar, corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, peanut butter [peanuts, dextrose, hydrogenated rapeseed and cottonseed oil, salt], peanuts, butter, salt, soy lecithin, paprika extract color), fractionated palm kernel oil, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, less than 2% of milk, nonfat milk, salt, cocoa butter, hydrogenated palm oil, natural and artificial flavor, hydrogenated rapeseed and cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, soybean oil, TBHQ, annatto and paprika extract color.

Contains milk, soy and peanuts, may contain nuts. No mention of gluten.

The package has the Cocoa Plan logo on the front. This is Nestle’s new initiative to bring sustainable practices to their cocoa growers through education programs. The programs are to help growers use better practices to increase yields, reduce losses as well as creating schools for the children in their communities. It’s an internal program that Nestle operates that does not, as far as I know, have any external audits or benchmarks, though they do also buy from Fairtrade and UTZ certified sources in quantities to match certain products so that they can bear their logo.

There are a lot of similarities between the Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It’s probably not a coincidence. Each cup is .75 ounces, with the package holding two totaling 1.5 ounces.

From the above you can see the long and complicated ingredient list for the Butterfinger Cups. The Reese’s cups are far simpler.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Ingredients: Milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, nonfat milk, milkfat, lactose, soy lecithin, PGPR), peanuts, sugar, dextrose, salt, TBHQ.

Simpler does not necessarily mean better. Both cups have TBHQ in them, which is a preservative (keeps the peanut oil from getting rancid). But both are rather small in mass for a candy bar these days. A Snickers Bar or Butterfinger Bar is over 2 ounces. These cups are kind of puny.

But in the ingredients list, you’ll notice that the Reese’s have no added oils, no fractionated palm kernel oil or hydrogenated rapeseed oil. But I’ve got to admire the bang for the buck I get with the Butterfinger, it has 20 more calories from fat than the Reese’s. Here’s the comparison of the nutritional panels for both cups:

So, the Butterfinger is less salty and just slightly fattier - some of the protein grams of the Reese’s are fat grams in the Butterfinger. This is an odd observation, since the Reese’s Cups I know and love usually have a soft, greasy spot in the center of the chocolate on each cup where the peanut oils have migrated from the peanut butter into the chocolate. As far as I can tell, the Butterfinger Cups are far more stable and consistent.

They’re different candies. They share some of their format and the basic flavors but the textural experience is different. I still prefer the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, but that’s probably because I’ve grown up with it. I don’t care for the fake, overly sweet butter flavor of the Butterfinger Bar or these Cups. But I do appreciate the variation in the textures. Overall, I usually go for the smaller ingredients list and I prefer my candy to have the innate oils from the flavor ingredients, not added ones. But it’s a good candy and I think they’ll probably last longer than Butterfinger Stixx.

Related Candies

1. UNREAL #77 Peanut Butter Cups
2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
3. RM Palmer Giant 1/4 Lb. Peanut Butter Cup
4. Justin’s Organic Peanut Butter Cups
5. Nestle Butterfinger Pumpkin
6. Nestle Butterfinger Snackerz
7. Head to Head: Clark, Butterfinger & 5th Avenue
8. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Line

The final bar in the trio of seasonal bars from Ritter Sport that I wanted to review is the Winter Edition Coconut Macaroon. As I mentioned in the review of the Caramel-Orange and Caramelised Almonds, the Ritter Sport seasonal editions are becoming much more readily available in the United States now.

I found mine at Cost Plus World Market, they were priced up at $2.99 a bar, instead of the usual $2.49.

I was most interested in how different this bar is from the Ritter Sport Coconut bar that debuted earlier this year. Like many of the Ritter Sport bars, this one is a cream filling, which means the first ingredients are sugar and palm oil. The Coconut Macaroon bar is filled with a milk creme and pieces of coconut macaroons and crispy rice. So the filling is a bit more textured. (I also recognize now that I tried a test market version of this a couple of years ago at the Ritter Sport factory.)

The milk chocolate is soft and the bar is easy to break. The coconut scent really permeates the whole thing, giving it a tropical note. The chocolate is smooth and creamy and milky. It might have been fun to see a dark chocolate used on this one to differentiate it from the Coconut bar.

The filling is light and has lots of crispy coconut bits and little rice flakes. The rice gives it a malty note, which balances out the sweetness a bit.

Overall, the cream bars are not a huge favorite of mine, they’re not greasy or heavy, but not really satisfying for some reason. The balance here is good, but I’d like to see Ritter Sport go for some more dark chocolate options for their seasonal bars going forward.

Related Candies

1. Ritter Sport Coconut
2. Nestle Crunch Girl Scout Cookie Candy Bars: Peanut Butter & Caramel and Coconut
3. Ritter Sport 100th Anniversary Edel-Nuss Mix + Bonus Previews
4. Dove Milk Chocolate Coconut Creme Eggs
5. Ritter Sport Sommer-Genuss 2010 Limited Editions
6. Limited Edition M&Ms Coconut
7. Russell Stover Coconut Wreath

SweetWorks, which makes many flavors of the break apart chocolate orange and Sixlets, also makes a wide variety of foil wrapped chocolate pieces and figures for all occasions.

Their holiday range is quite diverse, featuring chocolate balls, disks and semi-solid figures. The company sent me a huge box filled with confections to sample before Thanksgiving, and I’ve finally made it through all of the items before Christmas.

SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Ornaments are one of the classics. They’re just a little solid chocolate sphere wrapped in foil.

Foil Colors: Solid Hunter Green, Solid Red, Diamon Silver, Diamond Blue, Diamond Red.

Taste: The milky chocolate is very smooth and has a lot of dairy notes to it. It’s on the sweet side but also has a lot of vanilla notes to it.

Verdict: Very nice, easily munchable. This sort of piece will appeal to kids and adults.

Rating: 8 out of 10

SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Crisp Balls

Foil Colors: Hunter Green, Silver & Red

Taste: The milky chocolate has a nice ratio of crisped rice. It’s creamy, a little softer than the solid chocolate bars but not quite as sweet.

Verdict: This is what I want from my candy in my stocking. It’s comforting and filling but still attractive.

Rating: 8 out of 10

SweetWorks Dark Chocolate Balls

Foil Colors: Hunter Green, Gold & Red

Taste: These are extremely dark looking, almost black. I checked and noticed the ingredients list: sugar, chocolate, chocolate processed with alkali, cocoa butter, butterfat (milk), soy lecithin, and vanilla. So this chocolate contains alkalized cocoa, which makes it darker. It also has butterfat in it, so it’s not vegan, which is too bad, because it’s hard to find vegan holiday treats. The flavor profile is a little odd. It’s definitely not overly sweet, but the particle size of the chocolate gives it a slight grain and a dry finish.

Verdict: I liked them well enough to pick them out as something to eat in combination with other things, like nuts, but I didn’t like the dry afterbite.

Rating: 7 out of 10

SweetWorks Solid Milk Chocolate Bells

Foil Colors: Hunter Green, Silver & Red

Taste: These are a bigger bite than the balls, about 2/3 bigger, so it’s a lot more chocolate at once. I noticed the smoothness of the melt much more in this shape.

Verdict: These are easier to peel and eat, though one piece is a little bigger than I prefer a bit of chocolate to be. But they don’t roll around, so that’s a plus.

Rating: 7 out of 10

SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Bells

Foil Colors: Green with Silver Trees & Red with Silver Trees

Taste: These didn’t smell like much in the package, but once unwrapped there was a nice fresh peanut scent. The milky chocolate is really smooth and the peanut center was part meltaway, part peanut butter.

Verdict: They’re not the same texture or peanut flavor profile as Reese’s, so as long as you’re okay with that, these are very satisfying.

Rating: 8 out of 10

SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Medallions

Foil Colors: White Snowman, Blue Santa, Green Teddy Bear & Red Reindeer

Taste: Milky, sweet and creamy.

Verdict: This was the most disappointing design as far as I was concerned. They seemed dated and missed an opportunity for something a little more splashy. A simple patterned foil or perhaps better artwork for the illustrations would have put these over the top. I like the format of the disks, as they’re easier to bite than bells and something that can be used in S’mores very easily.

Rating: 6 out of 10

SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Santas

Foil Colors: Dominantly Red with Green & Yellow Accents - 4 designs

Taste: Thin and long, it’s an easy two bite piece. They were exceptionally shiny.

Verdict: Like the medallions, the design of the Santa foil is a little dated. But in the case I found it utterly charming, especially since I could walk them around on my desk and set them up in little tableaus as if they were interacting. The bonus here is that the Santa is molded with quite a bit of detail, so even unwrapped they’re beguiling.

Rating: 7 out of 10

SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Santas

Foil Colors: Dominantly Red with Blue & Bronze Accents - 4 designs

Taste: This has a similar light peanutty flavor to the Bells. It’s not a deep roasted flavor, it seemed a bit saltier and a little thick/stickier in the melt.

Verdict: I didn’t like the ratios as much as the Bells, but I have to appreciate the cute little Santa expressions.

Rating: 7 out of 10

SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Hollow Foil comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. They have Turkeys in full feather, Santas, Nutcrackers and a Rocking Horse. (I think they also do a Teddy Bear.) These are very sturdy, the foil is thick and well designed. Instead of a bit piece that wraps around to the back, these are crimped. This means that there’s a full front and back design with a large seam where the two sides are pinched together.

The sizes vary, as you can tell from the photos. As an example, the SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Santa is a little shy of 6 inches and weighs 70 grams (2.5 ounces). The base of the Santa is thick, which makes it very stable when standing. They’re all very attractive designs and would be good as either stocking stuffers or as decorations on a cookie plate or as place settings at a table.

The SweetWorks Hollow Chocolate Rocking Horse is 3.5 ounces, so the same as a standard tablet bar, only in a fancier format. SweetWorks uses all natural milk chocolate for their hollow molded figures. The ingredients list only: sugar, cocoa butter, milk, chocolate, soy lecithin and vanilla. They’re also kosher and gluten-free though processed in a facility with tree nuts and peanuts. The SweetWorks Hollow Chocolate Nutcracker is the largest of the pieces they make for Christmas, at 4.5 ounces and is nearly 7 inches tall.

The SweetWorks Milk Chocolate Turkey is only 1 ounce, but seems like a far larger portion. The base, like the others, is mostly solid which keeps the figure upright whether it’s wrapped or not. The chocolate tastes milkier and smoother than the foil covered balls. (My guess is that the formulation is just a little different for the molded chocolate because of the production demands of filling the intricate molds.)

Rating: 8 out of 10

Like the others, the molding details are great, it really is a nicely sculpted turkey and completely recognizable when it’s unwrapped. I liked these much better than the Hershey’s or Dove versions found at Easter, but they’re not quite as rich as the Lindt foil figures. I really liked the Rocking Horse though, I thought its design set it apart from the other offerings on the store shelves. I saw the Turkeys at Dylan’s Candy Bar, and I think they were $2.99 but online they’re a bit less. I just wish they were easier to find. For Easter they make a 3.5 ounce Yellow Chick and 3 ounce sitting Rabbit. It makes me wonder if there are figures that could be more “year round” or generic for parties and decorations since the Teddy Bear seems like a natural item for a baby shower.

SweetWorks can be found in the bulk bins at Dylan’s Candy Bar (and probably other places). Their foil balls actually come in a dozen colors and are also available as hearts year round in a wide color and texture palette. You’re more likely to find these online (you can buy direct from SweetWorks.net) and usually for a pretty decent price for all natural chocolate that isn’t Hershey’s Kisses.

Related Candies

1. Madelaine’s Foiled Milk Chocolate
2. Riegelein Confiserie Hollow Chocolate
3. Upscale Hollow Chocolate: Michel Cluizel & Hotel Chocolat
4. Russell Stover Hollow Milk Chocolate Bunny
5. Lindt Chocolate Bunnies (Dark & Milk)
6. Caffarel Figs & Chestnuts (Fico & Castagna)
7. Palmer Milk Chocolate Balls
8. Thompson All Natural Milk Chocolate Crisp
9. Short & Sweet: Butterfinger Jingles and Mint Miniatures

The Ritter Sport Winter Editions are more prevalent in the United States than they used to be. Webstores like German Deli and Chocosphere have been stocking them and I even found the complete set of the three special bars at Cost Plus World Market.

They’re $2.99 each, instead of the $2.00 or so that the regular non-seasonal bars go for. The Ritter Sport Winter Edition Caramel-Orange is a milk chocolate bar is filled with an orange cream. Like most other Ritter Sport bars, it’s 100 grams or 3.5 ounces and formed as a square with 16 individual sections.

Even though the bars travel pretty far and are packaged minimally, they’re always in great shape. I enjoy the format of the bar, as I like a thick piece, because of how long the melt may take, but I appreciate the deep trough sections that allow them to be broken into easy to eat pieces.

The milk chocolate in the bar is 30% cacao and 18% milk, so it’s a very milky but kind of chocolatey bar. The cream center is made of palm oil, sugar, milk products and actual orange powder (a mix of orange juice and orange pulp). It sounds kind of weird, but this also means that it’s different enough for all the other pumpkin spice and peppermint bar versions on the market right now.

The cream center is a bit darker and though not quite smooth or light enough to be a cream, it’s not grainy enough to be a fudge either. It’s orange, it tastes like orange juice - a little tart note now and then - and a bit like orange zest. There’s a slight grain to it, but it has enough fat in it to have a good mouthfeel without a greasy cling. The milk chocolate is robust enough to give it a cocoa note.

I’m finding that the more I have these cream filled bars, the less I like them. I love nuts and nut butters; I love crunchies and cereal bits; but emulsified palm oil and flavors just isn’t doing it for me any longer. These come in at 164 calories per ounce, which is a lot when those calories are not coming from cocoa butter, but from palm oil. Half a bar has 50% of my daily saturated fat intake. I think I’ll stick to the solid bars or the ones with nuts, but it’s nice to see oranges in a winter confection every once in a while. I’d like to see them do more with their marzipan bars, I liked the orange version they did as a winter edition and think that merits a revival.

Related Candies

1. Ritter Sport Winter Edition Caramelised Almonds
2. Limited Edition Ritter Sport Amarena Cherry
3. Limited Edition Ritter Sport Winter Kreation + Factory Store
4. Divine 70% Ginger & Orange Dark Chocolate
5. Choceur After Dinner Mints: Orange & Peppermint
6. Ritter Sport Peppermint
7. Niederegger Marzipan Orange

A few weeks ago I went to the preview opening of the brick & mortar store for Sugarfina. (More photos here on la.eater.) The evening included tastings of a half a dozen of their favorite candies and of course I got to meet one of the co-owners, Rosie, whom I’ve been corresponding with via email for about a year.

Sugarfina opened earlier this year as a webstore, selling a carefully curated selection of candies from around the world. Many of the gummis are made with all natural flavors & colors and come in extraordinary flavor combinations and shapes. The chocolates are a mix of whimsy and sophistication, with an array of malted milk balls, caramels and cordials.

Sugarfina displays morsels, everything in the shop is morselized, easy for hand-to-mouth sampling and when you’re not eating it, it’s fun to look at. While browsing the store, if you didn’t know it was candy, everything could easily be mistaken for beads or buttons. 

Guest were treated to a $10 gift certificate, which I put to good use right away. I even had a shopping list before I got there so I wouldn’t be distracted. I chose to create my own bento box. It’s a sleeve with three slots. It’s exceptionally well designed. The robin’s egg blue and white design is carried through the store and packaging. The inside of the box has blue scalloped concentric circles on white, as does the tissue in the bag it was placed in. The box itself is $4, which isn’t bad when you consider it doesn’t need wrapping and is durable & reusable. The cubes that fit in there were either $7 or $8.

The other change from my previous Sugarfina sampling is that the boxes for the candy have changed. They were a polyester soft plastic, which were not really that secure (hard to keep closed once you took the clear plastic stickers off). The new boxes are acrylic and after you take the labels off, they’re also reusable. They’re airtight, so any leftover candy keeps far longer.

One of the things that got me to actually go over to Beverly Hills after work was the fact that one of the new products is an Italian fruit gumdrop mix called Citrus and Berry Fruttini. They’re little pâte de fruit, coated in crunchy sugar.

The berry is a Wild Blueberry. They’re mild and sweet with a dark raspberry jam flavor and then that hint of black tea that I often taste in blueberries.

The yellow is Italian Lemon made from femminello lemons. I’ve never had a fresh femminello lemon before, but I’ve had limoncello, which is a sweet lemon liqueur that uses the peels. These are quite zesty and reminded me of Meyer lemons. It’s tart, it has a great balance between the sweetness and the oily flavors of the lemon oils.

The orange is Blood Orange. This one was definitely orange, but lacking the zesty notes that the lemon had. If I were to pick these up again, I’d go with the all Lemon selection, which they sell separately. There’s also a Wild Strawberry which I didn’t get to try.

Rating: 8 out of 10

I am quite fond of candies citrus zest, but the Aphrodite Kumquat goes far above and beyond that humble confection.

At the heart (sorry it’s not better depicted) there is a whole kumquat. It’s about the size of a small olive and completely candied. Unlike regular orange peels, the rind of a kumquat is pretty thin but when you eat the whole thing, you’re also getting the pulp inside. So there’s a juicy, tangy orange syrup at the center, along with the very strong clementine-like peel around it. Then it’s covered in a thin layer of chocolate. That chocolate is infused with the orangey oils and then the whole thing is encased in a beautifully treated apricot-colored sugar shell.

One is more than enough. They’re quite intense, the strength of the citrus oils are enough to leave my tongue burning for several hours. Sure, there are only eight of them in the box, but how could anyone eat more than two in a day?

Rating: 8 out of 10

The Chocolate Sparkles are also Greek and another special find. They’re like the smooth and flat little rocks you might pick up on the beach: except they’re an exceptionally unnatural shimmery blue.

The candy shell is thick, like a Jordan almond so there’s a lot of crunch. The dark chocolate center is smooth and creamy with an excellent silky melt and deep cocoa flavors. Unlike many dark chocolate lentils, these truly are made with dark chocolate that has no additional milk or dairy fat in it. (Though there may be traces of milk, wheat or nuts as they’re processed on shared equipment.)

Rating: 8 out of 10

These also came in yellow and pink, also with the shimmery finish. I don’t see them on the website, but they were definitely for sale in the store.

The prices are, well, Beverly Hills. However, unlike someplace like Dylan’s Candy Bar, where you portion out your generic candy into generic bags for $12.99 a pound, many of those products can be purchased at the drug store for a fraction of the price. Sugarfina’s per pound price point is more, about $25.00 per pound, but about 40% of Sugarfina’s candy can’t be purchased anywhere else in the United States and is far better quality than the drug store fare at most pick a mix candy stores. $25.00 per pound isn’t out of range for the chocolate items, but it is steep for sugar candy, even if it’s all natural.

Even though they don’t scoop by the pound, if you stop in the store, they do have little 1 ounce packets you can buy of many of the items to sample or just have a little treat. In true SoCal fashion they also offer a candy concierge.

It’s hard to rationalize it as an everyday candy shop (like I seem to treat See’s now that they’re walking distance from me), but the decadent packaging and precious treatment of the candy elevates it all to a different level. It’s not snacking, it’s sampling. It’s for grown ups.

Sugarfina
9495 S Santa Monica Blvd
(Little Santa Monica Blvd between Rodeo Dr. & Beverly Dr.)
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
website

Related Candies

1. Sugarfina: The Chocolates
2. Sugarfina: The Gummis
3. New York City Candy Spree
4. Limited Edition Ritter Sport Winter Kreation + Factory Store
5. Choward’s Spearmint & Lemon
6. Friday’s San Francisco Candy Adventure
7. Daffin’s Candies Factory & World’s Largest Candy Store
8. Dylan’s Candy Bar and Candy Bars

The Marabou Noblesse Crisps are chocolate thins made in Sweden. They come in four varieties, I have three of them to try: Original, Dark and Orange.

Though I’ve never seen Noblesse before, the concept is pretty simple. They’re thin disks of chocolate, about two inches around and really wafery. They have a little bit of crunch to them, thanks to some corn flakes. While I might have thought these were copycats of the Belgian Thins I’m seeing everywhere now, the Noblesse version has been around (if Google translate is accurate in this article about the package redesign two years ago) since 1964.

The boxes are simple, though not quite as enticing as some others I’ve seen at this price point. Here in the States these retail for about $6 to $9 for just 5.3 ounces. However, Marabou is working on sustainable sourcing for their chocolate and have the Rainforest Alliance logo on the front with at least 30% of their cacao content from certified sources.

I got my packages from Swede Sweets, which sent me a large selection of candy to sample.

The disks are stacked in four slots in the box, they’re easy to take out and portion (though I’m unsure how much a portion actually is, as the nutrition panel gives me the option of eating 3.5 ounces (100 grams) or the whole box, but not a normal amount, which I’ll guess is one stack or 1.33 ounces.

At about eight thins, it seems like a lot of candy.

The Noblesse Original Crisp comes in light red box and features milk chocolate. The Marabou milk chocolate ingredient list includes milk whey, which is not permitted in products labeled chocolate in the US, though it doesn’t bother me that much. The cacao content is 36%, which is a fairly robust milk chocolate. The flavor, however, isn’t terribly deep or complex. It’s sweet and milky with the little corn flake bits giving it more of a chew than a crunch.

The Noblesse Mork Choklad Crisp (Dark Chocolate Crisp) is very appealing. At only 48% cacao content, it’s not challenging, more comforting than anything else. The flavor is a bit thin, but the texture is nice with a strong coffee note to the whole thing. I finished this box first and if I were to seek these out, this is the option I would go for.

The Noblesse Apelsin Crisp (Orange Crisp) is also the same 36% milk chocolate with a strong orange oil note. This cut the sweetness for me substantially, but it’s a lot of orange. It’s even a bit salty, though the listing only says 100 mg per 100 grams of candy.

They’re a lot easier to serve from the package than the Belgian Crisps (also found at Trader Joe’s in a house brand). They’d be a nice hostess gift and something fun to serve to guests with coffee, tea and cookies around the holidays.

Related Candies

1. Sockerbit Swedish Candy Selections
2. Milka Bars, Milka Drops and some Li’l Milka
3. Belgian Milk Chocolate Thins
4. Cloetta Kex Choklad
5. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Crisps
6. Frugal Swedish Sweets