Hershey’s makes several varieties of their Miniatures line. I picked up Hershey’s Special Dark Miniatures as I’d never seen them before and they seemed to promise dark chocolate versions of the old favorites Krackel and Mr. Goodbar (though not by name).

The bag was a bit larger than the other Hershey’s Miniatures that I bought at the same time and has only three varieties instead of four.

But the most notable part is the appearance of the little seal that Hershey’s puts on some of their dark chocolate confections, it says that this is a “natural source of flavinol antioxidants.” At only about 45% cacao content, yes, I guess it qualifies as a source, though not a terribly dense one. Hershey’s has some wonderfully convincing documentation about this on their website, though they’re probably purposefully vague about how much of these beneficial compounds are in any given serving.

The assortment here is rather balanced between the three varieties: 13 Special Dark, 11 Special Dark with Crisp Rice and 12 Special Dark with Peanuts.

I just reviewed the Special Dark on Friday, but for those who don’t feel like clicking over, here are the relevant parts of that again:

It smells sweet, a little woodsy.

The texture is rather chalky and doesn’t melt into a creamy puddle in my mouth. Instead it just tastes sweet and more like hot cocoa made with water than real rich chocolate ... there’s a thin-ness to it all, probably because Hershey’s now uses milk fat.

There’s a dry finish with a slight metallic bite to it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

The Special Dark with Peanuts comes in a mustard yellow wrapper, which I figured is to remind us of the Mr. Goodbar. Why they don’t just call it Mr. Goodbar Dark or Mr. Darkbar or something, I have no clue.

Though the ingredients on the wrapper are not broken out for each of the individually wrapped varieties, the list is clear, these are all real chocolate. There are no additional oils present except for those native to the chocolate or dairy ones (permissable in present definitions).

The little bars are cute and look really just like you’d expect a dark Mr. Goodbar - dark sheen and little nuts poking through.

It smells like dark roasted peanuts and cocoa.

The bite has a good snap and an immediate mix of bitter notes from both the peanuts (which look like they’re roasted very dark) and the chocolate. The texture isn’t super creamy, but is consistent with an okay melt.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I brought a lot of my own baggage to the Special Dark with Crisp Rice as I was hoping Hershey’s could be redeemed. Perhaps with the one hand they’d taken away a beloved favorite but with the other they’d snuck a glorious replacement into this mix.

It looks much like the Peanut version, but smells much sweeter with only the lightest whiff of malt.

The crunch isn’t as pronounced as the old Milk Chocolate or present Mockolate version, but has a nice texture. The malty flavor of the rice is completely lost in the thin cocoa flavor and sweetness. The texture doesn’t seem as creamy or melt as easily for some reason, but I can’t call it waxy.

It’s less bitter than the others though, so provides a nice counterpoint.

Is the Krackel and Hershey’s redeemed? No. But it’s a passable effort.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I didn’t even try asking Hershey’s what the ingredients for the individual pieces are, because I’m not entitled to know should I decide to pick only one of the variety to eat.

If I needed to buy a chocolate miniature assortment from Hershey’s again, I’d have to pick this one up instead of the old favorites. But even with the higher ratings than that one, I don’t see myself picking this up again.

Related Candies

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2. M&Ms Premiums: Dark Chocolate
3. Hershey’s Nuggets Double Chocolate
4. Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces
5. Kissables Dark

Hershey’s Miniatures were introduced in 1929. At that time the assortment was pretty much the same: Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, Krackel and Mr. Goodbar. (Though Hershey’s made a bar called Semi Sweet, the present iteration, a dark version didn’t find its way into the mix until the Special Dark came along.)

Hershey’s bills the mix as A little something for everyone (r).

I remember as a kid getting these in both my trick-or-treat haul and my Christmas stocking. They’re a great mix of candy because even though everyone has their favorites (and my rankings for them have changed over the years), even if you don’t like all of them it’s pretty easy to find someone to trade with.

Each piece is a nice size, two bites for those who prefer to savor or one big bite for those looking for a quick fix.

I wasn’t sure when I picked up the bag if they have a consistent mix, so I documented mine. It actually feels like a good proportion: 11 Hershey’s Milk Chocolate and 6 each of the Krackel, Mr. Goodbar and Special Dark.

This particular bag was 9.2 ounces, they’re available in a wide variety of sizes though and often in bulk bins at large grocery stores.

It’s hard to approach a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar without some sort of personal history. Those of us who have grown up on them know the flavor pretty well, though I don’t think most of us think much about it. Those who taste Hershey’s for the first time as adults though have expressed strong dislike for the taste and/or texture. All I can say is that it’s distinctive and they wouldn’t keep making it if someone didn’t like it well enough to keep buying it.

It has a sweet smell, a bit milky and dare I say, cheesy (feta) and milky. There are also notes of black pepper and caramel.

One of the nice things about the Miniatures is that the bar is thicker, so a bite (half the bar), is a nice mouthful that give more opportunity to revel in the flavors and textures. The milk chocolate is rather fudgy, not quite firm even a room temperature. It dents instead of chipping or flaking and is more likely to bend than snap. It’s a little grainy like a fudge, but the particle size is small. The flavors are strong, it’s sweet without burning the throat and has some mellow cocoa notes mixed with that inimitable tangy yogurt flavor of Hershey’s along with some toffee and maybe a touch of hazelnut.

I hate to sound like an old fart, but I think it was better before. I think something happened that it became grainier.

It sounds like I hate the stuff, but I don’t. I feel the same way about it as I do for things like Fritos, American cheese, grape soda and Fudgesicles. They’re really not that good, but I love them anyway.

All I can do is hope they don’t make it worse and give them a 6 out of 10.

The Special Dark bar was introduced in 1971. I always liked the packaging, but not the bar itself. It looked rich and sophisticated, which appealed to the part of me that yearned for status that could be bought for 20 cents at the corner shop. But to actually eat one as a child was akin to eating raw fish, I just didn’t have it in me. Yet.

Similar to the milk bar, this one also has a slightly soft snap.

It smells sweet, a little woodsy.

The texture is rather chalky and doesn’t melt into a creamy puddle in my mouth. Instead it just tastes sweet and more like hot cocoa made with water than real rich chocolate ... there’s a thin-ness to it all, probably because Hershey’s now uses milk fat.

There’s a dry finish with a slight metallic bite to it.

So while I’ve come to love and prefer dark chocolate, this is like eating cheap chocolate chips to me. A diversion while I wait for the better choice ... like those freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or a wonderful single origin Ocumare bar.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Mr. Goodbar was introduced in 1925. Later, during the depression, the bar was sold as “a tasty lunch” back when meal replacement bars were simply candy bars. (And it’s still not a bad idea if you get a really nutty bar.)

Even though the bars are smaller these days and don’t cost a nickel, it’s tempting to think that this bar is unchanged since Milton Hershey started producing it.

Sadly it’s not a war or a depression that’s change Mr. Goodbar. I can’t say what The Hershey Company is thinking these days but they’ve changed it. Mr. Goodbar is no longer a chocolate bar.

Instead he’s a silly oiled up shadow of what he used to be. The description of the bar was more recently peanuts in milk chocolate but is now just made with chocolate and peanuts.

The bar looks the same as ever. A milky, chocolatey sheen with little peanuts peeking through. It smells like deep roasted peanuts and sugar. (More like peanut brittle than a chocolate product.)

The flavor is overwhelmingly peanut. The peanuts are roasted dark too, so there’s a slight burnt taste to it that I think is meant to mask the nonexistent chocolate.

Yes, this mockolate is shallow and unimpressive. The texture isn’t all that different from the Milk Chocolate bar, but it has a different melt. It’s cool on the tongue. It’s actually salty (looking over the ingredients in the old recipe and the new, salt now appears).

For a mockolate bar, it’s quite passable. For a time tested icon it’s a travesty. I don’t care how depressed I am or the country might be, this is not a tasty lunch.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

Krackel, I’m told, is the last candy bar that Milton Hershey developed that still exists today.

It went through a few changes over the years, when introduced in 1938 it had nuts and crisped rice but by the late 40s it was a simple crisped rice and milk chocolate bar. (The packaging was also similar to the Mr. Goodbar, sporting a yellow stripe and brown instead of its present red.)

Today the bar is all but gone. The full size has been discontinued (2006), only the miniature remains. To add insult to injury, the bar isn’t crisped rice in milk chocolate, no, now it’s made with chocolate and crisped rice.

One of the things the Krackel bar has had going for it over the years, especially in the miniature size is the crisped rice. They’re big crisped rice pieces. Nestle Crunch has moved to some sort of BB-sized rice product that just doesn’t deliver the depth of crunch or the malty & salty taste.

The crisp is definitely there, the malty flavor peeks through. But the

mockolate, oh this isn’t even worthy of being wrapped up and called R.M. Palmer.

I’ve given away four of these little bars and asked people what they think to people who profess that the Krackel is their favorite in the miniatures assortment. I didn’t preface it with anything, yet they all recognized that this was terrible. Empty, vapid, lacking all chocolate flavor, no creamy component and no puddle of chocolate ooze melting so that all that’s left is the rice crisps.

I was curious how mock this mockolate was but I am simply unable to get the information out of Hershey’s. (Read more about that experience here.) It’s just disgusting that Hershey’s, the Great American Chocolate Bar company, is making this ... they should have just let this bar die a natural death than let it be zombified into this mess.

Rating: 1 out of 10

There is nothing to do but simply stop buying this deplorable product. 12 out of the 29 bars (41%) here are not even chocolate and yet I’m paying chocolate prices!

If you like the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, I’d suggest getting just the snack sized bars, they’re a little bigger, but at least you don’t end up with any Krackels or Mr. Goodbars and you get more value for your money. (Unless you were looking for some individually wrapped & solidified cooking oils.)

Related Candies

1. Kissables (Reformulated)
2. American Value Chocolate Bars
3. The Shame of Some “Healthy” Candy
4. Whoppers Twosomes

I was wandering the candy aisle at Gelsons, an upscale grocery chain in Southern California, on Saturday night and happened upon a new chocolate product I’d not seen before.

Called Perugina Nero, it looks like a pretty direct import, as the package was all in Italian except for a sticker on the back with the ingredients & nutrition facts in English. The sticker covered up the native descriptions though, so all I could glean was that they were thin tablets that appeared to be a little smaller than business cards made of chocolate.

The chocolate leaves come in three varieties: 70% Cacao, 85% Cacao and Gusto Arancia (Orange Flavor). I went for the Arancia because I really love the touch of orange essence combined with dark chocolate.

The box is pretty big but holds only 3.38 ounces. The price was right though, at $2.99 on sale, it’s about the same as an imported chocolate bar.

Inside the box is a tray sealed in cellophane. Four little compartments hold stacks of three little chocolate cards. It feels like a bit of overkill on the packaging, but I have to admit that it did a nice job, all my cards were pristine.

The pieces are 2.75” by 1.75”. Each piece is far thinner than a regular chocolate bar as well, even the tasting squares that I’ve picked up before, each is only 8 grams (most tasting squares are 7-12 grams but only 1” square at most).

The little leaves are quite pretty, with the stylized Pegasus emblem on each.

They smell of woodsy, smoky chocolate and quite strongly of orange.

Biting into a piece, it sits on the tongue and melts right away, releasing its flavors quickly. I got a rush of rich chocolate, bitter tones, woodsy flavors that combine bark, coffee and Popsicle sticks along with the bright notes of orange essence and then a low bitterness that echoes the orange zest and dark chocolate.

Even though the chocolate itself isn’t particularly buttery, the quick melt because of the format gives it a creamy component I often find difficult to tease out of big chunks of chocolate without chewing it a bit.

Since the box is essentially the equivalent of the large 100 gram tablet bar, this is a great solution to sharing. It’s a great option for serving with coffee or tea or even an aperitif. The pieces are lovely to look at, though serving right from the tray isn’t quite elegant, neither is cracking up a regular bar and flattening out the foil wrapper.

For those who are watching their calories, each leaf has 42 calories. The impression of a large portion if you were to eat two leaves would still only deliver 84 calories, a decadent treat without busting your diet. (Though they’re not individually wrapped or anything, so nothing to stop you from eating the whole box.)

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1. Ghirardelli Intense Dark
2. Vanilla Beans KitKat & Bitter Orange Aero
3. Voisin Papillotes
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Nestle Noir is a line of dark chocolate bars from Nestle. I got two bars Nestle Noir Eclat Caramel and Nestle Noir Cerise from Canada (courtesy of Amber a few months ago).

The large format bars come in a smart black box with a spare and enticing design and the further promise that this is a product of Switzerland.

The dark chocolate is 64% cocoa solids and features pieces of “crunchy caramel” (what US-folks would call toffee). The dark chocolate recipe contains butteroil (milkfat), so don’t expect a pure experience.

The bar is lovely to look at, with nicely molded segments, glossy sheen and crisp snap. In addition, the caramel bits look like they’re nicely distributed.

The chocolate is dark and rich, not complex but rather robust. There’s a bitter tone to it that seems to come more from the caramel bits than the chocolate itself and it’s rather nice. The caramel bits remind me of sponge candy - very dark burnt sugar notes. They’re crispy and pop with quite a bit of flavor considering they’re so small.

I was shunning this bar for months but now that I’ve tried it, I think it’s a really good effort. I wouldn’t spend more than $2 for it, but for something found at the local drug store, the caramel bits really make this one stand out from the crowd of syrupy filled bars.

Rating: 7 out of 10

The other bar was one I wasn’t even going to review (which is why there’s no photo of the bar unwrapped). Cerise ... that’s cherry. I’m not fond of cherry flavor, though I do like the actual fruits.

But then I read the ingredients. Yes, it’s 64% cocoa solids too and has butteroil but it also has real cherries in it. But in addition there are apples and pineapple and later in the listing some artificial color & flavor (though it appears far more color than flavor). It’s a fruit salad in a bar of chocolate. Curiosity wins.

It smells woodsy and rather like maraschino. Oh, and then biting into it, it was apparent that it was more of a cherry-flavored bar than a cherry-studded bar.

The fruit bits are soft and chewy, kind of tangy, a little grainy (as some dried fruits can be when the sugars crystalize) and a rather noticeable shade of pink. They don’t taste like much of anything though. The flavor seems to come from the chocolate itself.

No, this doesn’t work for me at all.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I’m still curious to try their caramelized nib bar. This 64% chocolate base is a bit firmer and smokier than the Cacao Reserve that Hershey’s came out with, so I’d like to compare the two nibby bars.

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Altoids has a pretty wide variety of flavors and their newest innovation (from late 2006) is offering their most popular mint flavors covered in dark chocolate. This summer Wrigley’s has not only brought out a new mint flavor, Creme de Menthe, they also offer it in the Altoids Dark Chocolate Dipped Mints format.

The dark brown tin with gold and green accents looks rich and inviting. It was easy to spot on the rack at the checkout at Safeway when I was up in the Bay Area and I was lucky enough to catch them on sale, too, at only $1.50 for the package.

The tin design has been revised a bit in the past year. (Here’s the old and here’s the new.) Inside is a kraft brown waxed paper liner.

The dark chocolate covered mints don’t look like much and look identical to the previous varieties. They smell, well, minty and chocolatey.

I prefer crunching mine. The chocolate cleaves off pretty easily and the mint inside has a satisfying crunch. But the chocolate is pretty good too, though tastes more of mint than chocolate, it’s creamy and has a buttery melt and dry finish.

I can’t quite peg what Creme de Menthe is in the first place, so all I can say is that this variety is for people who would like Altoids but find them too strong.

These are like eating a hardened Junior Mint. The dark chocolate complements the mellow mint well, the mint lingers and feels fresh and cool longer after it’s gone.

I ate the whole tin. While the curiously strong Peppermint variety keeps me from eating more than, say, eight or ten in one sitting, it took me only two sessions to eat this whole package. But of course the package only holds 1.76 ounces, so it wasn’t a huge binge. And my breath smells pretty good now. I think I might prefer the softer bite of something like Junior Mints, Dutch Mints or York Peppermint Patties, but I have to say that the crunch was different enough that these aren’t quite interchangeable. (But they are more expensive.)

As with all the traditional Altoids mints, these have gelatin in them and are unsuitable for vegetarians.

Related Candies

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2. York Mints
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I picked up this Christopher Elbow Artisanal Chocolate bar in San Francisco a few months ago and have been saving it for a time when I need a little sparkle.

Elbow is known for his inventive combinations of spices, fruits and savories with chocolate. His bonbons are distinguished by their bold and bright patterns. His bars, on the other hand are subdued and understated and dare I say lacking any pretension that a bonbon piece named Strawberry-Balsamic Caramel might connote (or my favorite from Elbow right now is the Venezuelan Spices Chocolate Pecan Turtle).

Instead his bars are numbered, currently 1 through 12. I picked up No. 6 Dark Rocks which features 61% dark chocolate blended with popping candy.

The bar is anything but intimidating. The fresh brown & aqua box protects the sizable 3.5 ounce bar well. It’s wrapped inside with a simple silver aluminium foil. (A little thin for me, I like a foil I can wrap and unwrap a few times before it falls to bits.)

The bar is simple looking, just 24 little sections. No logo, no letters, no names.

It’s a glossy dark brown with a good snap to it. The little popping candies are easily seen in a cross section, though don’t look quite as dense as the Pop Rocks Bar.

The chocolate is smooth and on the sweet side but has a wonderful buttery quality that sets this apart from any other pop rocks confection I’ve had to date.

Letting the chocolate melt means that the pops come out as a little background sizzle. Munching the bar means that they crackle and hiss. Either way is certainly a different experience.

They’re expensive at $7 a bar, but of course not your every day fare. A fun bar to share, especially for a special occasion.

There are plenty of other bars that caught my eye on the list though, so I’m more likely to experiment (I’m likely to go for the white chocolate with nibs next) before buying this again. But I have a few friends who adore this bar and still others that I would consider gifting this in the future.

Last year I was introduced to Feodora chocolate by my husband who brought me this lovely Hazelnut bar. It was just whole hazelnuts in a rich and sticky milk chocolate. Very tasty (but had bloomed so I didn’t do a full review but somehow managed to eat it all anyway).

In order to properly review it though, I needed to find more.

Feodora is a German chocolate company who named their line of bars and chocolates after Feodora, the sister of the last German Empress and half-sister to Queen Victoria. As an imported brand it’s not as easy to find for me as some others from Germany like Hachez or Ritter Sport.

I picked up this small assortment of Feodora’s small bars at the Fancy Food Show way back in January and found them in my chocolate stash.

Vollmilch-Hochfein Chocolade - 37% Kakao mindestens - sweet but quite deep with strong raisin and grape flavors, smells a little like a mild cheesecake but very creamy.

Edel-Bitter Chocolade - 60% Kakao mindestens - has a wonderful buttery consistency, but a strong and bitter taste. The notes are of balsam woods, coffee, cherry and dark teas.

Grand’or - 75% Kakao mindestens - The Grand’or is reputed to undergo a long conching process, which results in an extra smooth chocolate, so I wasn’t concerned with the texture. It was just as buttery and creamy smooth as the 60% but really intensely flavored. Some dark cherry and tea notes were present here along with charcoal and cedar. It’s quite rich, one of these tiny bars was absolutely satisfying.

The bars are very consistent in their consistency - lovely smoothness and even flavors. The molding was pretty and the tempering spot on for each of the small pieces. They’re not that expensive for import bars, leading me to believe this is a mid-range bar. You can get them online from German Deli and I’ve seen them at Mel & Rose’s Wine & Liquors.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m often a sucker for packaging. In this case it’s the Feodora Mocca’s. Little coffee flavored dark chocolate bits shaped like coffee beans. In this case they came in a gold box with a flip open top and a very attractive cup of coffee on the front. Since I’d already tried the little chocolate bars, I thought something in their flavored line would be ideal. Still, they were $3.99 for 75 grams.

They’re actually quite a bit bigger than real coffee beans at 3/4 of an inch. Each was nicely formed, flat on one side and with a little lengthwise cinch to simulate a bean.

The bittersweet chocolate is smooth, and actually a bit bitter with the authentic taste of freshly roasted coffee infused quite strongly. (It’s 3% coffee according to the label.) It was every so slightly grainy which was disappointing after the smoothness of the bars, but forgivable compared to the gritty nature of many coffee bars I’ve had over the years.

The coffee chocolate is also available as a bar, but I think I’m willing to pay the premium for the cute box and shape of the pieces. But I reckon I’m only going to do that once or twice a year at most. But they’d make a nice stocking stuffer for any coffee fiend.

Related Candies

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5. Milka Alpenmilch
6. Ritter Darks

This is another Canadian import, the Cadbury Caramilk Deluxe.

I got it from my Canadian candy source, Amber, along with a bunch of other bars that we simply can’t get here in the States (Oh Henry!). While the Caramilk bar has an American counterpart, the Caramello bar it just doesn’t have the same profile.

It turns out the Caramilk bar is the #3 bar in Canada. Different versions seem like a no-brainer for capturing a bigger market share. (I tried the Caramilk Maple, too.) But they might want to include it on their website (I think it was launched in mid 2007, so you’d think someone might have updated the site since then).

You can tell this is a modern candy launch because Caramilk Deluxe has its own Facebook page.

Instead of the traditional bar format, the Caramilk Deluxe opted for pieces. There are four little milk chocolate molded pieces tucked into a folded paperboard tray. At only 45 grams (1.59 ounces) it’s a bit smaller portion size than a regular candy bar. But don’t worry, it still clocks in with 230 calories.

They’re a little bigger than the regular sized Rolos (which is kind of what I was expecting at that point), more like a hefty Hershey’s Kiss.

The nicely molded pieces have a little swirl on the top. Again, nice touch for something called Deluxe.

As I don’t live in Canada and didn’t think to look for this on Facebook, I just had to muddle through my first tasting. There is no description on the package of what it is, just the picture. And the picture is vague. Sure, I get that there’s a shell and caramel ... but what is that red-brown stuff at the top?

Well, even after the first bite I wasn’t sure.

The caramel is flowing, sweet and extremely smooth. The chocolate is milky and tastes kind of like pudding. The other filling is rather like dark chocolate fudge. But it tastes like Oreo cookies. A very dark, burnt cocoa flavor. While thought the slight chew of the fudge was a little offputting, the flavor it added was pretty good.

Since they seem to be marketing these to women as a little indulgence the packaging and little pieces feel upscale. But the flavor of the product is pretty ordinary. If you’re a Caramilk fan, you might like these, but I’m not going to go placing a special import order or anything.

Related Candies

1. Big Mo’ Bars: Peanut Butter & Creamy Caramel
2. Fran’s Gray Salt Caramels
3. Cadbury Eggs: Creme & Caramel
4. Head to Head: Rolo vs Caramel Kisses
5. Short & Sweet: Caramello /  Mega M&Ms / Orange Kisses