Candy Blog

At the Fancy Food Show in January I saw these lovely little items and couldn’t wait until I found them in the store.

The name isn’t so enticing but at least it’s accurate: Real Eggshell filled with Hazelnut Chocolate Truffle. I found mine at Cost Plus World Market, which has a great selection of Easter candy this year. They were a bit expensive at $3.99, so for some folks this might replace the chocolate rabbit if they’re on a budget.

It’s a real eggshell that’s been emptied and filled with a gianduia. The shell is then resealed with a little sticker dot over the hole, painted up and sold. The chocolate resolidifies and when the shell is peeled off, it’s like hard boiled egg made of chocolate.

I thought it might be cute to serve them as a dessert like a soft boiled egg. I didn’t try it myself, but I’m guessing instead of sticking them in the fridge before opening you could pop them in the microwave for 10 seconds or a pan of hot water for a minute to make them soupy. Then it’d be like a rich hazelnut pudding that you’d eat with a spoon.

Even though it’s what I’d consider a novelty product, the ingredients are gourmet: sugar, hazelnuts, cocoa butter, cocoa liquor, milk powder, soy lecithin and vanillin. I didn’t refrigerate either of mine before opening them, so I think as long as it’s not too warm (over 75 degrees) they remain solid enough to peel.

I opened mine two different ways. For the green one above I peeled off the sticker at the bottom. This showed that the painting is added after the filling is added, as the sticker is also painted and the margin under it is still a white chicken egg shell. For the second egg, the yellow one, I just smacked it against the edge of a table and pulled off bits.

Both eggs I had contained a void inside - so thought this one looks like it’s a hollow egg, the vacant space isn’t really that large. It’s kind of like the real air pocket in chicken eggs.

The truffle inside is soft, smooth and creamy. The hazelnut flavors are the best part - grassy, roasted and nutty. The dairy and cocoa butter keep it ultra smooth and the cocoa touch mellows it all out. It’s on the sweet side, not as sweet as Nutella or a Milka bar, but sweeter than the dark chocolate versions of gianduia I’ve had from Caffarel.

The confection is a novelty that lives up to the promise. It’s beautiful, unique and charming though a bit problematic to consume. I thought the best way to eat it was to expose enough truffle filling and then bite it off. Then I misjudged and got a little eggshell ... eating eggshell makes me think I’m eating my own teeth (I know, weird phobia). Finally I ended up taking off all the shell and muddling through with melty fingers.

$3.99 for 1.75 ounces actually isn’t that bad for true European gianduia, but still it seemed expensive because of the effort involved in getting the shell off. My favorite style of egg decoration is the laborious Ukranian style. That would be inappropriate for these because the shell is destroyed to get to the candy (Ukranian Egg Decoration or Pysanka application would also destroy the filling, which is added first). The point is that I didn’t care much for this airbrushed 80s reminiscent dayglo abstract.

Though the package says that the 1.75 ounces are a single portion, I found it too much to eat in one sitting. It’s 290 calories.

Related Candies

1. Laica & Caffarel Chocolate Eggs
2. Nestle Creme Eggs
3. See’s Hollow Eggs with Novelty
4. Princess Marshmallow Eggs
5. Godiva Easter Eggs
6. See’s Scotchmallow Eggs
7. Kinder Egg

Last weekend I went to ExpoWest, which is a natural products trade show held in Anaheim. There are about 30 choccolate or candy companies that display there so I try to stop by for a few hours during the show to check out the new treats. This year I saw that Sjaak’s, the California-based chocolatier that’s Fair Trade, Organic and often Vegan had some new items.

These little floral shaped bites are Hazelnut. Amazingly they’re also vegan - so no dairy products in there even though it’s “milky.” The chocolate is smooth, the hazelnut flavors are pretty bold. (I think a darker chocolate option would be fun, too.)

Wonka introduced a line of jelly beans back in 2006 (original review). They were matte, opaque pastel jelly beans with a strange grainy shell but familiar SweeTart flavors.

This year the product seems to have been reformulated, though there’s no mention of it on the package which is also redesigned. Readers alerted me that they were different this year.

The 2010 version of SweeTart Jelly Beans are more vibrant and come in the current SweeTart flavors of Cherry, Lemon, Grape, Blue Punch, Green Apple and Orange.

I noticed the color difference before I even took the bag home. They’re more opaque and shinier with consistent colors. They’re at once familiar and a little different.

The version I’ve had before had a grainy and cool-to-the-tongue shell. When I saw these and remembered the comments, I was wondering if Wonka was just using the Spree Jelly Beans which have a harder shell.

The shell is more crisp than the previous version and the flavors seem a little more distinct and intense. They also seem to be more faithful to the flavors of the chalky original SweeTarts disks. But what’s missing is probably the tangy hit that the real SweeTarts have.

As you’ll notice, I found quite a few abnormal ones in my bag. These were a few that had distinctive shapes, quite a few were just larger than what I’d call normal or smaller than what I would have thought should be the target. They all tasted fine - the narrow ones obviously had more shell to them proportionally.

They’re still nice - the grape is much better as it is tangier now. I enjoyed the citrus flavors even though they weren’t particularly sour. Green apple is okay, though bland and I usually pick out the cherry and blue punch ones but if I ate them it’s not the end of the world.

In the end, the update is definitely different but I wouldn’t call it an improvement. I think it brings them more in line with what I’d expect from a product extension but still not as good as actual SweeTarts. Now if they could only do the SweeTarts Chicks, Ducks & Bunnies with all the flavors of SweeTarts we’d have something to talk about.

The versions I’ve tried before (2007 & 2008) were made in Canada. This bag was made in Mexico. There are no allergen statements on the bag, so they may be nut free/gluten free and contain no animal-derived products.

Related Candies

1. Lemonhead & Friends Jelly Beans
2. Big Tex Giant Jelly Beans
3. Hot Tamales Spice Jelly Beans
4. Smarties Jelly Beans
5. Wonka Nerds Jelly Beans
6. Lifesavers Jellybeans

Most Easter candies are pale pastels and muted colors. The new Easter Dots are just the opposite - incredibly bright little knobs of flavored jelly.

More stuff I’ve photographed and eaten but never written up as a full review. Here’s an array of bars from the small confectioner called Coco-Luxe. They’re rather different from mainstream fare and all happen to contain cocoa nibs.

Coco-Luxe Monkeyin’ Around bar is milk chocolate with banana chips, cocoa nibs and alfa sea salt.

Coco-Luxe Spumoni bar is white chocolate with dried cherries, pistachios and cocoa nibs.

Coco-Luxe Roark is dark chocolate with cocoa nibs.

You can see the full package images by clicking on the thumbnails:

Saint Patrick’s Day isn’t exactly a big candy holiday. Potato and shamrock flavored candies, thought they exist, aren’t exactly mainstream.

Godiva, who is always good at merchandising, has a limited edition Shamrock Mint Truffle. These dipped bonbons are right up my alley, they’re a a classic mint ganache with Godiva chocolate chips enrobed in a dark chocolate shell and strung with a lucky green shamrock.

Godiva was kind enough to send a box of them to me, you can also get them as singles in the store. A box of 5 retails for $12. (The samples I got came in a box of six ... dunno why that was.)

The spheres are beautiful. I’ve mentioned before that I prefer enrobed chocolate over molded pieces, there’s something about the tempering of enrobed chocolate that I think has a better mouthfeel. So these had me right away with their excellent attention to detail. The little clovers in a white chocolate colored light green were cute - the flavoring wasn’t too sweet and didn’t distract from the rest of the confection.

The pieces smelled mostly of minty chocolate. The whole thing reminded me of mint chocolate chip ice cream. The shells were thin and coated the cream filling expertly - none had any cracks or leaks.

The filling was creamy smooth with a light mint touch. They were sweet, but the dark chocolate did a good job of balancing it out. They really were the bonbon version of mint chocolate chip ice cream. The only hesitation I had with them were the colors - I don’t know what the ingredients are but the center looks like it might have a touch of coloring in it, which makes it look like grout, not some sort of decadent peppermint ganache. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be a year round item (though I could see a little peppermint candy candy decoration for Christmas).

I ate the whole box with very little help: Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

Johnny also has a review of them.

Related Candies

1. Fannie May Mint Meltaway
2. Robitaille’s Presidential Inaugural Mints & Turtles
3. Hershey’s Nuggets Double Chocolate
4. Kohler Chocolates Garden Ganache & Toffee Mountains
5. Ritter Sport Peppermint
6. The Mint Kisses

I love candy.

That is all.

Feeling a little sluggish after having an hour ripped from your lazy Sunday?

How about a little spot of sweet espresso and some dark chocolate to get your going?

I picked up these little Espresso Filled Dark Chocolate nuggets at Cost Plus World Market. I think they’re made by Mieszko, a Polish candy company. I was hoping they’d be like the Ferrero Pocket Coffee that are so hard to get here in the United States.

The packaging was nicely done. The stand up pouch has a zipper lock for re-sealing. Each individual piece is wrapped in a paper-backed foil and then a thin cellophane over that to seal it up tight. Often I worry that filled chocolates will be cracked or oozy, but every one was perfect.

The little domed rectangular nuggets are about one inch long, 3/4 of an inch wide and about the same high. The dark chocolate isn’t particularly dark, the package says that it’s at least 40%. It smells rich and dark, but that’s about as good as it got on that front.

The chocolate shell was nicely tempered and thick enough to be a strong container for the liquid center. The chocolate is smooth but far too sweet and lacking in bold chocolate punch. The espresso goo inside is a smooth and syrupy texture. It smells nicely of coffee but is sticky sweet. I liked the sweet roasted barley notes to it, but it wasn’t what I’d call espresso at all, I’d call it a Postum syrup.

It’s too bad, the price was decent and the fact that they’re pretty easy to find if you have a Cost Plus World Market nearby would make them a great item for coffee lovers. But these aren’t for coffee lovers, they’re for people who heap spoonfuls of sugar into their espresso and call themselves coffee lovers. In reality they’re for sugar lovers who like coffee flavor ... nothing wrong with that and here’s a candy to go with that. (I know, I said at the top of the review this might be the caffeinated pop to get you going after the time change, I was wrong.)

Related Candies

1. Javaz - Milk & Dark Chocolate Covered Coffee Beans
2. Bouquet of Fruits Vinyeard - Wine Filled Chocolates
3. Java Twix
4. Trader Joe’s Espresso Chocolate
5. DeFranco’s Espresso Secrets
6. Pocket Coffee