Here’s how to decode the code on a Hershey’s wrapper. Hershey uses a two digit alpha-numeric code to denote the month and year of the expiration date. Here’s what the Hershey’s site says:

There is an ink stamped code on Hershey’s products. Within that code, usually at the end, there is a two character code that represents the year and the month until which the product is expected to be within its peak freshness. The first character is a number, (0-9) that represents the year. The second character is a letter, (A-L) that represents the month. A=Jan., B=Feb., etc. For example, a code of 7D is best before until April 2007.

My Hershey’s Twosomes Almond Joy (Limited Edition) bar has a code that’s on two lines:
1BE
7C K2

I’m guessing the 7C is the one I want, so that means that the bar is considered fresh until March 2007.

My York Peppermint Patties:
13NYU
6K

This would expire in November 2006, so I got in just under the wire.

A Heath bar:
14HR2
D 6L

This one would expire in December 2006. Just remember, L is the LAST month!

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These were introduced almost two years ago, so I was a little confused by the NEW! starburst on the package. But I hadn’t had them anyway, so into the basket they went.

I don’t know when citrus flavors stopped being the normal “sour” flavors, but I’ve missed them a bit. It’s not like blue raspberry is any more natural as a “licorice” flavor than orange or lemon.

These are a wheat-based chew, which is what most “licorice” is. The center is flavored and then dusted with a sour sugar coating. They smell really nice as a combo - a little floral, a little fruity and a slight tangy essence. Leave them in a desk drawer and it’s kind of like an edible sachet.

They’re wee morsels, smaller than most licorice bites. They have the same basic star shape in cross section, which is great for holding onto all the sour dust.

Strawberry - mild in the strawberry department and with a decent tart bite.

Cherry - a nice chemical cherry flavor with a solid sour kick, but no complexity. A bit of a bitter aftertaste.

Green Apple - a pretty good sour apple flavor with a combo of the floral notes and that realistic apple juice taste and a sizeable tartness that satisfies. My favorite of all of them.

Blue Raspberry - floral and with an odd sort of yellow mustard note in there that confused the heck out of me. Not as sour tasting as some of the others and of course the mustard thing was kind of unpleasant.

Overall, they’re tasty, but don’t really provide any more candy satisfaction than some other tangy chews that I’ve had lately. I might even prefer the Sour Strings I had this summer or the SweeTarts Shockers - Shockers have the lead because of the variety in a single roll.

They’re back!

I know folks were clamoring for them, and now they’re back again. Limited Edition Cherry Cordial Creme Kisses were first offered last year as part of Hershey’s ever-expanding Kisses line. I’m not sure Hershey’s realized how popular they’d be, but folks really wanted them and Brian from Candy Addict even started a petition online which led to a column in the NYTimes magazine this summer.

After all that hullabaloo, Hershey’s has quietly brought them back. Again as a Limited Edition item. It’s a little unclear if they’re going to become a seasonal offering which would be kind of cool ... I’d suggest Valentine’s Day, but no one asked me.

After all this, I’d never tried them before. With good reason, they’re cherry flavored.

Here I am with two bags of them, so I’ve got to give it a go.

They’re dreadful. Truly, I find them disgusting. They’re beautifully made. A shiny milk chocolate shell containing a flowing fondant with a strong wild cherry flavor. The center actually isn’t that sweet, but the milk chocolate is, so there’s a little “too sweet throat tingling” going on. The cherry flavor is very strong and lasts a long time. I ate about eight of them last night, brushed my teeth, went to bed, got up, brushed my teeth and I can still taste that cherry flavor ... it must be like garlic and gets into your bloodstream or something.

Granted, one of the reasons I probably don’t like cherry is this medication they used to give kids to sedate them before surgery (I’ve had it twice) - it was bright pink and they’d bring it in a little paper cup and it smelled kind of appealing at first (that’s how they suckered me in, that and I hadn’t eaten in 12 hours) but once in the mouth it washed down my throat with a fire that made me distrust those nurses for the rest of that stay in the hospital and the next. It seriously made me think that I was on fire and of course anytime any of my hospital roommates were faced with drinking a similar cup I warned them of the consequences (much to the dismay of the nurses and orderlies ... it was a good thing I was in traction and couldn’t spread the word further afield).

All that said, you may find it hard to believe that I’m happy Hershey’s is making them and if you’re a fan you should start scouring the stores and pick them up. It’s great to see that perhaps public opinion shaped their decision to bring them back. They’re a little more expensive than the regular solid Kisses (they’re pretty complex to make and they’re dumping way more of that cherry flavor in there than I expected). So if you’re a fan, celebrate! If you don’t find them at stores there’s always eBay and of course, my source, CandyWarehouse.com.

Remember Zotz? Those hard candies with a sour and fizzy center? These aren’t those.

Jolly Rancher Double Blasts are billed as “flavor-infused powder filled candy.” Each little bag contains a mix of two flavor combos, Chorange (Cherry outside and Orange inside) and Raspilime (Blue Raspberry outside and Lime inside).

Each little candy rod is about the same diameter as a pencil. The color and shape makes them look more like little pegs that you’d use with Tinkertoys than candy, but that didn’t keep me from putting them in my mouth (or from them marking them as a choking hazard for young children). The hard candy outside is nice, it’s tangy and flavorful but not at all like the traditional Jolly Rancher hard candies that have a pliable stickiness to them. Pretty soon, as the candy dissolves, especially around the seams, you start getting a little jolt of the powdered center. The center is the second flavor and is not that strong, but the texture and effect is pretty stunning.

The powder is made from erythritol, which is a sugar alcohol like xylitol that has an instant cooling effect. It’s also sweet, which is also a plus!

They’re pretty addictive in the sense that each time I ate one, I was trying to either crack them open with my teeth to get to the super-cooled center or suck on the candy so that as much of it as possible had dissolved by the time I got to the powder. In the sense that the flavor combos are tasty, well, I could take them or leave them. I was surprised at how much I liked the Chorange, seeing how the bulk of it is Cherry and the Raspilime was just kind of boring (and my assortment had twice as many Choranges).

I’m hoping they’ll do some other flavor combos, but I’m most interested in the other version of these called Sour Bolt Blasts, which might be more like Zotz and have one flavor through and through.

Of course they still make Zotz, so I could just go find some of those.

These candies were made in Canada.

I’m a complete dufus sometimes. I bought these thinking that they were chocolate/cocoa almonds. I don’t know what led me to believe that, seeing how they’re kinda small but perhaps it’s that I wanted some chocolate/cocoa almonds.

I got them at the 99 Cent Only Store, and though the package says that they’re 99 cents, they were only 50 cents.

Think of them as Peanut M&Ms without the crunchy candy shell.

They have a nice texture, the peanuts were good quality, although a little uneven in size. When you pop them in your mouth, they’re a little bland. The cocoa is only slightly bitter, but keeps the chocolate from melting. The chocolate was sweet but balanced well by the cocoa coating. The nuts inside tasted like dry roasted and salted peanuts, which is a completely different experience from Peanut M&Ms. The hit of salt really balances the chocolate and coconut and of course goes really well with the peanut itself.

They’re not as neat and clean to eat as M&Ms and other “glazed” chocolate nuts. Leaving these sit on a piece of paper on my desk means a bit of cocoa and sometimes a little greasy spot.

As a treat, I think I’d be most likely to eat this at a movie or while watching a video. It’s a large but controlled portion and the balance of salt and sweet would be pretty satisfying and of course little individual pieces makes for easy sharing.

The bag is a generous 2.5 ounces, so if you find these on sale, it’s a good deal. At 99 cents it’s still not bad either.

There was nothing else like a Jolly Rancher when they first came out. Back then green apple and watermelon were radical flavors ... actually, when I was a kid, the slang term “radical” wasn’t even in use yet.

I really wanted these to be good ... like a gummi bear version of a Jolly Rancher, only in Jolly Rancher flavors.

They come in four flavors - Watermelon, Apple, Orange and Cherry. They’re a little tart jelly candy with a sugar sand coating on them. They’re not gummis at all, there’s not even any gelatin or pectin in the ingredients list, it’s sugar, corn syrup and corn starch plus a little flavor, tartness and color. They’re kind of small morsels too, about the same size around as a nickel.

Cherry - not quite a black cherry flavor, this was like a sour cherry and definitely a chemical flavor. This one differed most from the hard candies I was used to.

Watermelon - oh, it’s like summer distilled into a strange pink chemical. Sweet, tart and floral all at once but not really much like the real stuff. But still good.

Apple - tart and appley with that distinct artificial taste, but completely faithful to the Jolly Rancher flavor.

Orange - as usual, my favorite. Tart and with a good citrus essence mixed with a completely middle-of-the-road Tang flavor. Satisfying.

The package warns that mouth irritation may result from the high “sour level” but I didn’t find them that sour at all. The flavors actually blended pretty well - you can pop an apple and watermelon in your mouth together or an orange and cherry and find a pleasant surprise. But they weren’t “Screamingly” sour in the slightest.

My biggest quarrel with these is that they go sticky very quickly. I don’t know if it was the insane heat of Los Angeles or that they just do that after the package has been opened. It doesn’t seem to have effected the flavor, except maybe they’ve bled together a smidge. But really, there’s nothing really compelling here. It’s not a true chew like a Starburst or a gummi or a jelly ... they’re just kind of soft and certainly not sour enough to warrant being called anything more than tangy jellies.

This review is in honor of the New York Times Magazine column yesterday, called Consumed and written by Rob Walker on the subject of limited edition candies.

This particular candy is the perfect example. It’s a good, tasty bar that probably has limited appeal and will therefore never be seen on shelves again. Oh, how I mourn for some of these here-and-gone bars.

When I was a teenager my mother got a hold of a tapioca pudding mix that was coconut and orange flavored. You wouldn’t think that’d be a good idea, and I’m not sure I even liked it at first, but here it is, some 25 years later and I’m still pining for it.

The Mounds Island Orange bar is as close as I’ve come to recapturing that taste. (Yes, my mother tried to make it from scratch last time I was at her house, but it just wasn’t the same - something about the proportions was wrong ... don’t get me wrong, it was still tasty and I had two helpings. I love tapioca.)

It’s a regular old Mounds bar from the outside, it doesn’t even smell any different. A strong chocolatey aroma but no trace of the orange burst that awaits inside. That’s right, the coconut is orange flavored. Zesty orange and coconut, which really cuts the sweetness of the filling and allows the chocolate to shine through. (This is a much better idea than last years Key Lime Almond Joy which had a white chocolate coating flavored with lime ... whereas I would have preferred a coconut center with some lime essence in it.)

The center is a freakish orange color, as if someone took the pulp out of a fresh orange. It’s rather unnaturally orange, and it seems pretty silly that they would color the inside of it like that. But the flavor feels natural - not chemical in the least and I really enjoyed how each of the flavors played off each other.

I bought two of these bars, mostly because I saw that Joanna loved them as well, so if you’re a Mounds fan and enjoy zesty flavors, pick it up before it’s gone.

Though there’s little reason for me to be buying candy with the huge stockpile I have from the All Candy Expo, I couldn’t help but stop at the 7-11 on Friday on my way home from work. That’s when I spotted these two marshmallow limited edition items: Marshmallow Take 5 and Marshmallow Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

In the Marshmallow Take 5, the marshmallow replaces the caramel that’s normally found in there. Hershey’s has been mucking around with the Take 5 in these limited editions for a while, but none of the newer versions have been very satisfying in my opinion and this one is no different.

The bar smells wonderfully sweet and peanutty, but upon biting into it, it becomes freakishly fake tasting with a strong vanillin component. The peanut butter holds its own and the salty pretzel gives a welcome crunchy component but it still can’t drown out the sickly sweet marshmallow.

The thing I noticed about both of these bars is that the marshmallow isn’t fluffy like I’m used to with the Campfire kind. It’s rather latexy but very smooth.

(See other Take 5 reviews: Take 5, Take 5 White Chocolate, Take 5 Cookie & Take 5 Peanut Butter.)

The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup with Marshmallow was similar to the Take 5 in that it smelled and looked normal until you bit into it. Then there was a bit of flowing and slick marshmallow at the bottom of the cup, similar to the new Reese’s Caramel cup.

I found eating the first cup that I didn’t really like how overwhelming the marshmallow was to the texture of the crumbly peanut butter center. So for the second one I turned it over, so that the peanut butter layer hit my tongue first. Much better, but still, the sweetness of the marshmallow gave me a sore throat and didn’t really add anything to the experience.

I’m wondering, however, what a candy cup with caramel at the bottom and then flowing marshmallow (like a See’s Scotchmallow) might go over. Joanna at SugarSavvy.net also reviewed them yesterday.

(See other Reese’s reviews: Reese’s full line, Easter Eggs,  Snack Barz, Nutrageous, Reese’s Sticks, Fast Break, Reese’s Cookies, White Chocolate Reese’s & Reese’s Bars.)

In the mean time, I hope Hershey’s has gotten the impulse to add marshmallows to everything out of their system.