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IrelandWednesday, February 10, 2016
Tic Tac Be Mine MixLast year Tic Tac had a Valentine’s flavor called Be Mine Mix. It featured Strawberry & Wild Cherry in one box. The new version for 2016 has a couple of twists. First, there are three colors in the package, though the flavors are still listed as Wild Cherry & Strawberry Flavors. The appealing new feature though is that they’re printed. Tic Tac introduced printed little pieces last year with the Minions promotion (which was pretty genius in appearance, though in the States the flavor was not banana as expected, instead it was Passion Fruit). Since Tic Tac invested in this new printer technology, they’re trotting it out for other versions, including the Candy Cane version for Christmas, which were just peppermint Tic Tacs with little red candy canes printed on them. There are only three conversation starters here: I (heart) You, Hug Me and Be Mine. The type is quite wee, very hard for me to read without my reading glasses on, but love is for the young and able-eyed. The lightest pink tastes a bit like Strawberry Cake. I have no idea what it’s supposed to be but the shell part is smooth and sweet with very little flavor at first, the next layer down has a tartness and a definite strawberry flavor note. The center is softer and has more strawberry flavor but a really pronounce “cream flavor” which is not to say that it’s actually creamy, it just has a vanilla and maybe even touch of butter note. I don’t like it much. The medium pink is Strawberry, but this one, instead of the weird vanilla, the center has a menthol note on top of the berry. The red is Wild Cherry. This is well done. The outside is slick on the tongue with a very mild cherry sweetness. The next level down introduces the more varied cherry notes, a deeper jammy flavor and of course the tart bite. The center has a bit more chalky tartness. As a whole, it’s pretty good. I’m not usually fond of cherry, but this was the best one in the mix ... but it could be because I really didn’t like the others. All three go together pretty well, but as mints they’re not very refreshing as breath fresheners. The box is cute, but not distinctive as a Valentine’s item. I’d really only get this for someone as a gift or myself if I knew that I liked the flavors. The printing is certainly a novel addition to the brand, but it does decrease the enjoyment of the texture (the printing does not dissolve in the same way as the regular coating does). Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:46 pm Candy • Review • Valentines • Ferrero • 6-Tempting • Ireland • Target • Thursday, January 8, 2015
Guinness Luxury Milk Chocolate Caramel BarCombining spirits with chocolate is pretty common. There’s a new genre, though, the combination of brewed drinks added to chocolate. I picked up the Guinness Luxury Milk Chocolate Caramel Bar at an after Christmas sale, when it was only $1.49 for the Ireland-made bar. I’m not a beer drinker, as I don’t care for very bitter things, so Guinness has long been on my list of things that I don’t drink. Guinness is a dry stout introduced in Ireland in 1759. It’s quite dark and has a very distinctive look and long history. Flowing caramel skilfully handcrafted in small batches, flavoured with GUINNESS and set in a creamy milk chocolate shell to create a unique bitter sweet chocolate experience. So, as is the case with most alcohol-infused chocolates, the stout is mixed with the caramel, not the chocolate itself. The bar is nicely crafted. It’s a long bar, with domed segments. The indentations between the segments are pretty thin, so my bar was broken in several places, but along those margins. The good news is that the caramel does not enter those segment breaks, so it didn’t become an oozy mess. It smells distinctly of beer and milk, which really isn’t a pleasant smell in itself, only by association with pleasant experience with actual beer products. The yeasty notes reminded me more of bread, which is a nice combination with chocolate. The milk chocolate is quite sweet, though smooth and a bit on the fudgy side. The caramel filling dominated the flavors, though. There’s not a lot of caramel in there, but certainly flavorful stuff. It’s the flowing kind, with bready, malty flavors and a definite bitter hop note that wasn’t too distracting. There’s a smidge of salt, but not a lot of toffee or toasted sugar. I’m curious to try their Guinness Fudge, if it’s done with a lot of butter, because I think the yeasty flavors might go well. I’ll pass on the beer, caramel and chocolate here, though. It’s just too sweet, which is exactly what I wouldn’t want with beer. Related Candies
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Salted CaramelsThere’s a new term for what happens this time of year, it’s called Pumpkinundation: The proliferation of pumpkin and pumpkin spice products. (I discovered the term on Chowhound.) Salted Caramels were also a trend, but apparently every trend either dies out or simply becomes an everyday item. So, it has happened with Salted Caramel and so now they must be trendalized with the newest flavors of the season. These are Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Salted Caramels. Trader Joe’s makes a version of these for Christmas with white flake sea salt. They’re sold in the same box with a different design. They’re wildly popular, as they’re returned to shelves for more than six years in a row. Since Trader Joe’s will pretty much make a pumpkin spice version of every product they sell at some point, it was just the salted caramels’ turn. (I could list all of the items, but suffice to say that they’ve done tea, coffee, macaron, granola, ice cream, and actual pumpkin pie spice. Here’s a taste test from Serious Eats from a few years ago.) They’re described on the box:
The ingredients are all natural, but insanely long. The chocolates are made in Ireland (I suspect by Lily O’Brien). The filling isn’t just caramel, according to their list, but actually Sticky Toffee Caramel. There’s no list of what the spices are for their pumpkin spice. They’re lovely looking caramels, they do well in their package and emerge very shiny and with most of the salt still attached to the squiggle of milk chocolate on top of the 55% dark chocolate. Though I often find sea salt to be a bit over-hyped, as it’s used in such small quantities that it’s hard to tell different salts apart. In this instance I could tell it was Hawaiian Sea Salt ...and I did not like it. I can’t quite put my finger on it, a friend called it Spaghetti-Os flavored, I thought it was more like carrot, but there’s definitely an additional note to this salt. It was notable enough that for some of the pieces that I ate, I actually scraped the salt off completely. The spice smell is quite clove-heavy, even before I bit into it. The chocolate is earthy and sweet with a very good bitter note towards the end. It’s smooth and wonderfully tempered. There were no cracks or oozing spots on any of the caramels. The caramel has a light grain to it, which is probably the spice. There’s also a cereal sort of wheaty flavor to it as well. The other spice notes are earthy, with some ginger and black pepper notes and some cinnamon. Not really the best combination for me, if it were a pie, but it goes well with the chocolate. In the end, this was not a great combination for me, I didn’t like the plain version of these that much and the addition of the spice doesn’t do much for me either. I’ll stick to the individually wrapped Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels or the panned Butterscotch Caramels. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:13 pm All Natural • Candy • Review • Halloween • Trader Joe's • Caramel • Chocolate • 6-Tempting • Ireland • Monday, June 24, 2013
Cadbury Dairy Milk Golden Crisp and Mint CrispWhen some folks love a particular product, they can be pretty specific about it. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate is known worldwide, and because it’s so popular it’s made in several different locations around the globe. I’ve had Cadbury from Australia, South Africa, the UK, the United States and now Ireland. I picked up these Cadbury Dairy Milk bars that have little crisps in them. The Dairy Milk Golden Crisp is milk chocolate with golden honeycomb granules. It’s a bit bigger than an ordinary single serving bar, at 54 grams, that’s 1.9 ounces. The Cadbury Dairy Milk in Ireland is much like the UK version I’ve had, it’s made with a dash of vegetable oil. I can’t quite decide if this means that it’s mockolate or still chocolate, as it’s a small amount, but still replaces some of the much better cocoa butter that could have been in there. This chocolate also uses two emulsifiers, PGPR and ammonium phosphatides, which is similar to lecithin but made with rapeseed and glycerol instead of soy. The bar has a wholesome milky scent to it, not too sweet. There are a lot of little honeycomb bits in there. The honeycomb is also known as sponge candy or cinder toffee. It’s aerated boiled sugar, it’s usually a little salty tasting since it uses sodium bicarbonate to make the foamy texture. I love sponge candy, so this was definitely a plus. It’s less sweet than other crunchies can be, so it moderated the heavily sugared milk chocolate. Still, the chocolate was more on the fudgy and grainy side of things. It’s candy, not fine chocolate, so I considered it satisfying in that respect. The Cadbury Dairy Milk Mint Crisp was a nearly identical bar, the wrapper was accented with green in the theme of the mint flavoring. The ingredients were the same except for the notation for the honeycombed granules, which contain vegetable extracts of spinach, stinging nettle, and Tumeric. The Cadbury milk chocolate is 23% milk solids and 20% cocoa solids. I guess the rest is sugar and vegetable oil. The minty bar didn’t seem to have quite as many honeycomb bits in it. What it did have was a lot of mint. The peppermint was strong, though it was flavoring the chocolate, not the honeycomb ...so it’s not quite a Peppermint Bark experience. The milk is sticky sweet and the mint seems to highlight that, instead of diluting it. The chips were crunchy and had that lightly salty note to them. It didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the Golden Crisp, but still found it engaging. Overall, I didn’t sense too much that was better with the Irish version of Cadbury except that I liked this size of bar better than the large 100 gram tablets. I’m not a huge Cadbury fan, if anything, I’d opt for Kraft’s upscale and ethically sourced Green & Black’s dark milk chocolate. (And comparing the import price I paid for these bars, it’s actually a better deal.) Related Candies
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Meticulously photographed and documented reviews of candy from around the world. And the occasional other sweet adventures. Open your mouth, expand your mind.
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