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Kraft/MondelezTuesday, October 13, 2015
Toblerone Toasted Corn CrunchLast year about this time Toblerone introduced a new version of their classic milk chocolate mountain bar: Toblerone Toasted Corn Crunch. Oddly enough, they were available exclusively at that time at duty free shops in Europe. I never thought I’d run across a bar. But I was strolling the candy section at Cost Plus World Market and not only did they have a stack of them, they were also on sale for 99 cents for a 3.52 ounce bar. The bar features Toblerone’s Swiss milk chocolate with toasted crushed corn, honey and almond nougat. The bar format is exactly like all the other Toblerones. This comes in the classic cardboard prism box. Inside there’s a foil wrapped bar made of 12 triangular segments. The bar looks like any other milk chocolate Toblerone from the sides, but the bottom reveals there’s lots of bumpy stuff inside. The scent is sweet and milky along with a really strong corn note. The corn doesn’t smell quite like popcorn, more like, well, corn or maybe polenta. The chocolate is quite sweet, though smooth, it’s very sugary. The corn bits are like corn nuts, very crunchy though not quite hard enough to break any teeth. (Sometimes I feel like I’m chewing on teeth when I eat corn nuts.) The combination of the lightly malty, cereal flavor and the very mild chocolate is pretty good. There’s a nice boost of salt in there, which also offset the sugary chocolate. But I never really got the nougat and honey flavors that I enjoy so much in a Toblerone. The only good thing is that I felt like it keep me busy a long time, as I was working those corn bits out of my teeth for about 20 minutes. It’s an interesting bar but I see no need to consider it as a replacement for a Ritter Sport Knusperflakes (Corn Flakes). It’s hard to be harsh on the bar when it’s so much better than a Nestle Crunch Bar which is half the size and the same price. As far as their new bars, I think the Toblerone Salted Almond is worth seeking out. Toblerone still does not provide consumers with any information about their cacao sourcing with regards to ethics or sustainability. The bar contains eggs, soy, milk, corn and almonds. It’s made in facility that also handles other tree nuts. There’s no gluten statement on the package. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:11 pm Candy • Review • Kraft/Mondelez • Chocolate • Kosher • Nougat • Nuts • 7-Worth It • Switzerland • Cost Plus • Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Marabou Oreo BarOne of my contacts at Swede Sweets offered to send me this Swedish bar from Marabou which features Oreo cookie pieces. Marabou is now owned by Kraft/Mondelez, so they can use real Oreo cookies and call them that on the package. I’ve had quite a few bars over the years that have Oreos in them, as Kraft also owns Cadbury, Toberlone, Terry’s and Milka. (Well, I’ve had the Cadbury and Milka Oreo bars, I’d love to try a Terry’s Chocolate Oreo-orange, once they invent that.) The bars that I’ve had were cream filled bars, that is, they were milk chocolate bars with a palm oil cream center with cookie bits mixed in. This bar is just what you’d think a cookies & chocolate bar should be. The bar is made with Rainforest Alliance certified cacao, and contains at least 30% cacao. As a European “family chocolate” it also contains whey, which is considered a filler in the US, but then again, the US products with far less cacao mass to be called milk chocolate. Whey is just milk protein, it adds bulk without sweetness or extra fat, so as additives go, it’s not detrimental, though it can make the texture a bit more gummy. It’s a big bar, at 185 grams, which is 6.53 ounces ... about twice the size of the usual large tablet bar. The look of the bar is good, it’s large, so it was broken in a couple of places, but along the segmentation lines. The bar isn’t particularly thick, which means that the inclusions weren’t going to be very dense. The segments aren’t quite square, they’re about 1 inch on the longest side. There really aren’t that many big pieces of cookies, but a bit of cookie crumb/grit to the whole bar. Marabou chocolate is quite milky, though some of it’s flavor has that powdered milk note to it, but it’s also marked by some good notes of malt and a generic sweetness. The cookie bits are good, less sweet than the overall milk chocolate. The bits aren’t numerous enough for me, which led to a moreish quality that kept me eating it ... hoping I’d stumble upon the piece where all the cookies were. I think a single serve, thicker bar, might mean better proportions if they continue with this. The Hershey’s density of cookie bits in their Cookies N Creme bars is a good target (it’s easy to see how much is in there because it’s a white confection with dark cookie bits). I wouldn’t pay the premium to import this if I were ordering on the internet, but if I stumbled upon this in an airport, in a regular size, I might pick it up again. As near as I can figure, this bar contains milk, soy and wheat (but your Google Translate experience will vary, as will your ability to find the umlaut key). There’s no statement about peanuts or tree nuts. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:41 pm Candy • Review • Kraft/Mondelez • Marabou • Chocolate • Cookie • Ethically Sourced • Mockolate • 6-Tempting • Sweden • Friday, May 2, 2014
Cadbury Dairy Milk PebblesThe trend of making little poppable versions of popular candies extends to Europe, so when I saw these new Cadbury Dairy Milk Pebbles in London, I picked them up. Cadbury already makes several morsel versions of their popular Dairy Milk chocolate. They make Buttons, which are little disks and of course the Easter version, the Cadbury Mini Eggs which have a shell. Now Cadbury has a shell candy for all year round consumption, completing their entry into the world of morselization. I’ve also seen that Cadbury’s parent company, Mondelez (once part of Kraft) has created bagged mixes that include the Pebbles, mini Oreos, and Maynard’s gummi candies. Kind of like the M&Ms Sweet & Salty Snack Mix that came out from Mars. Like most Cadbury chocolate products in the United Kingdom, this is not real milk chocolate. It’s what’s commonly called “family chocolate” which is a nice way of saying, “We don’t need to waste expensive cocoa butter on children, we’ll substitute some oil in there.” So it’s a quasi-mockolate product that uses some cocoa butter and some vegetable oil. Still, it’s not like it’s R. M. Palmer mockolate, it’s made from 23% milk content and 20% cocoa content ... then, you know, some sugar and a few oils, natural colors and shellac. Instead of going with the typical lentil shape, the pieces are like flattened Cadbury Mini Eggs. They’re kind of like guitar picks. The colors are plain, for the most part when I dumped them out of the bag they were a little chalky looking but polished up pretty easily with a paper towel. (I figured they deserved a little spa treatment after being carted partway around the world.) The yellow ones are a bit strange though, because of the all natural colorings, the ingredients on this particular one is a little odd. It’s kind of like curry ...a little grassy. The chocolate center is smooth, a little malty but with a thin punch of chocolate flavor. The shell is wonderfully crunchy, outside of the odd yellow one. The whole combination is really a great candy, I enjoyed eating them, though it certainly didn’t satisfy my desire for chocolate. I would be interested in trying these in some sort of mixed bag with mini Oreos and perhaps a few nuts. I doubt that Cadbury will attempt to license this to Hershey’s for production under their deal. So American’s will have to content themselves with imports or just stocking up in the Easter version. They contain milk, corn and soy. There’s no statement about nuts or gluten. Though Cadbury has started certifying some candies with sourcing information, the Dairy Milk Pebbles did not have a the Fair Trade or Rainforest Alliance stamp. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 10:48 am Candy • Morselization • Review • Cadbury • Kraft/Mondelez • Chocolate • Mockolate • 7-Worth It • United Kingdom • Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Maynard’s Sour Patch Kids Soda PopzYou would think that a candy as special as Sour Patch Kids, first introduced in the 1970s in North America, would be available all over the world by now. Sour Patch Kids are basically sour sanded Swedish Fish (also introduced originally by Malaaco but now made by Cadbury/Adams, now part of the global Mondelez/Kraft snack empire) and have become a sort of genre of candy all on their own. There are a dozen different varieties, from single flavor (watermelon), fruit & berry shapes and odd flavor combinations. Back in 2012 Mondelez introduced Sour Patch Kids to the United Kingdom under the brand Maynard‘s, which was already known for its kid-friendly sugar candy lines. They weren’t a straight-up import though, the flavors were tweaked to include blackcurrant and instead of being a jelly candy, they were made with gelatin ... now they were gummis. I actually wasn’t aware of this history before I went to London. All I knew was there were some new Sour Patch Kids flavors not sold in the United States: Maynard’s Sour Patch Kids Soda Popz. The flavors are Cola, Orangeade, Cherryade, Tropical and Apple Fizz. They were easy to find but rather pricey for the 160 gram bag (5.64); they retail for £1.48 or about $2.50. What originally interested me was the cola. There are Haribo sour sanded cola gummis, but no vegetarian options as far as I knew. Well, if you read closely above, the Maynard’s version contains gelatin (though it’s bovine, so if you avoid pork products, you can still eat these though they’re not marked Kosher or Halal). Cola was definitely the star here. It’s quite tangy at the start and though I was thinking these might have some sort of fizzy component, they’re just sour sanded. The cola flavor is well rounded with some spicy notes as well as a good lemon and lime zesty citrus bite. The flavor seemed a little more intense than the Haribo Happy Cola, but still didn’t quite rival the excellent Cuba Libre gummis I got last year from Sugarfina. Orangeade was going to be my second favorite by its description, because I used to like orange soda. But this was strange. The sour start was good, but the flavor got strange after that. It’s sweet but not very orange and there’s a darker note in there, almost like there was a mix up and some tropical flavoring was dumped in there. Cherryade is weird. At first it tasted like a medicinal cough drop, then it was pleasantly sour, then it went back to the cough drop. It’s almost like a Dr. Pepper, the cherry flavor is that far off from the wild cherry of Life Savers. Of course I’ve never had British cherry soda, so this might be a great imitation. Apple Fizz is interesting, but only in a disappointing way. At first it tastes like a sour Jolly Rancher, with a little note of actual apple juice ... but then it tastes like I’m chewing on a vinyl children’s wading pool. It’s pretty awful. Tropical actually tasted like blackcurrant, if that’s possible, with some guava thrown in for soupy sweetness. Definitely distinctive, definitely one I avoided. For a late entry into the sour sanded gummi, these aren’t good enough to compete, at least in the US. Now, if Cadbury/Adams wanted to make a jelly version of these for the US, I’m absolutely interested. The flavors, however, should be more like our popular sodas: Cola, Cherry-Cola, Root Beer (or Grape if the sourness is an issue), Lemon-Lime and Dr. Pepper (or whatever that flavor is). Maynard’s Sour Patch Kids Soda Popz are not gluten free. For a local opinion, hop over to Grocery Gems for a review. While I was pondering Sour Patch Kids, I saw at the store that there’s actually a new flavor in the current mix. Thankfully they didn’t boot a flavor out of the standard berry, lime, orange and lemon mix, instead they’ve just added in blue raspberry. I picked up a box, mostly to compare the texture of the gummi version to the jelly version. But I figured I’d give the old blue a try, too. My initial impression without trying them was that blue raspberry was going to be too close to the Swedish red flavor and wouldn’t be distinctive. The sourness of Sour Patch Kids is distinctive - it’s tart, it’s sandy, but the powder is actually less grainy in the North American version than the UK. It’s immediately sour, but not such a thick crust that it doesn’t dissipate quickly. Mostly I was tasting this for the new blue flavor, but I reminded myself why Sour Patch Kids are fantastic. Blue is a light raspberry flavor, there’s a strong sweetness to the center with a light floral flavor ... but this is pretty much the profile of the red one (Swedish Fish flavor). It’s not quite as intense, but if you gave these to me with my eyes shut, I don’t think I could tell the difference. In fact, I separated out a pile of blue and red mixed, and at them without looking and really didn’t know the difference. The lime, lemon and orange are easy to pick out, even though they’re all citrus. There’s no problem, as far as I’m concerned, to simply have another berry flavor in the mix, even if it’s not distinctive. I’ve always wondered why they didn’t have grape though. My favorite will always be orange, it’s zesty and soft and sour. All the right things in all the right proportions. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 11:34 am Candy • Review • Cadbury • Kraft/Mondelez • Cola • Gummi Candy • Sour • 5-Pleasant • United Kingdom • Monday, January 13, 2014
Marabou Black Saltlakritz Milk ChocolateI knew from the first time I heard about this bar from Sweden that it was not for licorice haters. It’s called Marabou Black Saltakrits. It’s described (in English!) on the front as Milk chocolate with pieces of salty licorice. When Swedes say salty licorice, they don’t mean sodium chloride, like the regular sea salt or table salt. They mean ammonium chloride which has a distinctly more metallic flavor profile and can give the licorice an ammonia note at times. It’s marked as a king sized bar, and in Sweden that means 7.76 ounces ... they’re a unitary parliamentary representative democracy under constitutional monarchy, so they have a slightly more generous meaning for king-sized candy bars than we do here in our federal presidential representative democracy under constitutional republic. This very big bar is about 8 inches long and 3 inches wide. As it traveled quite a distance to me (from its origin in Sweden to Kristian in Germany who packaged it up and sent it to the far side of North America) it was broken in several places, so photographing the whole was not very attractive. Marabou is owned by Mondelez (Kraft) and this particular bar uses Rainforest Alliance certified cacao (30%). It doesn’t say anything else about the sourcing of the milk products or sugar. The bar contains soy and milk and may also have traces of almonds, other nuts and wheat. The bar smells great, like sweet creme brulee and a hint of anise. The licorice was not at all what I was expecting. The bits are little little toffee shards, they’re crunchy, not chewy. There’s no molasses, so it’s a much more pungent licorice flavor than a mixed sort of Australian or American chewy flour-based licorice. If you’re familiar with cinder toffee or sponge candy, which has a note of sodium bicarbonate in it, you might find this familiar, too. The licorice has a sharp note that’s rather salty but sometimes taste more acidic. It’s sharp and sweet but overall pleasant in small bits, but large pieces are off-putting. The creamy and ordinary chocolate is great as a background, it balances it all out, though offers nothing in the way of actual cocoa flavors. It’s quite milky, which is also fine. A few bites, and I like it. But more than a square and I definitely start getting an overabundance of the ammonia going and have to give it a rest. This is something I absolutely do not need a king sized bar of, I simple little one or two ounces would have sufficed. Still, it’s one of the best salted licorices I’ve had - I liked the crispy texture and quick dissolve. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 2:21 pm Candy • Review • Kraft/Mondelez • Marabou • Chocolate • Ethically Sourced • Licorice Candy • 6-Tempting • Sweden • Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Milka Amavel Chocolate Pastry TorteIn my candy swap late last year with Kristian of CandyBrain.de in Germany, I got a few unexpected treats. This Milka Amavel Konkitorei Schokoladen Torte was among them. I appreciate how easy to find and inexpensive Milka is, but for my tastes it’s too sweet and relies too much on tropical oil laden fillings than actual cacao content. Fun for kids, but not necessarily the decadent treat I’m usually willing to pay the import premium for. The Milka Amavel, if Google translate is to be trusted, is Loose cocoa cream on fine chocolate cake, covered with delicate Milka Alpine milk chocolate. I’m going to guess that loose cocoa cream (Lockere Kakaocrème) is actually something along the lines of a chocolate mousse (going with the alternate meaning of fluffy instead). Inside the box are two individually-wrapped pieces. They’re 60 grams each (about 2.12 ounces). They’re thick, chunky squares of about 2.5 inches. It’s a weird size, because it’s more than a single portion, but less than two. The domed pieces are nicely made, nicely molded with six sections and some little drizzly effects on them. They do smell rich and cakey, like brownies. The bite is soft, inside is a base of a sort of dry cake base and a chocolate cream. There’s an immediate note of rum; I did notice the ingredients listed Alkohol, so I wasn’t surprised. The effect of the different textures is great. The cream of the filling makes up for the dryness of the cake and the rather fudgy Milka chocolate, with its note of hazelnut, does a good job pulling it together. So, even though I said one piece was more than one serving ... I ate it in one sitting. Nicely done, Milka. I have no idea if these are available in the United States, but you may see them in airports as Kraft (or Mondelez) is doing a pretty good job of getting these into gift shops in larger metro airports. Contains milk and lactose, eggs, nuts, gluten, soy plus alcohol. No statement about other allergens like peanuts. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:05 pm Candy • Review • Kraft/Mondelez • Alcohol • Chocolate • Cookie • 7-Worth It • Germany • Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Milka MilkinisMilka is a popular brand of chocolate confections that originated in Switzerland and is now run by Kraft under their Mondelez snack division. The bars are kid friendly, and marketing with attention to their high milk content. They also have a touch of hazelnut paste, too. The box says that Milka is Europe’s #1 brand of chocolate. Milka comes in dozens and dozens of varieties. In Europe, they can take up six or eight feet of aisle space with their products (photo) and often retail for less than a Euro for a 100 gram bar (photo). Milka Milkinis are a milk chocolate confection with creamy filling. The box holds eight slender, foil-wrapped bars and weighs 3.08 ounces. I’ve seen these at Target for a while, usually for about $2.50 a box, but the 99 Cent Only Store also has them for only a buck. Of course you get what you pay for. Though it says milk chocolate, that’s used as an adjective, not a noun. It’s a confection made from:
A serving is 4 bars, or about 1.5 ounces, which tallies to 260 calories - a whopping 173 calories per ounce ... a peek at the rest of the nutritional panel reveals that’s 17 grams of fat, 10 of which are saturated and account for 50% of your RDA of saturated fat. (I don’t usually mind as much if it’s cocoa butter, but I do mind palm oil). The bars are about 3 inches long and about 2/3 of an inch wide. They’re rather flat and have four segments with the Milka cow icon on each. The chocolate coating is quite thin, as you can see from the cross section. This candy is mostly filling. The filling does have a good milky flavor to it, there’s a light hint of malt or a mellow note of something more minerally (there’s 8% of your daily RDA of calcium). There’s also a bit of salt in there, about 75 mg per serving, which is odd because the ingredients don’t list it. It’s soft and kind of pasty. It’s not like a chocolate bar, not quite like fudge. More like a bar of frosting. I didn’t love them. They were okay, I can see children enjoying them, they’re attractive and the small portion of the individual bars at least makes it easier to moderate intake. If I wanted this sort of creamy thing, I’d probably opt for the Lindt Lindor truffles, even though they’re more expensive. Milka contains hazelnuts and dairy products, as well as soy. (It’s confusing that they use both soy and sunflower lecithin, maybe they’re in transition.) They’re made in a facility that also processes wheat and almonds. There’s no statement about peanuts at all. Mondelez is currently buys 50% of their palm oil from certified sustainable sources and should be 100% by the end of 2015 (source). They have no stated plans for their cacao sourcing, though some is sourced through Rainforest Alliance and noted as such on their packages. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 2:24 pm Candy • Morselization • Review • Kraft/Mondelez • Mockolate • Nuts • 5-Pleasant • Poland • 99 Cent Only Store • Friday, December 13, 2013
Marabou Noblesse Crisps: Original, Dark & OrangeThe 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
POSTED BY Cybele AT 4:22 pm All Natural • Candy • Review • Kraft/Mondelez • Marabou • Chocolate • Cookie • Ethically Sourced • 7-Worth It • Sweden • |
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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