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Malaysia

Monday, February 4, 2008

Palmer Bee Mine

I bought this one just for you, dear readers. I’m not sure why I thought you wanted to read about it, but here it is, the Palmer Bee Mine hollow milk chocolate figure filled with compressed dextrose candies.

Palmer Bee Mine - Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees Inside!

This actually came in another variety, which featured a cow and some pun I can’t remember, like “you moo-ve me” or something like that. If they had a little train that said, I choo-choo-choose you, I would have bought a case even if they were made from mud.

Palmer Bee Mine - out of packageBut the Bee Mine features Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees Inside! and if there’s one thing I have trouble resisting it’s Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees (tm). (Well, I don’t really know what Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees (tm) are, but I figured I’d find out and then I’d know for sure if they’re irresistible.)

First, the box design is nice. It featured the choco-creature inside well, the cutouts are attractive. The box is a bit big, but I forgive that when it comes to molded chocolate items, as I know a little space tends to preserve shape. The foil design is also nice. It’s bold and endearing. It’s also a nice heavy foil that’s easy to unwrap and re-wrap.

Palmer Bee Mine - UnwrappedThe little guy inside was also nicely designed. He happend to be kind of cracked open already, but I think that might have been because I kept shaking the box. I figured yummy honey bees liked to be shaken before being set free. The little face molded in chocolate actually matches the foil design.

What’s more, it’s designed in 306 degrees. He has a little stinger and six little feet.

Like many Palmer chocolate products, he actually smells pretty good too. On the smoky side of the chocolate smell spectrum, but not overly sweet. He has a nice sheen and was pretty blemish free thanks to the packaging.

Palmer Bee Mine - Cracked OpenOnce I pulled the two hemispheres apart I found my bounty of Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees (tm).

But first the chocolate. It’s Palmer chocolate. Basically, disappointing. Well, saying that I was disappointed means that I had expectations ... I have no expectations of tastiness when it comes to Palmer.  But I do credit them for cute and attractive products. It was far too sweet, had a grainy melt and virtually no taste of chocolate or milk. It was like a Tootsie Roll flavor. (I did a little computation and Palmer chocolate has 12% sugar in it than Hersheys ... which is already pretty sweet stuff.)

My Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees (tm) are a compressed dextrose candy (like a SweeTart without the tart). They’re an attractive beige and smell like the Palmer chocolate. They’re shaped like a little bee, just like the package says they are ... in fact, the package has them at 100% scale. They’re okay ... I mean, who wants to eat compressed dextrose flavored like honey? It’s sweet and has a little dark honey flavor to it, but that’s about it. I give them points for originality though, I don’t know if I would have ever had a honey flavored compressed dextrose bee if not for this.

This was only $1.50 on sale, so it’s not like I paid a lot. (I think they’re $2.50 regularly.) The back has a greeting card layout “to” and “from” so you can just use a bold Sharpie and hand this to someone instead of a Hallmark card and have change to spare. But I’d say only give it to someone you want to confuse with your intentions ... bad chocolate does not say you care. It says, I was thinking of you ... but I wasn’t thinking nice things.

Oh, and for the record, I now have no trouble resisting Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees (tm).

Note: the logo on the back proudly states that this product is Made in USA but the Yummy Honey Flavored Candy Bees (tm) were made in Malaysia.

Related Candies

  1. Palmer Nest Eggs
  2. SpongeBob SquarePants Heart
  3. Elmer’s Chocolate
  4. Palmer Milk Chocolate Balls
Name: Bee Mine Hollow Milk Chocolate
    RATING:
  • 10 SUPERB
  • 9 YUMMY
  • 8 TASTY
  • 7 WORTH IT
  • 6 TEMPTING
  • 5 PLEASANT
  • 4 BENIGN
  • 3 UNAPPEALING
  • 2 APPALLING
  • 1 INEDIBLE
Brand: R. M. Palmer
Place Purchased: Rite Aid (Vermonica)
Price: $1.50 (on sale)
Size: 3.5 ounces
Calories per ounce: 146
Categories: Chocolate, Compressed Dextrose, United States, Malaysia, R.M. Palmer, Valentines

POSTED BY Cybele AT 7:05 am    

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Gandour Bars from Malaysia

I love the names on all of these candy bars! Santos of Scent of Green Bananas gave them to me a while back. They reminded me a bit of my uneven bunch of Peruvian candies.

image

Tourist
A crisp wafer plank with two domed compartments with a chocolatey paste inside.

The brand Gandour heralds they have the ingredients for happiness. Those ingredients include shea butter. Okee dokee.

The chocolate filling is rather firm, a little salty and pretty creamy. It’s not very chocolatey, more on the fudgy side. The crisp wafers are fun, though a little dry. The whole thing reminded me of the Happy Hippo, though there’s no hazelnut in this creme paste filling.

6 out of 10 (Halal)

Safari

This one is sporting a sassy jungle green wraper and woodsy font. Inside is a stack of wafers and creme then some caramel and crunchies with a mockolate coating.

It’s a big old jumble not jungle inside the package. The lumpy crispies and mockolate don’t quite get a good grip on the caramel and wafer center. It just doesn’t work for me. There’s too much mockolate and not enough caramel.

4 out of 10 (Halal)

XL’Z

M&M knock-offs made with mockolate. These were kind of a hybrid in size between Smarties and M&Ms. They’re bigger than M&Ms but thicker than Smarties. The colors were vivid. Though the package showed red, blue,  yellow, green and orange, I only had orange, red and green in my bag (which held 17 morsels). The mockolate was less milky than the other products and passably good. It actually tasted better than Garfield’s Chocobites. Kind of smoky and rounded, though not quite the smooth mouthfeel of cocoa butter chocolate. For a treat for little kids, I guess these would be just fine, but I could probably only bring myself to decorate a cake with them.

4 out of 10 (Halal)

Tofi Luk

This is one that I had no clue about judging from the name. But the description and image on the wrapper seemed pretty agreeable. A biscuit bar with caramel and a chocolate flavored coating. So it’s like a Twix! The bar was just a little flatter and a little shorter than a Twix, but it’s kind of fun that they sell these smaller portions. It looked pretty good, with the same rippled appearance on the coating.

The inside was a lot different from a Twix. Instead of being a very dry shortbread, this one was a little salty and reminded me of a dense Ritz Cracker plank. The caramel was not chewy or gooey here, just a sweeter texture between the cookie and mockolate (and not always there either). The whole thing had a rather strong “butter flavor” to it.

5 out of 10 (Halal)

POSTED BY Cybele AT 6:02 am     CandyReviewCaramelCookieMockolate4-Benign5-Pleasant6-TemptingMalaysia

Friday, October 20, 2006

KitKat Cappuccino

Why is the American KitKat packaging so boring? I mean, look at this box that the Malaysian version of KitKat in the limited edition flavor of cappuccino came in. You may not be able to tell, but it’s actually embossed as well (click on the photo for a larger version).

image

I’m a fiend for coffee, but since I limit myself to two cups a day on weekday and one a day on weekends, I need to get my coffee fix in other ways too. There are very few coffee bars, so I’m always keen to try these limited edition ones. The American KitKat came out with a limited edition coffee flavor last year, which I rather liked.

This limited edition flavor is made by Nestle and comes in two individually wrapped two finger bars. Upon opening the wrapper it smells not like coffee but more like maple and yogurt. These are not bad smells, kind of tangy ... very sweet and with a woodsy essence. But still, the espresso scent of a cappuccino was missing. It tasted sweet, a little grainy but the crunch of the wafers was nice. The tang was a little odd, but not unpleasant. Overall, I’d say this tasted more like a Spanish flan than cappuccino. This is not a bad thing ... I love flan.

If I were presented with this bar again, I don’t think I’d buy it. It misses the chocolate note that I buy chocolate bars for but still a good thing to have at least once.

Note from the package: this candy is certified Halal.

Name: KitKat Limited Edition XI - Cappuccino Flavour
    RATING:
  • 10 SUPERB
  • 9 YUMMY
  • 8 TASTY
  • 7 WORTH IT
  • 6 TEMPTING
  • 5 PLEASANT
  • 4 BENIGN
  • 3 UNAPPEALING
  • 2 APPALLING
  • 1 INEDIBLE
Brand: Nestle
Place Purchased: gift from Santos (thanks!)
Price: 24.75 Philippine peso (about 50 cents)
Size: 1.2 ounces
Calories per ounce: 144
Categories: Chocolate, Cookie, Coffee, Malaysia, Nestle, Limited Edition

POSTED BY Cybele AT 6:55 am    

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Malaysian Hard Candies

My site designers/programmers Susie & Travis (from Hop Studios) sent me a bag o’ treats a few months ago from their trip to Singapore. I don’t really have any specs on the candies since it was a mix, so here’s a sample of what they looked like:

image

It took me a while too steel myself for trying so many mysterious things, but I’ve finally plowed through most of the treats. Some were just variations on the candies we have available here, different kinds of mints (chewy, hard, soft), coffee hard toffees, ginger chews (made in Indonesia) and of course fruit hard candies. Some were rather normal, based on the ubiquitous citrus fruits but a good number were curious.

Durian and Tamarind top the list of scary candies. I’ve heard horror stories of Durian, which is rather common throughout Southeast Asia. It’s a sizeable and formidable looking fruit and I’m told an acquired taste for outsiders (and some who’ve grown up there have never been fond of it). It’s a divisive fruit, actually, as so many people can’t stand it because of its rather pungent odor, it’s not allowed on public transportation in many large cities.

The durian hard candy is probably just as much an acquired taste and not one I’m likely to accomplish. This hard candy tastes okay at first, a little sweet, a little tart and then rather like boiled shallots. Yes, onions or garlic or perhaps a little like Slim Jims.

The Tamarind, which I’ve never had and is surprising as I live in Los Angeles and it’s all over the place, was actually nice. It’s a little toasty, rather ordinary after all being so worked up about trying that.

imageThe most curious one was the Creamy Corn. It tasted just like it sounds. Like creamed corn. Only in a hard toffee instead of running on my plate into my fried chicken. I have to say that it was very faithful to the name, and I ate the whole thing and was fascinated by it, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. It’s rather like eating the Buttered Popcorn Jelly Bellies. It’s a novelty, not a pleasure. At least not for me.

Mango was actually really nice, better than any other mango candy I’ve had, probably because they did more than make it taste like peaches. There were a few mango flavored ones, but the best overall were the ones branded Lot100 (the Blackcurrant was good, too). It had a nice pine essence to it, which is one of the things that I find so interesting about real mangoes, they have a woodsy flavor to them.

The best one was called Great Monster and I think was simply an orange hard candy. Simple, tart and zesty.

I had high hopes for those labeled barley sugar candies, but they didn’t really taste like the barley sugar I know of here in the states. They were nice, especially the lime torrone one (which was not at all like an Italian Torrone).

There are still a few I haven’t tried, but give me a few more days to get my courage back.

Rating - 6 out of 10 overall (some higher some lower ... it’s an average)

POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:52 pm     CandyReviewHard Candy & Lollipops6-TemptingMalaysia

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