I’m a little tired from my trip and thought I’d let you do the work today!

I took this photo a couple of weeks ago of a candy I’d never bought before. When I took it out of the wrapper I found it, um, mystifying. It looks like a mummy, don’t you think?

It was actually pretty tasty though! I gave it a 6 out of 10.

Anyone know what this candy is? It’s about four inches high ... submit a comment if you’d like to guess. I’ll reveal the answer on Easter Sunday!

UPDATE:

Yes, it is a marshmallow rabbit!

Made by Necco, the package boasts real chocolate and it was actually pretty good. The marshmallow was soft and fluffy without being too sweet. I got it for 25 cents, so keep your eye out for after-Easter sales if this is your sort of thing. The look of the candy suffers from the fact that marshmallow isn’t the best for creating detail, but hey, it’s for eatin’ not staring at.

The Original “Flowing Center” Candy Cups!

I’ve come to realize that about half of how we experience things we eat has to do with experience that we bring to it. A piece of the most amazing cake or the best chocolate during a horrible dinner or at a traumatic time in your life may, actually, leave a bad taste in your mouth. The most mundane sugar morsel might be elevated to ambrosia based on other fantastic associations. Things like candied apples, candy corn and cotton candy all seem to benefit from this phenomenon.

Candy is most often associated with good experiences, as it’s often a reward or an indulgence in the first place. So Valomilks were getting high marks before I even ate them because of my pursuit of them and the lore associated with them. 

But really, 2,400 words and four posts later, you’re wondering, what’s all the fuss about? Are they that good?

The chocolate is smooth, a little sugary and has a slight cool feeling when melting on the tongue. The cream is impossibly sticky, though I never had the “run down your chin” experience with them. The flattened marshmallow is sweet, without being cloying or sappy, but it lacks a vanilla kick I was hoping it would have. I was hoping for real vanilla bean essence here, and perhaps it’s my fault for making the candy into something in my head that it would never be. It was smooth, and it’s true that the chocolate and filling go together well, the proportions are just right, but to be honest ... I wasn’t that keen on them.

I’ve given them at least a half a dozen chances now. I’m not a neat freak, but I really don’t like being sticky. It’s just too hard to eat. As I sit here and eat another package of them, I have a moistened washcloth with me to keep wiping my hands and face. I end up taking bigger bites than I want,  and instead of thinking about what I’m eating, I’m thinking about what a mess it is. Really, if there were a candy I could advocate for the nude, this would be it (as long as they’re not sitting near an ant hill).

I know there was a lot of build up in this series, but most of that is immaterial to the candy itself. I may end up doing the same for some other coveted bar in the future, though I hope it’s one that’s more transportable.  I hope you’ve enjoyed the Saga of the Valomilk and hopefully the actual Valomilks should you get a chance to try them.

While on that fateful trip to Pennsylvania in February I picked up some Mallo Cups. How could I not? They’re made right there in Altoona by the Boyer Candy Co. Soon, I will have tasted all the marshmallow cups there are. Boyer is known for cup candies, they also have the Smoothie Peanut Butter Cup, which has a devoted following.

The Mallo Cup is the East Coast version of the Cup-o-Gold which consists of a milk chocolate cup filled with marshmallow (of differing consistencies) and a little coconut on the top.

The coconut smell is quite apparent when raising the cup to the mouth. The chocolate is sweet and very creamy with the coconut bits providing a chewy texture. The marshmallow center is soft and runny, but not too flowing as to make a mess.

Like the Valomilk, the Mallo Cup suffers from some structural integrity issues - in this case the chocolate base is too thin, so I was not able to remove either cup in my package from the paper without leaving some chocolate behind - basically bottoming out. (If you look closely at the photo, which you can click to enlarge, you’ll see that there is no base at all as I wasn’t able to peel it off for the photo. Maybe refrigeration would help.) The marshmallow itself has a nice flavor and consistency - it’s not at all foamy but not viscous or grainy like some others marshmallows. It doesn’t have any perceptible flavor of its own so I came away with more of a chocolate/coconut vibe.

I liked it quite a bit better than the Cup-O-Gold, I liked the sweetness of the chocolate, nutty scent of the coconut and mellow filling and the proportions seem better balanced (the Cup-O-Gold seemed to be too much chocolate and of course was single cup in a package).

The unique selling proposition of the Boyer Candies, though, is the “Play Money Rebate Offer”. The tray in the Mallo Cup package is actually a coupon advertising their rebate program - save up 500 Points and you can get a $1.00 rebate. Each Mallo Cup tray is worth 5 points. Yes, you get a dollar for every 100 Mallo Cups you buy! The points are also good for other merchandise such as candy tins, sweatshirts, mugs and caps. I have no idea how long they’ve been doing this, but the copyright notice on the package says 1983.

Other opinions: Writers/Artists Snacking at Work gave it a 7.5, Candy Wrapper Museum just doesn’t like marshmallow, Taquitos.net thinks it smells like coconut and finally, read about the long road back for the Mallo Cup production line.

Related Candies

1. Melster Marshmallow Eggs
2. Mallow Blast
3. Boyer Smoothie
4. The Saga of the Valomilk - Review
5. The Mysterious Cup-O-White Gold

In case you didn’t notice, All Easter Week kind of overlapped and is now two weeks. (I don’t hear any complaints!) Of course any discussion of Easter candy would be incomplete without Peeps which is why I saved them for last.

The thing is, there are lots of people who talk about Peeps and chances are you either love them or hate them already. Here’s what I think about Peeps: I think Peeps are pretty cute. The colors are great and the idea of a crusty crusted soft marshmallow is a good one. I think the name Peeps is pure genius. And the idea of a little yellow marshmallow candy shaped like a baby chicken is pretty good too. The manufacturing variations of them allows them to have their own personality. (According to the Peeps factory tour on their website their eyes are added by hand. It gives them a rather personal touch.)

But see, I don’t really like the taste of them that much. They’re sweet and all, and that’s good. And I know yesterday I said I liked plain old rock candy, so it seems odd that I wouldn’t like fluffy sugar.

If I do like Peeps, it’s when they’re stale. At least they have a little texture then. They’re tacky and lose their springiness and suddenly have a little tooth to them (well, Peeps can’t have teeth). Anyway, a slightly stale Peep is chewy and kind of a nice change of pace. A very stale Peep is almost like cookie. I’ve tried toasting them, but it’s tricky, because they catch fire quite easily. I guess the best thing to do with them is to do a mashup where you pull one apart and mash it into something else like crushed Oreos or chocolate chips.

There are several iterations of Peeps. There are different colors of the little chicks and little bunny shapes (which I don’t like as much for no good reasons I can verbalize). You can get white egg shaped ones for decorating and of course they’re not just for Easter anymore with other shapes/colors/flavors for all the major Candy Holidays.

Of course the thing I most like to do with Peeps is take photos of them (stay tuned for more of those, my new camera arrives today). There’s a whole Flickr group devoted to them, called Peep-Tastic. Then there’s Peeps Research, more Peep Research,  a PeepShow, and of course the official site. For more literary expressions in Peeps, check out Lord of the Peeps, Peeps Haiku and then the definitive resource, the Wikipedia entry. Click here for some worksafe PeepPr0n and finally, for the last word on Peeps, check out this article from Salon’s archives.

I took my photos about two weeks ago and the Peeps have been in an open plastic baggie every since, I think they’re ready to eat.

So, do you love em’ or hate em’ and how do you eat ‘em?

Related Candies

1. The Adventures of Melted Chocolate!
2. Peeps Chick & Bunny Candy
3. Peeps Monster Mash Ups
4. Peeps Mash Ups
5. Peeps Lollipop Rings
6. Peeps Spooky Cats & Cocoa Bunnies
7. 2006 Independent Food Awards
8. Candy Mash Ups - Marshmallows & Chocolate

Candy is a microcosm of society and existence. I know this because there are certain candies that indicate the presence of the divine in every scrumptious bite. Then there is evidence of evil on this planet. The Easter “marshmallow egg” is one of the latter candies.

This candy has promise on the outside, as all temptresses do. It’s big, so of course it’s appealing to any foolish child who hasn’t learned that “bigger is not always better.” What’s more, it is an evil that has no name. Really, what are these things called? If I say marshmallow egg, you might thing of the satisfying marshmallow half-hemispheres that are drenched in chocolate this time of year. Or even something that resembles an Easter-themed Circus Peanut. Brachs has chosen to call their version of these Bunny Basket Eggs. I will hereafter refer to them as BBBE, which when pronounced as an acronym (as all good acronyms should be) it will sound like a stuttered bee-bee or a very cold person trying to say ‘bean.’

Part of their temptation lies in their beguiling size, which is made up entirely of sugar with a dash of artificial color and carnauba wax. That’s a Starburst Jelly bean there; it’s no match for the Mastodon known as a Brachs Bunny Basket Egg.

I hope you understand that Brachs probably makes the finest BBBEs there are. They’re generous with the color and they’re even flavored. The green ones are lime and orange ones are orange. I can’t tell you what the rest are. Please don’t make me eat more of them.

If you haven’t already guessed, these are horrid candies. It’s not like I’m against eating pure sugar, I have in fact indulged in full spoonfuls of honey or brown sugar as a treat quite often. The shell of a BBBE is similar to a jelly bean. It’s a rather grainy sugar coating that’s smooth on the outside and lightly flavored. The center of a BBBE is a fluffy, grainy sugar that really isn’t like marshmallow, but I call it that because the ingredients mention gelatin and corn starch.

I don’t think BBBEs can be made and delivered fresh, not to mention the fact that few people eat them right out of a pristine bag. They’re intended to sit in amongst the pastel cello grass of an Easter basket until all the other choice candies are consumed and a desperate sugar-toothed child is force to eat it. Then the last thing this child remembers of his Easter experience is this deplorable egg. The smell of these inside the bag is like a mess of flavored lipsticks or a bad candle shop. A combination of fake fruit flavors and of course airborne microfine sugar which is intent on giving you that satisfying sweet feeling on your tongue before you even eat one.

I realize that this candy has its champions, and that by no means makes you minions of evil. I can only surmise that the experience of eating these foul little fingers of pure sucrose is inextricably tied to a pleasant experience and these help you relive a little of it. If that’s the reason, then I completely support their continued, but limited, production as a therapy device. If you would like to read someone who might share your unending love of these, you might want to pick up Hilary Lifton’s memoir called Candy and Me: A Love Story (you can preview the chapter online). 

I honestly did try to like these. I never cared for them as a child, but I did buy them, make them look pretty in the photos (they are actually very pretty) and of course ate TWO! That’s why they get a rating of two instead of one. (You may now commence in the comments section telling me how wrong I am.)

Related Candies

1. Hiding Eggs
2. Circus Peanuts
3. Cadbury Canadian Creme Eggs
4. Brach’s Fiesta Eggs
5. Russell Stover Eggs (2007 edition)
6. Melster Marshmallow Eggs
7. Cadbury Eggs: Creme & Caramel

As part of this year’s Independent Food Festival and Awards sponsored by tasteEverything, I’ve been tapped as a jurist to give out an award for excellence in food. (You know it’s gonna be candy.) I decided after my mind-blowing experience touring candy factories in the Bay Area last December that it had to be something that really helped me to immerse myself in the true source of chocolate.

My 2006 Winner of the Independent Food Awards is The Best Things to Stick to your Marshmallow: Scharffen Berger Chocolate Covered Cacao Nibs.

Cacao nibs are roasted cocoa beans, what all chocolate is made from. Scharffen Berger then pan coats them with 62% cacao semisweet chocolate. They’re complexly flavored little buggers, about the size of rice crispies - they’re crunchy, sometimes fibery, sometimes buttery and nutty ... always a surprise. Some flavors are like wine, raisins, coconut, coffee, oak, banana, apricot, sweet almond, grapefruit, cherry, cinnamon, clove ... I could go on and on. They’re like a blank canvas and a symphony all at once. They take over the senses and make you forget your train of thought. The coolest part is that each little morsel is independent of the others - it might have come from a different tree, might have been harvested weeks before or after its buddies in the tube. Eat one and get a sense of the particular, eat a palmful and travel the world.

So, what do you do with these besides just eat them like candy? You can bake with them, as I saw at Tartine in San Francisco, where you can get Rochers (like soft meringues) made with cacao nibs.

Photo courtesy of Chris Hong (via Flickr)

But I’m not really a baker. You can’t just serve an olive boat of these morsels to guests. Then oddly enough the answer came to me in the mail the same week. I was reviewing Plush Puffs, flavored, handmade marshmallows. With proximity being the mother of invetion, I tried putting things on my marshmallow. Actually, I tried mashing my marshmallow into things.

Now, given that I have the title of jurist, it was incumbent upon me to evaluate at least several other marsh-mashables. So I ordered up more Scharffen Berger Cacao Nibs and a full array of Plush Puffs (Orange-Honey, Sam’s Sour Lemon, Maple Pecan and Vanilla Bean) and scoured my kitchen and a few stores for some options. 

In the interests of trying to find the perfect thing to mash into my marshmallows, I pulled a few things out of the cupboard and ordered some others off of Chocosphere. Here are the results:

The definition of pure confection heaven has to be Orange-Honey Plush Puffs with Scharffen Berger Chocolate Covered Cacao Beans. This is the standard by which all other mashmallow-ables will be judged. (Really, why did I go on, how much better could I expect things to get?)

My second favorite thing to mash into my marshmallows has to be these Valrhona Chocolate Covered Orange Peels (Equinoxe Noir des d’ecorces d’oranges confites). They’re tiny pieces of lightly candied orange peel pan coated with 66% cacao dark chocolate. Smooth, sweet, crisp and with a great zesty orange taste. At $4.00 for 1.8 ounces, they’re even more expensive than the Scharffen Berger Cacao Nibs, but as a little dash mixed in with the Cacao Nibs, it’s a welcome little burst of citrus energy. They go really well with both the Vanilla Bean and Maple Pecan ones but unlike the cacao nibs, they don’t work with everything.

It wouldn’t be fair of me to evaluate chocolate covered cacao nibs without trying out the naked ones. So I selected the Dagoba Cacao Nibs, which are also organic. The pieces are less consistent in size and shape than the chocolate covered brethren. They have a wild, alcoholic aroma. Smoky and woodsy to the nose, they provide a huge burst of flavor when eaten on their own but they’re also incredibly acidic and sometimes acrid, astringent and puckeringly dry. When pressed into the Vanilla Bean marshmallow, the sweetness and blankness allows the subtle cacao notes to shine while moderating the overt acidity.

With the success of the malted rice krispies squares, I thought I’d just go with the source materials. This wasn’t as pleasant. The malted milk powder is a bit salty and of course dry. The milk powder, I think, is part of the issue. Milk doesn’t really belong with marshmallow. In fact, it turns out that I don’t really care for the flavor of powdered milk.

I love molasses and my favorite sugar is Billington’s Muscovado. It’s got a sort of whiskey aroma to it, a complexity that you won’t find in refined sugars. I like to let it dry out in chunk and eat it that way. It doesn’t really stick to the marshmallows very well, and frankly, it makes it too sweet.

As a final confirmation about the Chocolate Covered Cacao Nibs, I brought the array of my top contenders to an Oscars (tm) viewing party Sunday night. At the end of the night the marshmallows were nearly gone and so were the CCCN while the plain nibs were largely untouched. On top of that, people were pleased with the fun combination of flavors. (And as a capper we got to taste some new regionally-sourced chocolate ice creams. Yum!)

There is one other company that I know of that makes chocolate covered cacao beans, called SweetRiot. I haven’t tried them yet, but I imagine they too are awesome.

If you’ve stumbled across this posting without first visiting the tasteEverything, have a look at all the other incredible finds from around the globe.

Related Candies

1. Peeps Monster Mash Ups
2. Candy Mash Ups - Marshmallows & Chocolate

I think it might be marshmallow day here at CandyBlog.net.

Last week I was at the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax to meet up with some other bloggers and I knew I had to stop at Littlejohn’s Candies because a reader told me they had the best toffee. Of course once I got there my eyes were drawn to these plump caramel kisses - soft caramel drenching a puffy marshmallow. I completely forgot about the toffee.

So, I got two, one in chocolate and one in vanilla. (And a pecan praline which was divine and I ate before I could take a photo of it.) I figured I can always go back for more toffee ... and another pecan praline.

Once I opened the wrapper it was obvious that these caramels were made with lots and lots of butter. They were creamy, very smooth and exceptionally sweet with a slight hit of salt to it. The marshmallow center was smooth and light without being too foamy. The center also wasn’t very sweet, so it gave a nice backdrop to let the caramel dominate the flavor stage. The chocolate caramel wasn’t as tasty to me, there wasn’t enough chocolate to set it apart from the regular caramel and I plan on sticking to the vanilla in the future.

These are messy candies. They stuck to the cellophane wrapper and to my fingers as I held it. They’re too big to put in your mouth all at once (about the size of a squashed golf ball), so eating them posed a challenge. I ended up with sticky fingers. In the future I think I’ll leave them in the cello and scrape them off with my teeth.

Since the Farmers Market and the adjacent Grove shopping center are such a tourist destination in Los Angeles, if you do come to the city be sure to seek this place out for something a little different from the tourist fudge that you find at many places. (Though they certainly have fudge.) It’s a classic, working farmers market and they actually make the candy right there with big plate glass windows so you can learn all of their sugary secrets.

There are a couple of other iterations of the famous red foil Rocky Road. One is Mint, which I found only recently but was in such bad condition, I could hardly give it a fair review. The second is this one, which I found at the Rite-Aid which is Dark Chocolate.

This bar comes in a pleasant, lightly gold-tinted wrapper. I’ve decided that all Rocky Road bars are dented and cracked as a consequence of the scant packaging. No matter, it doesn’t seem to affect the taste at all. This bar doesn’t smell quite as chocolately as the milk chocolate one does, but does have a very sweet aroma.

The marshmallow is thick and foamy, but not very moist. It has some good give to it without being too rubbery and a not-too-fake vanilla taste to it. There’s very little contribution from the cashews in the chocolate coating except for some texture. I think the bar might be better served without them, but then I’d probably notice that the quality of the coating chocolate isn’t really that good.

Overall, I liked it quite a bit better than the traditional milk Rocky Road, but its rarity is an impediment to purchasing it again. I’ve been in plenty of Rite-Aids in Los Angeles and this is the first time I’ve seen this there and it’s not good enough for me to keep going back to that particular Rite-Aid (Santa Monica Blvd. & La Brea).