A few months ago I discovered quite by accident that Russell Stover introduced a new candy. The Color Me Candies are little milk chocolate candy coated lentils. (Yes, the same thing as M&Ms, Nestle Smarties, Jots, Hershey-Ets and Koppers Milkies.)

Not an innovative new product, but still it warranted a tasting as far as I was concerned because they’re selling them in single color bags and for what appears to be a barn-buster price. I ordered one color about a week ago - and of course right after I ordered they introduced some color mixes based on sports teams.

There are 13 colors total, I chose the Igloo Blue, which looked like an icy powder blue. I thought it’d photograph well and have less food coloring that might influence the flavor profile.

The bags hold 8 ounces and was priced at $2.99 (plus shipping - I got a bunch of other stuff as well that I couldn’t find in stores).

The pieces are similar in shape and size to M&Ms. They’re a little thicker in the center but a sharper, thinner edge. They’re consistently shaped and colored for the most part. There were variations, but all were within what I’d call acceptable.

The only hesitation I had after opening the shipping box was that some of the candies - probably about 5% were chipped. Not terrible, but in a glass jar for display and serving it might be distracting for the light colored versions. (I expect for the darker colors it’d be less noticeable.) This might have been because I didn’t order very much, so my box had a lot of open space for shifting of the contents. If you’re ordering a large amount I don’t expect it to be as much of an issue - but maybe check with their customer service to confirm.

The shell is crispy and crunchy - far more interesting as a texture than the M&Ms (it reminded me more of the new Hershey’s Pieces). The chocolate texture is creamy and smooth, far better and silkier than M&Ms (even the Premium ones). The primary flavor notes are dairy - a rich milky and caramel along with a mellow chocolate flavor.

They’re excellent, actually. Easy to keep eating, not too sweet and different enough from M&Ms that I would probably seek them out for a special occasion.

So, the pricing scheme, because I see these as a candy buffet item, the price does make a difference. At the moment these are only available (as far as I know) from Russell Stover directly on their webstore. They are sold in 8 ounce (half a pound) bags in 13 single colors and 16 “team color” mixes. The cost at the moment is $2.99 per bag, which means they’re $5.98 per pound. The rival products to this are: M&Ms which are sold on their website in 7 ounce bags with a price tag of $15.98 per pound (or $11.60 if you’re willing to buy in a 5 lb box) and Koppers Milkies which are found on various webstores, I priced them at CandyWarehouse.com and found that they’re $9.90 a pound when purchased in a 5 lb box - some sites have them for less (but fewer colors) and some for more. Russell Stover doesn’t offer a bulk purchase, but I would expect that would make them even cheaper.

M&Ms and Koppers Milkies come in far more colors. M&Ms and Koppers Milkies are Kosher. None are nut free.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces
2. Russell Stover Eggs (2009 edition)
3. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
4. Hershey Eggs
5. Best Intentions: Sun Drops

Russell Stover has a large assortment of holiday treats in Santa-themed packaging. What’s nice about them is that they’re always fresh and moderately priced (often on dramatic sale for three for a dollar but usually about 50 cents a piece). I picked up every variety I could find this year:

What I noticed first was that the packaging is inconsistent in its design. Sure they’re all a mylar wrapper, but beyond that the Santas are different drawing styles with the Maple Cream, Strawberry Cream & Coconut Cream sporting the same Santa holding a gift aloft as he sits in a chimney. But The Peanut Butter Santa is more streamlined, the Marshmallow Santa has some freaky bright red cheeks and insanely short arms and finally the Marshmallow & Caramel Santa is in the style of the European Saint Nicolas complete with staff.

What I also found out is that the definition of “Santa Shaped” is pretty loose in Russell Stover’s world. It’s not quite as egg shaped, and maybe the tapering ends can be a feet/boots and a head. But really, it’d be best to just call these Christmas Lumps or Snow Clods.

The Peanut Butter Santa is pure simplicity: a peanut butter bar covered in milk chocolate. The shape of it is kind of figure-like. It’s the smallest of the pack as well, clocking in at only .75 ounces. It smells nutty and sugary and a little bit like peanut butter cookies. The milk chocolate is quite slick and melts easily, it has a light cocoa flavor to it. Most of all the salty peanut butter center is grassy-tasting. It’s a strange green flavor more like edamame than roasted peanuts.

It was tasty enough for me to finish it easily, but being small didn’t hurt either. The center is moister and a bit oilier than the center of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Tree (or Egg or Cup). This wasn’t a bad feature, just different.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Size: .75 ounces

I thought perhaps I’d tried these before and looked up to find that I reviewed the Maple Cream Egg way back in 2006. But the Russell Stover Maple Cream Santa is actually different. While the Easter version is coated in dark chocolate, the Christmas version is Milk Chocolate.

The amorphous lump didn’t remind me of Santa’s silhouette in the slightest but the maple cream flavor is a bit more Christmassy than Easterish so kudos for that, Russell Stover.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the dark chocolate version so I’ll spare us all comparisons. What I can say is that this is ludicrously sweet. The milk chocolate is sugary and not terribly creamy and the center while moist and fluffy is also throat searingly cloying and sticky. The maple flavor was simply a flavor, not something that felt natural or integrated into the candy itself.

Rating: 5 out of 10
Size: 1.25 ounces

While the Strawberry Cream Santa is also milk chocolate like the Cream Egg, this one lacks the pretty little swirls and curls on the top. It does smell a little like berries, but mostly it smells like milky chocolate. It’s quite sweet and has only a faint hint of strawberry and is rather similar to a Nestle Strawberry Qwik shake. I know it was really sweet, but I like the texture of the cream center that Russell Stover uses for both this one and the Maple Cream. It’s rather like a marshmallow cream, quite smooth and fluffy and moist without being runny.

Rating: 5 out of 10
Size: 1.25 ounces

The Coconut Cream Santa is also unlike the Cream Egg in that it’s milk chocolate, not dark chocolate. In this case as well, I think the sugar-laden milk chocolate is simply over the top. I like the coconut flake texture of the cream filling and the nice size of the piece, but the sugary quality of the chocolate with its grainy and fudgy melt is just too much. It’s amazing what a difference dark chocolate can make, but it does.

Rating: 6 out of 10
Size: 1.25 ounces

Things were looking up when I found the Dark Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Santa. I didn’t really expect this to be terribly different from the Easter Rabbit version, except that one was huge at two ounces and only in milk chocolate where I shopped.

This one was by far the most attractive of my Santa set, a nicely detailed figure of Santa Claus scratching his head. Unfortunately I smashed him somewhere along the way and his face was a little worse for it (or maybe he wasn’t scratching his head, maybe he was holding his hand over his nose and cursing me).

The marshmallow is latexy and has a chewy pull. Not too sweet and with a faint whiff of vanilla flavoring.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Size: 1.00 ounces

The Marshmallow & Caramel Santa Covered in Milk Chocolate is the only other in the collection that estimates the shape of Santa Claus.

Of course this one looks like it could be a Mummy or Generic Figure for Unisex Bathroom Door.

It’s smaller in dimensions from the Dark Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Santa, yet it’s actually heavier, it’s the same 1.25 ounces as the Cream Santas. I’ve had the Caramel and Marshmallow Pumpkin before and found it interesting.

This one seems to be more evenly balanced between the caramel and the marshmallow. It’s dense for a marshmallow product, the marshmallow is fluffy and has a light hint of vanilla to it with a smooth and velvety melt. The caramel isn’t runny nor quite chewy but has a good stringy pull to it.

It’s lacking a punch like the See’s Scotchmallow, but for 50 cents and in the shape of a clothes pin, well, I don’t want to sound too ungrateful for a decent piece of candy especially since this one seems to have the proportions just right on this one. I wish the caramel was a little more chewy, a little more salty, but still a fun piece.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Size: 1.25 ounces

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Eggs (2009 edition)
2. Reese’s Enigma & Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Eggs
3. Russell Stover Marshmallow Rabbits
4. Russell Stover Eggs
5. Russell Stover Eggs (2007 edition)
6. See’s Scotchmallow Eggs
7. Russell Stover Coconut Wreath

This is a pretty simple product and is part of a large line of Halloween candies from Russell Stover.

The Russell Stover Dark Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Pumpkin is what it says. A marshmallow in the shape of a pumpkin covered in a thin shell of semi-sweet chocolate.

The wrapper follows the same design, a stylized colored pumpkin drawing ... this one features a darker background from the milk chocolate version. It’s also smaller than they used to be. My 2006 review showed them at 1.25 ounces, but as sugar & chocolate prices go up, either the candy increases in price or gets smaller.

It’s a big, rather flat and vaguely pumpkin shaped piece. About 2.5 inches across at the widest. Even though they’re just wrapped in a little mylar sleeve, they seem to take traveling pretty well. This one only has a crack from me trying to get it to sit upright for the first picture, not anything that happened in transit or at the store.

Breaking it in half is not advised. This is a candy that’s best bitten & eaten in one sitting. The marshmallow is soft, moist and bouncy. It has a good pull, it almost looks like caramel or latex when I tried to pull it apart. The flavor is only the lightest vanilla, it’s mostly about the fluffy texture and sweet melt. The dark chocolate is decent. The sticky marshmallow keeps it from flaking off, even when it cracks. It also keeps the whole thing from tasting too cloyingly sweet.

I definitely prefer them over the standard milk variety and hope they do the Marshmallow Rabbits in a dark version next year.

For those watching their calories, this is a nice, spare treat. It’s only 110 calories but feels rather filling. (Of course as a marshmallow product it contains gelatin. They’re not Kosher and are made on shared machinery with peanuts, tree nuts, eggs and wheat.)

Other traditional Russell Stover Easter treats are now restyled for Halloween. So if you can’t wait until spring you can get Solid Milk Chocolate Pumpkins, Sugar Free Marshmallow Pumpkins, Caramel Pumpkins, Milk Chocolate Marshmallow Pumpkins, Coconut Cream Pumpkins, Strawberry Cream Pumpkins, Orange Marshmallow Pumpkins, Coconut Buzzard Nest, Strawberry Cream Buzzard Egg, Vanilla & Chocolate Creme Buzzard Egg, Marshmallow & Caramel Creme Buzzard Egg, Peanut Butter Ghosts, Marshmallow Ghosts and Coconut Ghosts.

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Eggs (2009 edition)
2. Pete’s Gourmet Confections: Marshmallows
3. Elmer’s Toasted Marshmallow Eggs
4. Russell Stover Eggs
5. Russell Stover Orange Marshmallow Pumpkin
6. Frankford Marshmallow Pals
7. Russell Stover Eggs (2007 edition)

I was at the drug store a few weeks ago and wasn’t really thrilled with the selection of candy. Well, it was a nice selection but I’ve tried all of that stuff before. Then I spotted the new display of Russell Stover & Whitman’s Samplers (they’re owned by the same company now) and was debating whether to review a full box of candy from them.

Instead I wussed out, blaming the heat that it was impractical to bring a large amount of chocolate into my 90+ degree home. So I got one of each of their little 1 ounce boxes - just as a teaser. I thought, here’s an opportunity for Russell Stover & Whitman’s to wow me ... they have two pieces to do it. For the opportunity to snare me, I gave them $1.25 for each sample sized box.

Russell Stover Private Reserve features two pieces of their premium assorted chocolates. The red foiled box is elegant and simple.

I have no idea what they are, the box tells me nothing specifically about them, well, it specifically tells me the combined ingredients and that’s about it. I only have the shapes go on. Inside is a little tray with spaces shaped like the candies.

The nut looking one was in fact a nut flavored paste inside ... perhaps a gianduia since far down on the list of ingredients were hazelnuts.

This was terrible. It looked great, I’ll grant you but had an odd waxy & greasy feel to it. The hazelnut paste as more of an amaretto flavor, which is fine with me ... though confusing because the nut shape was kind of like a walnut and kind of like a hazelnut but definitely not an almond.

The second one was a lovely milk chocolate covered caramel. The caramel was stiff & had an excellent pull. It had a good combination of toasted sugar flavors and a touch of butter. A little bit of vanilla. It was sweet, the milk chocolate was decent but didn’t really contribute much of a chocolate punch.

The Whitman’s Reserve was the same price, but honestly didn’t look as appealing on the box. It bills itself as a Premium mini collection as if a pair is a collection. Like the Russell Stover, it makes no mention on the box as to what’s actually in the box besides the ingredients. As far as the actual ingredients go - they both use vanillin (fake vanilla) but otherwise rather decent source materials.

The large and puzzling piece here was the white chocolate item with the stripes. It does look just like the one on the box - both pieces are pristine - so I’m satisfied right away with the appearance.

Sniffing it brought me no closer to discerning what it was (no nuts, that was certain, though). It smells simply sweet & milky.

The bite is soft and I decided it was either a poor excuse for a truffle or simply a chocolate cream. It’s a milk chocolate center - sweet and greasy but at least not as sweet as the white chocolate coating. It doesn’t do a thing for me.

Happily the second piece was identical to the second piece in the Russell Stover - a simple milk chocolate covered caramel. I couldn’t tell it apart at all and that’s not a bad thing.

For the $1.25 I spent, I got two pieces of candy. One I liked and one I didn’t. So for the future I’ll probably stick to the Russell Stover Pecan Delights, which are usually a better value and of course a good variety of textures & flavors. (They can now be found in a “candy bar” format for about the same price in stores.)

Am I missing something about the appeal of Russell Stover & Whitman’s boxed chocolates?

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Private Reserve Vanilla Bean Brulee
2. Storck Chocolate Riesen
3. Caffarel Gianduias
4. Russell Stover Organic Pecan Delight
5. Dove Jewels
6. Whitman’s Sampler Tin

The last item I’ve picked up from Russell Stover this year is their White Chocolate Peanut Butter Rabbit.

I bought it because Hershey’s has tweaked their White Reese’s Peanut Butter products. They were once a real white chocolate coating with cocoa butter, but now they’re a hydrogenated tropical oil concoction.

So I was careful to read over the ingredients on the Russell Stover white chocolate: White Chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk, soy lecithin, artificial flavor & salt), peanut butter (peanuts, hydrogenated vegetable oils, salt) sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, tapioca dextrin, dextrose and salt.

It’s a pretty sizable rabbit, though it’s also over-packaged. The box is 4.5 inches wide and 7.5 inches high but the bunny is only 3.25 inches at its widest and 5 inches at its tallest. The rabbit is inside the sealed box in a little plastic tray.

It weighs three ounces and this one cost me $1.50 which I didn’t find at all unreasonable.

Opening the box, it smells like Easter baskets - milky sweet and fake.

It’s a nicely molded Rabbit with good details. The proportion of white chocolate to peanut butter varies greatly, depending on where I bit into it. The edges and creases were loaded with more white chocolate and the domed portions were mostly peanut butter.

The white chocolate is sweet and surprisingly smooth. But it was oddly waxy, not in a bad way, just in a fake way, like it needed an authentic dose of real vanilla beans or something. The peanut butter center is the crumbly peanut butter with the slight grain to it. It’s salty and nutty, but also rather sweet, too. The effect of the product is that it burns my throat. I think I might like it with more peanut butter and less white chocolate, perhaps a version of the peanut butter egg?

It just didn’t thrill me much. I ended up eating the whole thing, but it took me about three weeks of nibbling on it now and then. But if you’re a white chocolate & peanut butter fan and are disappointed with Hershey’s turn towards the oily side, it might be a good option ... especially if they’re on sale starting Monday.

Related Candies

1. Askinosie White Chocolate (Plain, Nibble & Pistachio)
2. Choceur Coffee & Cream
3. Vanilla Beans KitKat & Bitter Orange Aero
4. Toblerone Single Peaks
5. M&M Pirate Pearls
6. Bleached Reese’s

Russell Stover makes so many chocolate eggs, it’s taken me more than three years to get through them. (Well, I tasted all of them, I haven’t necessarily photographed & reviewed them all yet.)

The Russell Stover Truffle Egg is a rather small one compared to the other whipped center eggs. Still it clocks in at a full ounce, so it’s just very dense.

It’s a molded egg with a shiny, rippled milk chocolate shell and a milk chocolate truffle interior.

It smells like a decent rich milk chocolate. Sweet and with some hints of vanilla and milky cocoa.

The bite of the shell is good and crisp. The center is soft and fudgy, but not the slightest bit grainy ... though it’s not quite a silky melt.

The immediate flavor I got was not of chocolate but of rum. It’s a bit sweet but also has a little salt to it.

Looking over the ingredients, I was expecting tropical oils and hydrogenated fats, but instead it was pretty clean:

Milk Chocolate (sugar, whole milk, cocoa butter, chocolate, soy lecithin & vanillin), whole milk, natural flavor, salt and invertase.

It’s very rich and rather satisfying, so much so that a single egg was more than enough for me (though it only clocks in at 140 calories, so it’s not even as fatty as some other real chocolate candy bars).

Rating: 7 out of 10

The Russell Stover Caramel Egg is also on the small side. This one is a squat little buddy with perhaps too much packaging around it.

It smells milky and malty.

The bit is smooth, the milk chocolate shell flakes only a little bit. The caramel is soft and has a slight chew to it, but for the most part is more on the saucy side (though it’s thick enough that when I left the half of it sitting for a while, the center didn’t ooze out).

The caramel is satiny smooth, no hint of grain at all. The toasted and boiled sugar flavors aren’t pronounced, nor is the butter, but the overall dark sugar notes are there and go well with the sweet milk chocolate.

As I’ve mentioned before, I prefer a stiffer caramel chew, but this was enjoyable and actually more appetizing to me than a Cadbury Caramello or Cadbury Caramel Egg.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Another set of eggs that I haven’t included on the blog specifically in this ovoid shape are the Marshmallow Egg and the Chocolate Marshmallow Egg.

The have other shapes for different holidays. Just a couple of weeks ago I reviewed the Russell Stover Marshmallow Rabbits. They’re available for Halloween as a Pumpkin (also in orange flavor), a Valentine’s Heart and these eggs come back as Footballs in the Autumn/Winter.

The nice thing about this version is that it’s an actual portion. The Rabbits are a bit big for one sitting, unless you’re voraciously hungry or sharing. And they’re bound to be around at deep discount after the holiday. But eat them quick ... I’ve found that the marshmallow items don’t keep as well as the Coconut Eggs.

Previous Reviews:

2008 - Creme Eggs (like Cadbury Creme Eggs):

2007 - Russell Stover Eggs

2006 - Russell Stover Cream Eggs

I think the only ones I’m missing in review are the Vanilla Cream Egg and the Chocolate Brownie Egg. I haven’t seen them this year at the stores I frequent.  But that means there’s something to look forward to next year.

Related Candies

1. Elmer’s Dark Chocolate Heavenly Hash & Gold Brick Eggs
2. Nestle Creme Eggs
3. Lindt Lindor Truffle Eggs
4. Princess Marshmallow Eggs
5. See’s Egg Quartet
6. Kinder Egg

A lot of Easter candies seem to get smaller as the years go by, and portion control is a responsible way to go. But sometimes you just want a big, luscious rabbit to sink your teeth into.

Russell Stover offers a lot of Easter goodies, I’m most fond of their eggs, which are usually fresh and the perfect size at about an ounce for less than the price of a candy bar these days.

But I was mighty tempted by these Marshmallow Rabbits. They’re two ounces, and since they’re marshmallow they’re pretty big. The packages are 6 inches tall in vibrant metallic colors with a rather realistic rabbit illustration on the front.

They come in two varieties, the regular vanilla marshmallow covered in milk chocolate and a chocolate marshmallow covered in milk chocolate.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I opened the package. Some marshmallow shapes can be curiously amorphous. These looked, for the most part, like the outline of the image on the package. They’re about 4.5 inches tall and about 2.5 inches at their widest part.

I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a rabbit face with extra huge cheeks/jowls, or the whole body with a big meaty legs. (Part of me also thought they looked like a Buddha with rabbit ears.)

The chocolate is wonderfully rippled and I was pleased with how well I’d picked my rabbits out, as they were practically flawless (though I ended up dropping the chocolate one and denting his ear as I was taking the photo).

Russell Stover Marshmallow Rabbit

The chocolate shell has a nice snap to it and an overall chocolate malt scent. The marshmallow center is soft and moist with a strong vanilla flavor. It’s not quite as fluffy as some I’ve had, but it’s also very satisfying and has a bit of salt to it (60 mg in the whole 2 ounce portion).

Though the package says that a whole rabbit is a single serving, I found just the ears was plenty satisfying. The problem with a very large marshmallow items is that it’s hard to save some more for later without it making a mess. Still, I found them pretty easy to slip back into their packages and pinch shut for later. (I wouldn’t save it for more than a day or two, or else they get hard and tacky.)

Russell Stover Chocolate Marshmallow Rabbit

The chocolate on this one looked slightly lighter than its vanilla counterpart, though that could have been all in my head (well, it’s all in my tummy now).

This one has a light cocoa scent that reminded me of cookie dough.

The chocolate has a similarly crisp snap but still doesn’t flake or crumble off of the marshmallow excessively.

The marshmallow is soft, though not as mushy as the vanilla. It has a very springy and latexy quality to it. The flavor is mild, like a cup of hot cocoa, definitely less sweet than the vanilla but also much saltier (210 mg per 2 ounce portion).

The chocolate on both was really flavorful and helped to make these some of the better chocolate marshmallows I’ve bought at the drug store. The novelty shape and price makes them a really good deal. But the large portion size and awkward shape makes them difficult to share (as I think traditional chocolate rabbits are). There are no artificial colors in them.

Related Candies

1. Peeps Chocolate Mousse (Bears & Bunnies)
2. Easter Novelty Toys (with candy)
3. Russell Stover Eggs
4. Russell Stover Orange Marshmallow Pumpkin
5. Russell Stover Eggs (2007 edition)
6. Russell Stover Cream Eggs

When thinking of a premium bean my mind usually goes to coffee or chocolate or perhaps if I’m particularly hungry, heirloom beans like Anasazi. Very low on that list are Pectin Jelly Beans.

Jelly Beans are a rather simple sounding candy but are rather complex to make. They start with a boiled sugar, syrup and gelling agent mixture. Historically pectin was the gelling agent of choice. Pectin is a soluble fiber originally made from apple pomace (the stuff left over after pressing apples for juice) and later citrus rinds, it was easily available and previously regarded as a waste product.

Later, I’m not sure when as I’m not really a jelly bean historian, corn starch became more common for jelly beans (probably because corn products are so ridiculously cheap). But corn starch, as the name implies, is a starch, so it’s a carbohydrate. While corn starch may have taken over the jelly bean, at least it left our jellies & jams alone.

There are a lot of fans of pectin beans, though. They’re adamant that pectin makes the best kind of jelly bean. Smoother, milder and soothing. But pectin beans are becoming rather hard to find. I know of three brands at the moment: Jelly Belly (a special assortment, not their regular Jelly Belly), Brach’s (Peacock Eggs) and Russell Stover. I’ve been scouring the aisles of the drug stores & grocery chains and found this Russell Stover Pectin Jelly Bean mix.

They were a bit on the pricey side, on sale for $2.50 for a 12 ounce bag. As far as I could tell when purchasing them, they’re a fruit assortment. The package didn’t say what the flavors were. It also said “Made for Russell Stover” on the package, so they may be made by Jelly Belly or Brach’s for all I know. (But they’re not Kosher.)

They are big, beautiful, shiny beans. They’re about three quarters of an inch long (a Jelly Belly is about a half an inch), almost rod shaped.

I found nine flavors in the package:

My assortment seemed to be very heavy on the red and green.

Overall, I appreciated the mild flavor, consistent & smooth texture and ability to keep eating them without feeling full or regretful. The fruit flavor array wasn’t the best match for my sensibilities though. The only flavors I really liked were the orange and strawberry, though since they were so bland I found that I could eat any of them. I understand the appeal of these over a corn starch bean, which seem sickly sweet and sticky by comparison.

I really need to find these in the traditional spice flavors (besides the Hot Tamales Spice Beans I tried last year). Anyone have any suggestions of brands?

Related Candies

1. Loukoumi Artisan Confections
2. Wonka Nerds Jelly Beans
3. Blueberry Hill Spice Jelly Beans
4. SweeTart Jelly Beans
5. Starburst and Jelly Belly Jelly Beans
6. Jelly Belly - Full Line