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Monday, November 12, 2007

Russell Stover Private Reserve Vanilla Bean Brulee

Russell Stover Private ReserveRussell Stover has been going all out to align itself with the idea of premium chocolate with the tagline Elegant. Rich. Beautiful. for their Private Reserve line.

First, the package. It’s a 3 ounce bar in a pretty tab-top box. The printing is elegant, with a matte-gold background with a little wallpaper pattern and an embossed gold logo for their new Private Reserve line. The bar inside is wrapped in gold foil.

The Vanilla Bean Brulee with 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate boasts on the front that it contains Madagascar Vanilla Beans. (On the back in far smaller print it mentions additional artificial flavor in the filling.)

Vanilla Bean Brulee

The bar consists of eight squares. It’s dark and shiny and really a stunningly lovely bar. It has a pleasant but not overwhelmingly sweet smell of chocolate, mostly the cherry fruit notes and some smoke with just a light wiff of bourbon once snapped in half.

Though the package shows the filling as being thick and rather yellow, it’s actually a creamy white and thin. The chocolate has a good snap and a creamy melt for a 70%. Not too bitter with mostly woodsy notes of sandalwood and smoke. Though not a lot of filling, the white chocolate and vanilla center is wonderfully buttery and smooth and does have a good vanilla note to it. It also has a little salt, which really makes it pop, giving each set of flavors and textures distinctiveness.

I was impressed! I ate the whole thing. The price is pretty good for something that you find a drug store. If faced with this and the more standard candy bar fare, I might dig deep for this more expensive bar. It still wouldn’t replace an exceptional chocolate bar, but as something to compete with Hershey’s Cacao Reserve or Ghirardelli, I think it holds its own. It also holds a distinct place, I don’t think anyone else makes a bar like this in this price range.

UPDATE: Since some others have commented about the little tasting squares, I’ve gotten a hold of some of those and have to agree, they’re not the same! They taste tired and weak and a little waxy.

Related Candies

  1. UHA Puccho Custard
  2. Theo Confections
  3. Russell Stover Heart
  4. Russell Stover Cream Eggs
Name: Private Reserve Vanilla Bean Brulee with 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate
    RATING:
  • 10 SUPERB
  • 9 YUMMY
  • 8 TASTY
  • 7 WORTH IT
  • 6 TEMPTING
  • 5 PLEASANT
  • 4 BENIGN
  • 3 UNAPPEALING
  • 2 APPALLING
  • 1 INEDIBLE
Brand: Russell Stover
Place Purchased: sample from All Candy Expo
Price: $1.99
Size: 3 ounces
Calories per ounce: 135
Categories: Chocolate, White Chocolate, United States, Russell Stover

POSTED BY Cybele AT 10:40 am    

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Gummi Bears in Space

You know what’s missing from SciFi these days? Gummi bears.

Here’s a scene from Darth-Len‘s Flickr set called Gummis Under Duress.

(I miss Tom Baker as Dr. Who and his Jelly Babies.)

POSTED BY Cybele AT 7:14 pm     CandyFeatured News

Saturday, November 10, 2007

This Week in Candy - Packing my Bags

DSC00971I’ve been spending my spare time toiling away on my bad novel. I’m still shy of my fundraising goals for the Write-a-Thon next weekend for National Novel Writing Month. So if you’ve been thinking about donating to the cause (and possibly winning some limited edition candies for your trouble), please, please do it soon.

My donation to the cause will be a candy buffet for the other writers to enjoy. Don’t worry, I’ll have photos and hopefully lots more to say about candy buffets and candy favors for weddings and other parties.

I’ve also been prowling around in the post-Halloween bargain bins. I’ve been horribly disappointed. My best buys were Ghost Peeps for 9 cents a package and some Wonka Donutz that have some sort of red goo at the center for 13 cents each. (I’m not sure if they’re from this year or not.) The better news is that the Christmas candy is out and I’m seeing the Junior Mints Deluxe at RiteAid already.

Here’s the week in review:

Monday: Boston Baked Beans (5 out of 10)

Tuesday: Cowgirl Chocolates Buckin’ Hot Habanero Caramels (6 out of 10)

Wednesday: Melville Honey Spoons (6 out of 10)

Thursday: Sour Patch Extreme (5 out of 10)

Friday: Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Filled with Creamy Peanut Butter (5 out of 10)

Average rating 5.4 for the week with a 20% chocolate content.

 

POSTED BY Cybele AT 8:20 pm     CandyFeatured News

Friday, November 9, 2007

Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Filled with Creamy Peanut Butter

imageI’ve seen the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Filled with Creamy Peanut Butter at the stores for over a year now, but only in the super-duper 4.5 ounce slab bars. I didn’t really want that much of a bar and I figured it’d come around to the smaller size at some point. Sure enough I finally found them in the King Size. (I’m guessing they couldn’t quite swing a regular sized bar because of the proportions involved in making a filled bar like this.)

The bar puzzles me. It’s a Hershey’s product, just as Reese’s are, but it’s not branded under the Reese’s name, which is where most peanut butter products go (except for the Peanut Butter Kisses). I just couldn’d figure out what would be better about this bar compared to all the other Reese’s products in their line.

image

I’m not sure why I was so surprised at how it looked when I took it out of the wrapper. It’s downright unattractive. The five rounded rectangular segments have a “default font” look to them. The bar is long and thick, a little narrower than the traditional Hershey bar and of course triple the thickness to hold the “creamy peanut butter” filling.

As proportions go, this is more about the chocolate than the peanut butter - there’s probably a 2 to 1 ratio of chocolate to peanut butter here. The chocolate on this bar doesn’t quite taste like Hershey’s. There’s no familiar yogurty tang to it, but it does have that sort of soft & fudgy texture. The peanut butter filling isn’t an ultra-smooth cream as I was expecting, but not the dry crumble of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup either. I wouldn’t call it creamy. It didn’t have much of a salty hit to it, though the package did say that it has 140 mg, about half of what you’d find in a Reese’s.

It’s a nice tasting bar, it seems designed for the market of people who don’t want too much peanut butter in their chocolate and seem perfectly happy with a recommended portion of 2.3 ounces and 370 calories (the recommended portion when eating the jumbo bar is more responsibly set at about 1.5 ounces). The other difference between this bar and a Reese’s is that this one contains partially hydrogenated oils ... I’m not saying that’s a selling point.

Related Candies

  1. Reese’s Whipps
  2. Twix PB
  3. Boyer Smoothie
  4. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Line
  5. Take 5 Peanut Butter
Name: Hershey's Milk Chocolate Filled with Creamy Peanut Butter
    RATING:
  • 10 SUPERB
  • 9 YUMMY
  • 8 TASTY
  • 7 WORTH IT
  • 6 TEMPTING
  • 5 PLEASANT
  • 4 BENIGN
  • 3 UNAPPEALING
  • 2 APPALLING
  • 1 INEDIBLE
Brand: Hershey's
Place Purchased: 99 Cent Only
Price: $.50
Size: 2.3 ounces
Calories per ounce: 161
Categories: Chocolate, Peanut, United States, Hershey's, Kosher

POSTED BY Cybele AT 8:12 am    

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Sour Patch Extreme

Sour Patch ExtremeI don’t think I’ve ever thought that Sour Patch Kids needed to be sourer. Perhaps some sour enthusiasts did, but there are lots of super-sour, tongue-burning candies out there.

What I think is interesting about the new Sour Patch Extreme candies is that they didn’t just make them more sour. They mixed the flavors up a bit.

Each candy is a mix of two flavors. The head is one flavor and the shock of hair is a second flavor. I don’t think they looked too much like faces, more like feet with different colored toes to me.

Sour Patch Extreme FlavorsWatermelon Grape (purple hair and pink head) - I was surprised, these went together pretty well. The fake grape has a little concord snap to it and the watermelon, though pretty much a straight high pitched sour also has that slight note of the rind in there.

Orange Blue Raspberry (blue hair and orange head) - I would have preferred my citrus together - maybe a little lemon and orange, but this was okay. The orange seemed to overpower the raspberry in the sour department, but after chewing to the point where it gets sweet, that’s when the raspberry kicked in.

Sour Apple Strawberry (red hair and green head) - This combo was quite as abundant in the mix and that was fine by me. The flavors were so distinct they didn’t seem to go together.

I rather prefer my flavors separate. The good thing is that you can just bite off the half that you feel like eating, but of course you can’t throw the other half back into the bag for later (well, maybe you could, but I wouldn’t).

While they are more sour, they’re also a smidge less flavorful. I think I’ll stick with the regular ones.

I got these as a sample at All Candy Expo, but I spotted them at Target and 7-11.

Unlike gummis, Sour Patch products contain no gelatin (they’re technically a “jelly” product). For that reason they are suitable for vegetarians.

Related Candies

  1. Sour Gummi Bears
  2. Twizzler Sourz
  3. Haribo Fizzy Cola
  4. Warheads Juniors Extreme Sour
  5. Swedish Aqua Life
Name: Sour Patch Extreme
    RATING:
  • 10 SUPERB
  • 9 YUMMY
  • 8 TASTY
  • 7 WORTH IT
  • 6 TEMPTING
  • 5 PLEASANT
  • 4 BENIGN
  • 3 UNAPPEALING
  • 2 APPALLING
  • 1 INEDIBLE
Brand: Cadbury Adams
Place Purchased: samples from All Candy Expo
Price: ~$1.39
Size: 7.2 ounces
Calories per ounce: 106
Categories: Jelly, Sour, Cadbury, Canada

POSTED BY Cybele AT 10:39 am    

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