Thursday, October 8, 2015
Tastykake Fall Kandy Kakes: Salted Caramel and Karrot KakeThe Tasty Baking Company has been based in Philadelphia since 1914. Back in 1930 they introduced a new snack cake called the Tandy Take which was eventually renamed in 1974 to Kandy Kakes (to avoid confusion with the Tandy Company). These were the snack cakes of my childhood. I’m not sure if I had a Twinkie until I was in college,but Kandy Kakes, I’d had plenty of those. Their most popular item is the Peanut Butter Kandy Kake (they bake a half a million a day as of 2014), which was also my favorite of their products. The Peanut Butter Kandy Kake is a disk of sponge cake (or maybe angel food cake) with a stripe of peanut butter covered in mockolate. Their second most popular item, the Butterscotch Krimpet is also a curious creation made of a sponge cake (sort of like a Twinkie) but with crinkle cut edges and a butterscotch frosting. (Pennsylvania is kind of known for butterscotch confections, see also the Boyer Smoothie cups.) When I was growing up there was still regionalism for baked goods, Tastykake was really a local company, though recently they expanded south and also took over production of the Hostess brands including Twinkies. This year Tastykake announced West Coast distribution for their more popular items. (Though it says on their website they’re available at some of my local stores, I still haven’t found them on shelves.) For those of you just discovering this nostalgic brand, you should catch up with this add for Tastykake, I’d say it’s from around 1975, starring Betty White: First off, are Kandy Kakes even candy and do they belong on the blog? Well, I’ve debated about this for a while. For the past few years when I travel to Pennsylvania, I’ve usually come back with a box (or two) of the Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes. They fit most of my rules for candy in that they’re sweet, portable, shelf stable and require no preparation to eat. However, they’re also baked (but then again so are Twix). I also have the same problem with chocolate covered pretzels. What pushed me over the edge with this review is the fact that Tastykake offered these new Fall flavors: Salted Caramel Kandy Kakes and Karrot Kake Kandy Kakes. First off, Kandy Kakes is a strange name. Substituting letters in a standard word is usually an indication of lesser quality, just like chocolatey denotes something not-quite-chocolate. Not only that, Tastykake and their product line has a lot of Ks in it. A lot. It’s like they’re going for something wacky (this all predates the Kardashian ownership of the letter).
So, the name might be a bit juvenile, but maybe it’s also supposed to be delightful. Betty White said some nice things about the ingredients in her commercial in Tastykakes, but for reference here’s what’s in the Salted Caramel Kandy Kakes (yes, I transcribed all this, so forgive any spelling errors as many of these ingredients don’t come up in spellcheck):
The Salted Caramel are described as cakes with chocolate flavored coating and salted caramel filling (naturally and artificially flavored). The large box (a half a pound) holds 6 of these packages of twin cakes. They’re actually a little weird out of the box because there’s no indication of which flavor it is. (So if I had the Peanut Butter version out of the box, I wouldn’t know ... that little BN initial on the package, what does that mean?) There’s 90 calories per cake, so the pair is only 180 ... for 1.3 ounces, so not really a low calorie product, just its size helps with portion control. They smell sweet, but not like anything in particular. The chocolatey coating is noticeably thin and fake. The bite is nice, the cake is soft and a little dry but that’s balanced pretty well by the caramel stripe on top. The caramel is quite salty, though there are only 95 mg per pair. The mockolate is terrible, far more noticeably terrible on the salted caramel version than the peanut butter. There’s no cocoa flavor and certainly no creamy cocoa butter experience. There’s not even any milk in that fake milk chocolate. It’s pretty dreadful. Maybe I’m not a good judge of pastries, or petit fours or whatever category these should be in, but they’re not actually good candy. The Karrot Kake Kandy Kakes sound good in theory. But in reality the white coating is suspiciously white. It’s not milky white, though at least this white konfectionery koating has nonfat milk in it. The coating has more titanium dioxide in it than soy lecithin. However, they do smell good. They smell like a nice spice cake ... a little nutmeg, a little cinnamon, maybe a touch of clove and sweet milk. The bite is soft and a little more substantial than the Salted Caramel as this cake is actually carrot cake ... there’s actually carrot in there and even some raisin paste, orange puree and coconut. The white coating is filmy and there’s another creamy layer in there that’s kind of like cream cheese or perhaps unscented foot balm. It’s a great idea but the coating completely ruins it for me. (Now, a salted caramel stripe in there and maybe an actual white chocolate coating ... but then we’re into actual petit four world, not cheap snack cakes. The cakes are made on shared equipment with peanuts and tree nuts and contain milk, soy and coconut. Related Candies
POSTED BY Cybele AT 2:56 pm Candy • Review • Caramel • Cookie • Kosher • Limited Edition • Mockolate • 3-Unappealing • United States • |
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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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what you need to do is make your own Kandy Kakes. You can use better chocolate, and you can even tweak the recipe (more/less chocolate, cake, peanut butter, etc.). Any recipe is 1000x better than the processed stuff Tasty Baking Co. is putting out.
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/17957/tandy-cake/
Hi, I keep forgetting that you were originally from PA. Even though I’ve lived all over the country, I was born and raised in the Phila. suburbs and I can tell you that the quality of Tastykakes is on a constant downhill and has been for some time. Like yourself, I also love the peanut butter Tandy/Kandy Kakes and they are my favorite. But the company, starting years ago, began to cut back on its quality and quantity of what was packaged. This was always most noticeable in the package of 3 chocolate cup cakes which received less and less icing every year. Now with the Tandy/Kandy Kakes, they come two to a pack. They used to be available for purchase in a 3-pack. The other thing worth mentioning is that there are absolutely no preservatives of any kind in their snack cakes. If you do not eat these by a certain time, they will be inedible. They get super stale quickly and have a short shelf life. While I’m all for getting as many chemicals out of our lives as possible, this brand of cakes could use some preservatives…
I guess these are what Cousin Catherine (from the Vacation movies) would serve at a tea party.
I’ve never seen Tasty products in MI.
Thank you so much. I KNEW they were called Tandy Takes at one time but never found it verified. That was my era of snacking. My grandmother always bought them for me, the peanut butter or the mint, I think it was? Thank you.
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