Candy Blog

Candy Corn gets a lot of different flavor treatments for Halloween, but for the most part the Easter versions are all about little spring shapes in the form of mellocreams in light fruity flavors. Brach’s has introduced something new to go with their Pastel Candy Corn, it’s called Brach’s Carrot Cake Candy Corn.

The packaging is simple, just a thick plastic bag. The image on the front depicts a cake with white frosting and a green and orange carrot on it. Down in the other corner is a small basket of the candy corns.

As a side note, Brach’s, the 110 year old candy company, has been going through a lot of changes lately; this seems to have led to an identity crisis. I picked up this bag of candy last month which is also a new product but features a different logo which I thought they stopped using around 2011 (but also appears on their twitter). Brach’s is now owned by the Ferrara Candy Company, which merged with Farley’s & Sathers last year. This is a huge company now that makes mostly sugar candy like Trolli, Lemonheads, Atomic Fireballs, Black Forest Gummies, Now & Later, Rainblo Gum, Jujyfruits, Chuckles, Bob’s and Fruit Stripe Gum. It seems like this constant change and shift of directions is keeping Brach’s from regaining their place in the world of classic American comfort candies.

My first instinct on these, without even eating them, is that the colors are all wrong. A slice of layered cake would be a sort of light brown color with flecks of orange and then the off white cream cheese frosting. There is no green in a carrot cake, unless you make some of the frosting green. If they wanted the candy corn to just look like carrots, then make them all orange with the wide base getting just a touch of green to simulate the carrot top. To simulate a slice of cake, I’d make the top and bottom white and the center orange. Why it’s candy corn is an entirely other matter ... why not make little slide of cake shapes? Brach’s already makes cute little shapes for their Halloween and Easter Mellocreme mixes ... why not a slice of cake or little carrots or a block of Philly Cream Cheese?

While I had some misgivings about the coloration, everything else about these is extremely well done. Unlike my problems with the Brach’s S’mores Candy Corn last fall, which were quite broken and brittle, these looked great right out of the bag. I saw very few malformed or incomplete kernels and they stayed in one piece for the most part.

They didn’t smell like much, and honestly I didn’t think much of them the first few I tried. I noticed, though, that the base had a mild spice cake flavor to it, it’s subtle but there’s a note of cinnamon and nutmeg. The overall piece had a slightly creamier note, with what I can only guess is supposed to be a cream cheese flavor. Again, it’s very subtle.

I had to compare the mild flavor to regular candy corn, naturally, so I picked up the Brach’s Pastel Candy Corn, since they were on sale 2 for $5. These are much more subtly colored, with only the corn base getting a pastel note of green, pink, purple, green, or yellow. I enjoyed these, particularly because there was less artificial coloring in them, so the clean flavor of sugar and a touch of honey came through a bit brighter than in the fall version which has more orange (and Red #40) in it. I did notice that some of the flavors, like the cream cheese twang was missing, so it wasn’t something I dreamed up. I also noticed on the nutrition panel that the Pastel Corn has more salt in it, 100 mg per serving compared to 70 mg for the Carrot Cake.

I liked the Pastel Candy Corn, but I liked the Carrot Cake Candy Corn better, perhaps because there was a vague flavor to it. Is it a successful simulation of cake? Not by a long shot, but taken as a candy on its own without its bakery reference, it’s quite pleasant.

Like other Brach’s candy corn, this is made in Mexico. It does have honey as an ingredients, as well as gelatin, so this is unsuitable for vegetarians. It’s made in a facility that also processes milk, eggs, peanuts, wheat and soy.

Related Candies

1. Brach’s S’mores Candy Corn
2. Starburst Original Fruit Flavored Candy Corn
3. Brach’s Ice Cream Conversation Hearts
4. Jelly Belly Peas & Carrots Mellocreme Candy
5. Brach’s Fiesta Malted Milk Eggs (2012)
6. Pumpkin Pie Gourmet Candy Corn
7. Brach’s Robin Eggs (Solid Milk Chocolate)
8. Brach’s Chocolate Candy Corn & Halloween Mix

There are always flavor trends. Tropical fruits, pumpkin pie spice, hot pepper ... much of it is a pendulum that swings from novelty to the familiar in unfamiliar settings. One of the new flavor trends that has been pointed out by food industry writers is cake.

Cake itself isn’t a flavor, it’s just an item you can make with some batter and an oven. There are a few different versions of the cake as candy flavors. The popular varieties are Red Velvet Cake, Birthday Cake and Carrot Cake. I gathered together a few that I’ve picked up in the past few weeks out of curiosity, then I thought maybe I should go through my archives and see how far back this goes and how successful this is as a flavor.

Red Velvet Cake has never been one of my favorites, so making a successful candy adaptation will probably always be lost on me.

Birthday Cake, White Cake or Party Cake is another subset of the flavor, it’s usually yellow cake with some sort of vanilla frosting.

Carrot Cake and Spice Cake are by far the most interesting of the lot, because they combine a series of flavors, both the lightly spiced cake with carrot added for texture and moistness then add in the tang of a cream cheese frosting. Mars has reissued their Carrot Cake M&Ms at Walmart again this year.

So this week I’ll review: Peeps Party Cake, Brach’s Carrot Cake Candy Corn, Russell Stover’s Carrot Cake, Wedding Cake and Birthday Cake Eggs. If there are others you’ve seen in stores, let me know so I can track them down Stay tuned.

Related Candies

1. R.M. Palmer Cake Batter Cup
2. Birthday Cake M&Ms
3. M&Ms Milk Chocolate Red Velvet
4. Russell Stover Red Velvet Santa
5. See’s Holiday Pie Truffles
6. Godiva Cake Truffles
7. Cupcake Bites

The Lovely Candy Company is a new venture that says, “Enjoying candy is like riding a bike - everyone should be able to do it!” So, to take away any trepidation some folks would have to indulging, they’re making their line of individually wrapped chews and caramels from “cleaner” ingredients.

You’ll find they’re gluten free, no GMO ingredients, and they use rBST free dairy products. (However, even though they make no products with nuts, they are processed on shared equipment and may contain traces of peanuts, almonds, walnuts and pecans. They also don’t use soy, but again, may contain traces of soy as well as nutmeg.)

For my first experience with the Lovely Candy, I picked out their all natural Chewy Original Caramels. Unlike the ingredients list for Hershey’s new Lancaster Caramel Cremes I reviewed previously, this is a very short and easy to understand list of ingredients that you might assemble in your own kitchen:

Brown Rice Syrup, Sweetened Condensed Whole Milk (Milk, Cane Sugar), Butter, Dried Cane Syrup, Molasses, Vanilla and Sunflower Lecithin.

The caramels are soft and have a wonderfully sweet aroma. What I liked best was there was not fake butter note to it that I’ve experienced with other packaged caramels.

The bite is soft and easy to chew. It’s chewy and smooth, but not silky in the same way the Lancaster Caramel Cremes were. It’s odd to compare these to the previous product, but I am since they’re hitting store shelves (they were only a few feet from each other at Target when I bought them) at the same time with similar price points, I think it’s valid to see how they size up. The flavor is robust, not very salty but not sticky or overly sweet. They don’t have the molasses or brown sugar notes I was hoping for, also, I’ve noticed that brown rice syrup can give confections a malty note, but I didn’t sense that here either.

Overall, a decent caramel. Easy to chew, easy to share and pop in your mouth. I’m disappointed to say that I prefer the Lancaster caramels, even knowing their less than ideal ingredients list. Not that I won’t finish this bag ... I’m fully committed to them.

I like that I found these at Target, a place that I know serves a huge portion of this country with an awful lot of heavily processed products. If someone is looking for a candy with more transparently sourced ingredients, this is a good option. However, it’s still sugar and fat, so it’s still not considered a healthy alternative to nutritious food ... it’s just better candy.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Lancaster Caramel Soft Cremes
2. Werther’s Original Soft Creme Caramel
3. Morinaga Sweet Potato Caramels
4. Helliemae’s Salt Caramels
5. Kraft & Ferrara Pan Caramels
6. Bequet Gourmet Caramels
7. Grandma’s Caramels
8. Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels

Milton S. Hershey is one of great entrepreneur stories of the 20th century. Hershey always wanted to be a confectioner. He was apprenticed to a candy maker as a child and then later tried several times to make it on his own. He focused on caramels and small wrapped sweets, peddling them on a cart pushed around the streets. While working in Denver for another confectioner, he learned a new recipe for boiled sweets, a caramel that was extremely stable as well as delicious because of the use of milk in addition to butter. However, even in Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City ... each of these companies failed. In 1886 he returned home, in debt but still convinced that his new caramel recipe he learned in Denver could succeed. He convinced family members to invest once again and this time was the right time. He created the Lancaster Caramel Company which flourished.

He built this little enterprise into a full factory business by the turn of century, employing over 1,300 people and then sold it off for a million dollars in order to fund his new venture, the Hershey Chocolate Company. Hershey’s is finally introducing their own line of caramels, under the nostalgic name of Lancaster.

The new Lancaster Caramel Soft Cremes’ package looks nostalgic. What’s inside, though, is unlikely to be anything close to what Milton Hershey used to make in copper kettles. The package says “His [Milton Hershey] original caramel recipe is the inspiration for Lancaster Cremes. The ingredients tell the story of a modern confection:

Sweetened Condensed Milk (Evaporated Milk, Sugar, Water, Lactose), Corn Syrup, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Palm Kernel Oil, Sugar, Contains 2% or Less of: Dairy Butter (Milk), Glyceryl Monostearate, Salt, Soy Lecithin, Disodium Phosphate, Tocopherols, to Maintain Freshness, Sodium Carbonate.

Though I was a little disappointed to see the use of things like palm kernel oil, tocopherols and high fructose corn sweetener, I was more disappointed at the price for such things. Kraft Caramels are usually about $2 a bag on sale and contain similar ingredients but not the premium price. But, I was willing to give these a try.

The little nuggets are glossy and soft. They don’t smell like much, but have a beautifully soft and chewy bite. The chew and dissolve is impossibly smooth and rich, with good flavor notes of caramelized sugar and butter. It’s like a soft version of Pearson’s Nips. (I could imagine these as fantastic in coffee flavor.) It’s not a completely stiff caramel chew, like a Storck Chocolate Riesen, but much smoother than the soft bite of a Kraft Caramel.

As much as I wanted to hate these for their divergence from Hershey’s original simple ingredients, they are quite good. The texture, the consistency and overall not-too-sweet profile is really ideal. I begrudgingly love them. They come in two other varieties: Vanilla and Caramel and Vanilla and Raspberry. Honestly, I plan to quit while I’m ahead. If they come up with chocolate or coffee flavored ones, I’ll give those a go.

Oddly enough, the Lancaster Caramels are made in Canada, not Central Pennsylvania. Also, they’re not Kosher and there are no other notations on the package regarding nuts, wheat or eggs though the ingredients list dairy and soy as ingredients.

Related Candies

1. Slo Poke Caramel
2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
3. Kraft & Ferrara Pan Caramels
4. Hershey’s Miniatures
5. Coffee Nips
6. Werther’s Original Chewy Caramels
7. Sugar Mama
8. Goetze’s Caramel Creams

The R.M. Palmer Giant Cake Batter Cup answers a need no one has addressed before. It’s a fake chocolate cup filled with a solid oil-based confection that emulates raw cake.

The wrapper is pink and the launch of the product coincides with spring, so I’m going to call it an Easter candy even though there are no rabbits on the package, just a couple of pasty kids in chef’s hats making some sort of bowl of batter.

It weighs a quarter of a pound, which is giant compared to the mini foil wrapped peanut butter cups R.M. Palmer usually makes, but it’s not as large as the half pound peanut butter cups that Reese’s sells in pairs around Christmas. But this isn’t peanut butter, where most of us think more is better. This is cake batter, which is pretty much a room temperature cookie dough smoothie.

The cup is huge, at a quarter of a pound, it’s the size of a small saucer and weighs, well, four ounces. This is not R.M. Palmer’s first attempt at a quarter pound cup, they make a passable Peanut Butter Cup version. The package says that it’s two servings, but that’s a staggering thought when I looked at the ingredients:

Sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm kernel, coconut and/or palm oil), whey, cocoa, lactose, skim milk, corn syrup solids, soy lecithin, natural and artificial flavors

The chocolate flavored coating looks like bad chocolate, but that’s about the only thing that it succeeds at. There are no chocolate notes in it, it has no chocolate texture, it’s filled with sugar, milk by-products and oils. The filling isn’t like the Russell Stover cake fillings, there’s no flour in there; it’s just more oil and sugar and fake vanilla.

I’ve never been much for eating cake batter, so the idea of a candy that re-creates this is not up my alley. Add to that, vanilla cake is the least interesting kind of cake. Why would I want to eat that batter? Spice cake, lemon pound cake, devil’s food ... these are interesting. Vanilla cake batter is not.

Related Candies

1. Birthday Cake M&Ms
2. M&Ms Milk Chocolate Red Velvet
3. Russell Stover Santas: Gingerbread, Peppermint and Maple
4. Russell Stover Red Velvet Santa
5. Godiva Cake Truffles
6. RM Palmer Giant 1/4 Lb. Peanut Butter Cup
7. Cinnamon Bun Bites
8. Cupcake Bites
9. R.M. Palmer Quax - The Yummy Ducky