After a long and very white winter I’m guessing some folks are looking for a colorful spring rebirth with their Easter candy. Godiva sent me a few of their extensive Easter candy offerings and I do say that they have a great aesthetic.

I like to play with my candy, so the item I was most interested in getting a hold of is their Spring Pearls bag. The new Milk Chocolate Pearls come in two versions. The all orange candy coated milk chocolate spheres inside a cone shaped bag to look like a carrot. It’s not original but their version is drop-dead cute even if I find the ideas of carrots appearing as a spring or Easter motif hilarious. Carrots are a root vegetable and are planted in the spring but not harvested until the fall.

Even if the carrot is vexing I was still far more interested in the Spring Pearls because of the soft colors (less food coloring). There are three colors in this assortment: pale yellow, light green and soft pink.

The bag holds four ounces but the tag says that a single portion is 1.4 ounces (about 23 pearls) - which means that there are 2.86 servings in the package. Each pearl is approximately 1.74 grams and provides 8.26 calories.

But yeah, they’re $8.00 for a four ounce bag, which makes them $32 a pound or $2.00 for a single ounce.

This would be a serving size.

Just look at them! They’re so pretty. How can you argue with $2.00 an ounce when you’d get such enjoyment out of simply looking at them?

First I wanted to show the scale. Though the little spheres vary, they’re approximately 1/2 inch in diameter.

I found a Sixlet to photograph with one of the Orange Pearls as a comparison. The Pearl is on the left and the Sixlet is on the right. The colors are practically identical. Of course the difference is inside, Sixlets are a chocolate flavored candy and Pearls are actual milk chocolate.

In case you don’t know what Sixlets are or can’t recall their size, here’s an M&M. The Pearl in this photo is on the left and the M&M is on the right and has a little M on it.

The color of the M&M is a smidge darker if you’re trying to imagine the shade of orange the Pearls are.

The most vexing thing about these Pearls is the fact that they’re shiny spheres. They roll. So lining them up on the desk according to color isn’t easy. I’d need a special tray but I improvised by putting them between my F keys and number keys on my keyboard. (This doesn’t work so well on my laptop, which gets warmer. When sugar shelled panned chocolates get warm the shells tend to crack.)

The flavor is great. The shell is crunchy and the chocolate inside is smooth and creamy with a good dairy milk chocolate flavor. So much better than M&Ms which I sampled at the same time. But they actually weren’t better than the new Russell Stover Color Me Candies which are only 37 cents per ounce. (Yes, that’s 80% less.) The pretty bag simply isn’t worth that much.

I honestly had no trouble eating all of them. They are really well made and the fact that they’re spherical, I think, keeps them from chipping like the lentil shaped candy coated chocolate kin. I just can’t rationalize the price unless you simply must have a sphere - then I would definitely pay the difference instead of Sixlets. But hey, it’s Godiva, and giving a gift that has such an esteemed logo attached to it also means something. If you’re in the shop picking up something else that they do better than anyone else (and that’s always worth it), then it might be a nice addition. (I really vacillated between a 6 and a 7 out of 10 but let the price sway me towards the lower number.)

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Color Me Candies
2. Hershey-ets
3. Chuao Chocolate Blocks from LEGOLAND
4. Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces
5. Godiva Chocoiste Pearls
6. M&Ms Premiums

I bought a bunch of Japanese KitKats recently. (Photo here.)

A good malted milk ball is hard to find. Even worse, the good ones are hard to get. I don’t know why I expect to get some tasty malted milk at my nearest drug store or grocery, perhaps it’s because so many other quality candies are available these days.

But the mass-produced malted milk balls have been getting worse and worse while the gourmet styles seem to have branched out into novelty flavor combinations to the point that the classic is hardly available. There is a season for malted milk balls and it’s Easter.

Trader Joe’s has a milk carton package of Milk Chocolate Malted Milk Eggs that gave me hope. I also loved the price: $2.49 for 10 ounces of real chocolate malt balls.

The carton is cute, it’s the same base dimensions as a half gallon, but obviously shorter (I’m guessing it’d hold a quart). It’s 10 ounces of beefy malted milk eggs made with real milk chocolate. They lack the outer candy coating that most Easter varieties have, but that’s not the end of the world. It’s the center and the chocolate that count.

These eggs are large, about the size of a shelled pecan. They’re glossy and consistent. When I stick my nose into the spout of the carton they certainly smell like a sweet chocolate malt.

I think they have the perfect ratio of malt center to chocolate coating, so that’s a good start. The chocolate is soft but not gummy and though there’s a glaze on the outside (to keep them from sticking together) it doesn’t make the chocolate waxy.

But then there’s the center. The center is a good density - not too dense so that it feels like I’m eating styrofoam insulation and not too flaky so it feels like I’m eating yeast sprinkles. It’s crisp and has a mild malty and milky flavor ... but it also tastes like smoke to me. It’s as if all the air bubbles have some sort of burning plastic smoke trapped in them. Maybe I got a bad batch, but I just can’t get over it. I’ve tried, and I figure the fact that I’ve had these for about 10 days and haven’t finished them is a sign.

I might pick them up again (or have you tried them?) but since they’re seasonal I might just let it go. No sense falling in love with something that’s not going to be around.

Bonus Review: Naked Malted Milk Ball Centers

I’ve often lamented the fact that I can’t just eat the center of the malted milk balls. After all, I don’t need the chocolate, that’s not what attracts me to them. So after years of looking I found a place online (via some helpful readers) that sells the uncoated malted milk ball centers.

I ordered two one pound bags from Nuts Online. (The shipping got a little screwed up and I had to wait ten days to get them, apparently there was some sort of snow storm back on the Eastern Seaboard in February, they really should have said something in the papers about it.)

These are quite lovely. They’re crispy and dissolve quickly on the tongue. The malt flavors are intense and well rounded with a bit of a yeasty note and a little salt. I went through a one pound bag in the matter of a week. I still have a second bag that I’m hanging onto for those severe cravings that come after Easter.

They’re probably great for baking or desserts. They’re definitely good for munching. I can see them as a great movie treat because they’re not too sweet. Like most crispy candies you have to be very careful not to leave them out in humid conditions, they deflate and get tacky (I think we’ve all gotten the malted milk ball that’s just a gooey puddle inside.)

Related Candies

1. Jelly Belly Deluxe Easter Mix
2. Naked Chocolate Maltballs
3. Fairway NYC
4. Mighty Malts
5. Malted Crisped Rice Squares
6. Jelly Belly Chocolate Malt Balls
7. Mars Maltesers
8. Bulk Balls
9. Cocoa Pete’s Maltimus Maximus

I picked up a box of the new Panda Soft Herb Licorice after seeing a post on Gigi Reviews.

The cornerstone of an Easter Basket is the chocolate bunny. There are many to choose from and most often it’s about how it looks. I picked up three foil wrapped milk chocolate rabbits of similar size for a little comparison.

All were about the same price, between $3.99 and $4.49 (though prices vary from store to store, I picked all mine up at Target before the good sales started). All are American made, all are milk chocolate and all are Kosher. In the running are: Cadbury Dairy Milk Solid Milk Chocolate Bunny, Hershey’s Bliss Hollow Smooth & Creamy Milk Chocolate Bunny and Dove Fairy Bunny Silky Smooth Hollow Milk Chocolate Bunny.

Each is similar in size, thought the Cadbury bunny is solid so weighs a little more. Though they come in boxes, I’m not sure they’d go into the Easter basket that way. So here they are out of their boxes. I found all of them to be overpackaged, especially considering how many chocolate rabbits (Lindt is most notable) that are sold simply wrapped in foil without a box or plastic form shield.

Side by side it’s easy to see how the different milk chocolates are vastly different colors. Cadbury is the lightest and has an orange hue. Hershey’s Bliss is the darkest and from my reading of the ingredients and nutrition label it has the least fat (more milk solids and sugar).

They’re all three dimensional bunnies with nice molds. They were all pretty much flawless out of their wrappers as well.

The Cadbury Dairy Milk Solid Milk Chocolate Bunny is made in the United States by Hershey’s from imported “chocolate crumb” from Cadbury’s facilities in the UK (at least that’s what I learned via the NYTimes in 2007).

The ingredients are different than the UK Cadbury Dairy Milk. There is no additional vegetable fat in there, but it does contain PGPR, an additional emulsifier often used in less expensive chocolate. (If you’re curious about the differences between the UK and US Dairy Milk, check out this head to head comparison.)

Sugar, milk chocolate, cocoa butter, lactose, soy lecithin, PGPR, natural and artificial flavor

They all came with a crazy amount of packaging, the Cadbury bunny’s box was more than two inches taller than the rabbit inside. But it’s a generous size, a full six ounces which at the selling price of $4.49 it was the best value of the bunch.

The rabbit is a rather realistic representation, no anthropomorphism by the designers. It’s a classic sitting rabbit with high ears. The foil is great, the only one of the bunch that has a design on both sides. (The wrapping style is kind of like a chocolate coin, the two sides are a heavy printed foil and have a seam all the way around.) The fact that he could be seated facing either way was a great feature, especially if you’re designing an Easter basket for a particular tableau.

My Cadbury bunny was soft, even though my house was a cool 68 degrees. Biting off the ears was pretty easy, but after that I had to take a knife to him and give him a few quick jabs to break him up.

The chocolate has strong caramelized sugar and yogurty dairy notes. The texture is sticky as it melts though not as sweet as I expected at first. The cocoa is mild and woodsy ... it’s the classic dairy milk chocolate I think most people are familiar with. It’s a little grainy and gritty.

I was a little irritated at how hard it was to eat, requiring a knife or the unsanitary gnawing. But he was lovely. Here are some more shots I took if you want to see some other views:

The Hershey’s Bliss Hollow Smooth & Creamy Milk Chocolate Bunny was a little confusing. There were two products on the shelves at Target from Hershey’s (here’s where I picked all of these up). There was this Bliss bunny, which I thought was a good comparison to the Dove one, and then an identically molded one that was just “Hershey’s” but with a blue bow instead of a lavender one (I photographed the back of the package for later comparison).

The Hershey’s Bliss one has no PGPR like the Cadbury or classic Hershey’s recipe, but of course a price tag to match (in this case a dollar more).

The Bliss bunny wins for the least amount of packaging, if you can call this winning. Inside the box was a formed plastic piece that went over the front-facing side of the bunny but like the others, there was a lot of empty space in that box.

Bliss is a relatively new chocolate line from Hershey’s, it was introduced barely two years ago with a parallel line of products and pricing structure to the Dove line. The packaging and foil wrapping doesn’t quite rise to the level of elegance or chic sophistication that Lindt, Godiva and Dove have been perfecting for so long. But it’s what’s inside that matters ... well, in the case of hollow chocolate bunnies, it’s what’s inside the foil that matters, the really inside is nothingness.

Bliss was the lightest bunny in the bunch at only 4 ounces.

The shape is of a bunny on its hind legs, front legs kind of up in a begging position. She’s not carrying a basket or anything. The molding is nice, the details are pretty good, especially on the ears. I don’t care much for the design of it but the shape is good. It feels substantial, which is important to kids. It’s not easy to put a thumb through the side or anything.

The Bliss bunny had an excellent sheen. It broke nicely and wasn’t too soft. The bunny itself had thick sides, but not too thick that breaking it was difficult. (I actually like hollow bunnies more as I get older - I like the illusion or size but the ease of portioning.)

The chocolate was smooth and creamy, with a rich milky flavor with a little Hershey’s twang, but not too much. It’s sweet but not throat-searing and not at all gritty or grainy. I liked it much better than the Hershey’s rabbit I had last year and better than the Bliss foil wrapped pieces.

Here are more photos to give you a sense of the scale, wrapping and molding:

The final rabbit is the Dove Fairy Bunny Silky Smooth Hollow Milk Chocolate Bunny. This one diverges from the classic rabbit shape and goes a little into the weird territory. This bunny has fat, fat butterfly wings (I don’t know how some conservative folks feel about mixing fairies with Easter).

The box has the most packaging, a clamshell formed clear plastic piece that protects the bunny and holds it in place. It did its job well, as my bunny looked great in and out of the foil. The back of the box has a poem about the Fairy Bunny, a poem that tells the story of this magical Easter bunny who has a product placement deal with Dove.

This ingredients looked okay, there’s PGPR in there but it comes after the flavorings. (I’ve been told that PGPR is great for manufacturers because it makes molding easier.)

The Dove bunny is by far the best looking one in and out of the foil, but definitely on the feminine side with its lavender wing accents and luscious eyelashes. (Even the whiskers look feline-sexy.)

It’s a squat bunny, so it doesn’t feel quite as decadent as the Bliss one, even though it weighs a half an ounce more at 4.5 ounces.

The walls of the chocolate were inconsistent. Some spots were thick and beefy, others, like the sides and bottom away from the edges were quite thin.

The bunny has a soft milky and woodsy scent, not too sweet. The texture of the chocolate is creamy and smooth. As I had my bunny open for tasting for a couple of weeks, I noticed that the flavor profile changed. I’ve noticed this with molded items that have a lot of surface area, and especially with chocolate that has PGPR. The flavor gets a little rancid ... not full on “my goodness, this is spoiled” but a subtle “this was better last week”. So I found myself gravitating, much to my surprise, to the Bliss bunny.

This bunny still wins for its looks, here are some more glamor shots:

On the whole, all three are good quality. They’re expensive by the ounce when you compare it to other chocolate like little foil wrapped pieces or big bars. But they’re also a special item for an Easter basket, gifting or just using as a decorative item. I suggest going for the chocolate you like ... but sometimes aesthetics trumps taste. Don’t forget to check out your local chocolate shop though - there’s something special about buying local from a company that molds their bunnies on site.

Related Candies

1. Lake Champlain & See’s Bunny Battle
2. Upscale Hollow Chocolate: Michel Cluizel & Hotel Chocolat
3. Palmer Hollow Chocolate Flavored Bunny
4. Russell Stover Hollow Milk Chocolate Bunny
5. Lindt Chocolate Bunnies (Dark & Milk)