Mars has been morselizing its candy bar line over the past couple of years. The new Milky Way Simply Caramel Unwrapped Bites are in the latest in the introduction cycle. They’re just little unwrapped cube versions of the Milky Way Simply Caramel bar, served up in a bag for easy dispensing.

I picked mine up at 7-11, which had a sale on their Mars Bites, the Sharing Size were 2 packages for $3.00. (I bought a Powerball for the Wednesday $400M drawing as well, bringing my tally to an exact $5. Yes, I’m aware that my odds are 1 in 175,223,510 of winning.)

The bag holds 15 little cubes. That’s two servings, as this is a Sharing Size. So each serving is 7 or 8 cubes which comes to 190 calories. If you’re trying to moderate yourself, four would be 100 calories but trip up and eat the whole bag by accident, you’re looking at 380.

Mars has always made beautiful candy bars. (See this photo for evidence.) The new bites line, though, suffers from the packaging style. The little candies are not sealed like panned candies so they get scuffed and dented in the bag together.

The pieces are well formed, they’re cubes but most have little “feet” where the chocolate pooled. They’re rather milky smelling, it’s a sort of cereal and milk note. The chew is soft, the caramel is very smooth though it doesn’t have the taffy-like toughness that I enjoy in my caramel, it does have good toffee and toasted sugar notes. The chocolate is passable, it’s sweet and has a lot of dairy flavors, but it’s not exceptionally chocolatey. (A dark version of these someday might be nice, but if I want that, I’ll probably just have some Marich.)

Overall, I was very pleased with these. They’re easily poppable, satisfying in the sense that the textures and flavors were better than I expected. I didn’t want to eat the whole bag in one sitting, but I did finish it in three days. I can imagine that the packaging won’t do well in the summer months, and forget it if these get smashed a bit, because you’d be in for a huge mess inside the bag. They’d be easy to mix in with other things (like a Chex Mix for a really sweet & salty combo) or as an ice cream topper.

Related Candies

1. Bonomo Taffy Nibbles: Vanilla and Banana
2. Milky Way Unwrapped Bites
3. Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered Sea Salt Butterscotch Caramels
4. Nestle Butterfinger Bites
5. Dove Sea Salt Caramel Dark Chocolate Promises
6. Rolo Minis
7. Short & Sweet: Dollar Store
8. Milky Way Simply Caramel

It’s a new year and time for a new variety of Skittles.

This year’s flavor variation is called Skittles Desserts and features five different colors themed on dessert creations: Orange Creme (peach), Raspberry Sorbet (red), Strawberry Milkshake (creamy pink), Blueberry Tart (blue) and Key Lime Pie (bright green).

The pink package was pretty easy to find on the shelf. The current varieties of Skittles are the Original Fruits (now with green apple), Wild Berry, Sours, Tropical and Darkside. For Easter there’s also a pastel version of the Original Fruits.

Orange Creme is kind of pointless. It’s absolutely like an orange sherbet, which is to say, orange with all the great things taken out. The addition of the creme flavor component gives it a sort of Play-Doh flavor note that’s a little too fake milk. There’s no zest, though a light tartness.

Raspberry Sorbet has a strong floral note and only a light tartness. There’s also a bitter aftertaste for me, perhaps the food coloring. Overall, it’s a nice flavor that combines well with the others.

Strawberry Milkshake is comforting. It’s just strawberry with a sort of yogurt note. It’s not as floral or as tart, just sweet and slightly creamy.

Blueberry Tart is tough to say succeeds. It does have a lot of blueberry flavor in it, both the deep boiled jam note and the sort of tart and tannic tea flavors. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dessert like a berry tart, it’s closer to a fresh berry flavor though that’s not a bad thing.

Key Lime Pie is absolutely disappointing. I’ve had a lot of key limes, both fresh, frozen and mock versions. Key limes are definitely different from the standard Persian limes in both the flavor profile and texture. This lime is more Persian than Key. It’s tart, but not overly so, but misses that milky, sort of chalky note that key limes have.

This flavor assortment was lackluster. There were no stand out flavors, nothing new. It’s just a series of small tweaks to flavors that we’ve all seen before from Skittles. I didn’t think they combined particularly well, which is usually one of the features I like best about Skittles. Since the loss of the Lime Skittle in the Original Fruits variety, I’m left without a favorite Skittles package. I haven’t bought them since I stopped finding the bags with the original variety in them. In last year’s review of the Skittles Darkside, I listed a few ideas for new mixes (including Skittles Pies, kinda what they did here).

Related Candies

1. Skittles Darkside
2. Skittles Crazy Sours (Europe)
3. Skittles Blenders
4. Panda Blueberry Liquorice
5. Whoppers Milkshake Strawberry
6. Andes Mints & Dessert Indulgence
7. Skittles Chocolate Mix
8. Skittles Carnival Flavors

What’s in your candy bowl this year?

One of my favorite candy combinations is milk chocolate and cereal. You’d think it would be great to live in the United States, then, which has two nationally branded crisped rice bars: Nestle Crunch and Hershey’s Krackel. But they are both pale versions of what a crisped rice and chocolate bar could be.

So, I’ve been hunting for a great crisped rice bar and at the moment my go-to is oddly the Ritter Sport Cornflakes Bar because the chocolate is actually good and the cereal flakes provide that salty, malty crunch component that keeps it all from getting too sweet.

Trader Joe’s has finally come to the rescue with their Trader Joe’s Crispy Rice Milk Chocolate part of their line of stacks of small Belgian made bars sold near the check out counter (review of the dark chocolate here).

The bars are well priced, you get three 1.4 ounce bars for $1.79. The whole stack is wrapped in cellophane and each bar is also individually wrapped and sealed for freshness. The bars are made in Belgium with high quality chocolate (for candy bars) which means 31% cacao content and 18% milk content. (And oodles of sugar, too.) Unlike the US counterparts, this is real milk chocolate (Krackel contains vegetable oil fillers while both also use artificial vanilla and lactose, a sugar filler).

The size of the portion is ideal, at 1.4 ounces it’s 220 calories - more than enough for a snack but no risk of eating more (unless you really can’t control yourself and open one of the other bars). It smells milky and malty with a little toffee note. The melt of the chocolate is silky, it’s buttery slick and though sweet, the crunchy rice moderates it well. The crisped rice is the manufactured kind - you know, the perfect little spheres, not the rustic kernels from a breakfast bowl. This means that they’re very evenly distributed and very even overall, but I miss that variation in the crunch.

This really meets nearly all of my requirements for the perfect crisped rice bar ... there just aren’t enough Trader Joe’s.

The bar contains milk, wheat and soy and is made in a facility that also processed tree nuts and eggs. (No notation about peanuts.)

Related Candies

1. Ghirardelli Milk & Crisp Chocolate Eggs
2. Organic Moo Milk Chocolate with Crisped Rice & Corn Flakes
3. Nestle Crunch - Even More Scrumptious
4. Malley’s Chocolates
5. Ghirardelli Luxe Milk Crisp
6. Isle of Skye Seeds of Change Milk with Crispies
7. World’s Finest W.F. Crisp
8. Hershey’s Miniatures

Here’s another heart-shaped candy perfect for Valentine’s Day decorating. (Spoiler: they’re not good for much else.)

Though they’re called Sweet Treats Cupid Hearts, they’re also marketed and sold for folks looking for themed candy for baby showers. They come in mixes like pink and white and blue and white. I found mine at Jack’s Wholesale Candy in downtown Los Angeles, but I also saw them at Michael’s and some other party planning shops. I don’t know much about this Sweet Treats brand, the candy itself is made in China but the bag says that it’s packaged and distributed by Metro Candy Sales of Vacaville, CA.

The Cupid Hearts have one of my favorite ingredients list of all time:

Maltodextrin, Anticaking Agent (magnesium stearate), Artificial Flavorings, Artificial Colors (Titanium Dioxide and Blue #1), Glazing Agent (Carnauba Wax).

So, the first ingredient is the bulk of the candy, and when I say bulk, I’m guessing that it’s more than 90%. Maltodextrin is a polyscaccharide made up of many molecules of glucose (it varies depending on the formulation - it could be as few as 3 or as many as 20). So it’s basically sugar but it’s not quite as sweet as the sucrose we’re accustomed to but has all the calories. There’s very little else to this candy. They’re made by pressing the powder under high pressure, like making pharmaceutical pills and then they’re dumped into a big rotating drum (a panning machine) to get a shiny, colorful coating.

My understanding is that these are vegan (though magnesium stearate can come from animal sources, it’s far cheaper to buy the vegetable sourced version).

The pieces are thick and well formed to look like hearts. The colorful glaze, however, is inadequately applied. The crotch of the hearts on the blue ones were predominantly unfilled gaps. I don’t see this as a feature, just lack of quality control. (They were all like that in the store, the pink and white ones also looked the same.)

The bag smells slightly floral, like a generic fabric softener sheet. The candies have a light crunch, the centers are firm but not too sandy but easy to bite. They are all sweet except for that floral flavor, there’s no tartness, no tang, nothing fruity or spicy that indicates they’re food and not toilet bowl cleaner.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re decorative. You can let people eat them, but I don’t recommend it. It’s not that they’re bad, but at 120 calories per ounce, there are far better things to do with your discretionary calories. At $4.00 for 10 ounces ($6.40 for a pound), I also thought they were darned expensive considering the fact that the same store was selling the far prettier Oak Leaf Hearts for only $2.40 a pound. Even the Wonka Heartbreakers are a better deal.

Allergy Information: packaged on equipment that processes dairy, soy, wheat, eggs, sesame seeds, coconut, nuts, and/or tree nuts.

Update: It’s been suggested that they may be more like sachet beads than candy; they should be placed in little gossamer bags, tied with a bow and then left in the car to keep it smelling fresh.

Related Candies

1. Oak Leaf Hearts Candy
2. Wonka Everlasting Gobstopper HeartBreakers (2014)
3. Brach’s Ice Cream Conversation Hearts
4. Candy Sweet Spots
5. Hello Kitty Lucky Stars Candy
6. Runts
7. Palmer Bee Mine
8. Oak Leaf Candies
9. Goodbye Tart n Tinys
10. Ausome Jewelry Kit
11. Candy Blox