Candy Blog

Boiled candies, or hard candies, are considered kind of ordinary in most situations. They’re not most people’s first choice, in fact, in most lists of candies, they’re often down at the bottom along with raisins and toothbrushes (basically, not even qualifying as candy). It’s sad, because there are good hard candies and boiled sugar candies can be some of the most beautiful of all candies out there.

Cut Rock is a tradition of candymaking that goes back at least 150 years. It’s a simple concept, different colors of hard candy are layered together and then pulled or rolled out to shrink the design and then cut into easy to eat pieces. (To make swirled lollipops, the centers are plain but the ropes of candy are wrapped into a disk and a stick is inserted.)

Raley’s Confectionary in Florida is one of the new artisan companies to bring this tradition back, and their twist is to use natural colors, flavors and organic/fair trade sugar. (I’m not sure about the glucose syrup that’s mentioned in the ingredients label, but not on the website.) Since all he makes is hard candies, it’s vegan and gluten free (though he does make some nut items, so check before you order if you have an allergy).

If you want to see more about how it’s made, Raley did an educational video that addresses how scaling is important when creating the designs to make cut rock. And of course here’s a more generalized video that shows the whole process from start to finish:

Wes Raley (seen in action above) offered me some samples and since it’s summer, which I high season for hard candies, I accepted them. It then took a long time to get through the whole set: Emoticon Mix, Root Beer, Cappuccino, Pomegranate,
American Flag, Grapefruit, Lemon and Blueberry.

The SA Emoticon Mix is a good place to start because it demonstrates the array of forms and designs that can be created and also includes a wide variety of flavors. Of course I don’t know what those flavors were supposed to be, since there was no key, so I can only guess. I know one was lime, and another was blueberry. The interesting thing about this version was how the diameter varied.

The Cappuccino demonstrates the detail that Raley can get with the candy.

The center, as you may have seen in the video, is an aerated hard candy. This makes it white and the pulling of the hard candy also allows Raley to incorporate the flavors. It makes it crunchy without any of those annoying sharp voids that some hard candies get.

Each piece is a mere half in across, yet the wire thin brown “steam” coming from the little mugs is perfectly proportioned to the little cups of coffee.

The flavor on this particular candy is a little milder than the vivid and fruity Emoticons.

The coffee flavor is a bit mild and thin for my tastes. It was toasty and less sweet, but more like a brown sugar candy than a true coffee with a bit of foamed milk experience. That said, it was one of the first bags I finished.

Grapefruit is one of several citrus flavors from Raley’s. The pieces are well made, a yellow rind and a pink sectioned interior sell the look. The outside is sweet and mild, but the aerated fruity center is tangy and nicely flavored. It’s a little zesty, only a slight hint of bitterness and quite tart at times.

Here’s the real gem of all the varieties I tried: Lemon. This piece was yellow with a shiny yellow rind, white pith and yellow sections. Unlike the grapefruit, which was flavored on the inside, the outside was also flavored. So the rind was a gentle and sweet lemon, but the inside was extremely tart, zesty and juicy.

These were absolutely adorable. The design is unlike most of the others that cut rock makers create, it has no jacket. Instead the flag’s stripes go right to the edge. It’s a complicated design, enough of the elements, colors and ratios are there for it to say “American Flag” even though it’s round.

The flavor is fun, the blueberry is sweet and has a good berry flavor and the strawberry is light and floral.

Root Beer was one that I was truly looking forward to, mostly because Raley doesn’t use artificial colors and one of my complaints about Root Beer Barrels is the aftertaste from the dye known as Red #40. This definitely did not have any aftertaste, but it didn’t have much of a forward taste either. It was exceptionally mild, like the Cappuccino. There was a hint of wintergreen bite, but not bite of tartness, no earthy ginger rooty flavors either. It was toasty but not like Root Beer.

But the candy was adorable, with the frosty mugs on a crunchy background. So I may have been disappointed that it wasn’t like I wanted it to be, but I still managed to eat the whole bag.

I give the fruity flavors a 9 out of 10 and the drink flavors an 8 out of 10 (they designs on those were especially good). The packages were stand up, zippered gussets. Each came with a little silica gel package inside, so even though I opened them (and resealed) they all stayed pristine. Some hard candies can melt and deform in the humidity or high heat, but these looked as good today as they did about a month ago when I got them.

Related Candies

1. Torie & Howard Organic Hard Candies
2. Krauterbonbons from Lubeck Christmas Market
3. Trader Joe’s Classic Holiday Candy Mix
4. Papabubble Amsterdam & Pillow Fight
5. Hammond’s All Natural Lollipops
6. The Apothecary’s Garden: Herbs (and some Bees)

The new Lindt Hello line is rolling out, so I picked up a few bars to sample at Target. One is the Lindt Hello Coffee Blast which is part of their Limited Edition summer flavors.

The front of the package asks, “Feeling hot? Have a shot!” followed by a little heart.

The bar is big and has nicely formed, milk chocolate domed sections which hold the coffee flavored filling. The ingredients are interesting because sugar is so prominent in them, as is vegetable oil (in the form of coconut, palm and palm kernel) but coffee and milk are pretty high up there, too.

It smells good, a little sugary but with a burnt and toasted smell of fresh coffee as well.

At first I found the bar extremely sweet. The milk chocolate is sticky on the tongue, though has a smooth melt. The filling is interesting, because at first I just thought it was a cream with a touch of coffee flavoring. Instead it’s layered - there’s a coffee sort of ganache layer that has crystals or crunchies of actual coffee in it. Then there’s the milky layer, which is a little tangy but not as sweet as I’d expected, so it balances out some of the bitter and very strong notes of the coffee (barley malt powder is listed on the ingredients, that may be in the cream to tone down the sweetness).

As I noted on the previous Nougat Crunch bar, all the Lindt Hello products are milk or white chocolate. I like the flavor profile of this one, but the cream fillings leave me a little on the overstuffed but not quite satisfied side of things. (I have this issue with the much oilier Lindor Truffles.) Lindt was one of the first very dark chocolates I got into sometime in the last century, I’d like to see them add more of that to this line.

Lindt is engaged in a program to create complete traceability for their ingredients, including labor conditions and sustainability for their cocoa but they don’t specifically say anything about palm oils. The package says it may contain peanuts and/or tree nuts. Contains soy, milk and because there’s barley malt, I’d say it’s not gluten free, either.

Related Candies

1. Starbucks Dark Chocolate with Via Ready Brew Bar
2. Askinosie Intelligentsia Coffee Bar
3. Meiji Corot & CoffeeBeat
4. Sarotti Scho-Ka-Kola
5. Espresso Filled Dark Chocolate
6. Javaz - Milk & Dark Chocolate Covered Coffee Beans
7. Trader Joe’s Espresso Pillows

Hello is a new sub-brand from Lindt Chocolate with a wide variety available exclusively at Target in the United States. (You can get some bars & products at the Lindt website and from Amazon.) Lindt calls it “a brand new collection of contemporary and sinfully delicious premium chocolate bars, sticks and boxes, inspired by classic desserts and treats.”

I’m not sure how it differs from some of their other bars before, but the packaging is certainly different. Instead of the stuffy but easily recognized Lindt package which featured a continental flair, these are certainly modern looking with a lot of flirty typography and forced casualness.

I picked out two bars for my first try (they were on sale, 2 bars for $4.00). Today I’ll review the Hello Crunchy Nougat.

The German style of nougat is a hazelnut paste, not the fluffy egg and honey confection. It’s a milk chocolate shell with a nougat filling and some little shards wafer bits (wheat flour is listed on the ingredients).

The bar is large and thick. At 3.5 ounces, it’s quite long but not as wide as their other tablets. For filled bars I enjoy this format, though it’s usually hard to get a bar that hasn’t been broken in transit or on display. (Since my bar was, this is a photo of the soon-to-be-reviewed Coffee Blast, which has the same mold.)

The milk chocolate is creamy and sweet, though a little sticky. The filling inside the little sections is far sweeter but has a warm roasted hazelnut flavor with a bit more of a milky, sticky note. The cookie bits are good, they add a touch of salt or at least a little malty flavor that cuts through all the sugar. I also caught a few shards of hazelnuts, which added a nice chew though not much crunch.

It’s a fatty, fatty bar, in a good way. At 156 calories per ounce it was easy to see that it was more than filled with sugar. Ground hazelnuts plus a lot of milk and some coconut and palm oil bring the saturated fat up to 7 grams per serving. I don’t know if I’d buy it again, as there are other hazelnut bars I like better, but mostly because I’d prefer a very dark shell on this to offset all the sweetness inside. I’ll keep looking through their range to see if there’s something that would suit me better, because it was a good deal for $2.00.

Related Candies

1. Lindt Wasabi
2. Limited Edition Ritter Sport Winter Kreation + Factory Store
3. Eat with your Eyes: The Most Awesome Chocolate Bar Ever
4. Choceur Nougat Bites & Marzipan Bites
5. Lindt Excellence Dark with a touch of Sea Salt
6. Lindt Fioretto
7. Storck Toffifay
8. Lindt Lindor Truffle Eggs

Wrigley’s has released a new Life Savers Gummies variety. It’s called Life Savers Berry Bites.

They come in three flavors: strawberry, red raspberry and cherry berry (which is not a real thing).

Their construction is different from the usual Life Savers Gummis. First, they’re smaller, about same diameter as a hard candy Life Saver, but without the hole. They’re thicker and have two layers. The top is the semi-transparent gummi layer and the bottom is called a white “light textured layer” which is a foamy gummi, a bit denser than a marshmallow.

Strawberry is the lightest color, a pale pink which sometimes looked a little orange. The flavor is well rounded, a good combination of tartness and sweetness. Strawberry is pretty easy to do well, as Life Savers have done here. The foamy layer is also a little tart and seems to be less berry, but not quite creamy.

Red Raspberry is the red and was the least successful of the set. It was tasty, but not jammy enough for me and didn’t distinguish itself from the other two. It was sweet and has berry notes, but it was bland overall.

Cherry Berry is dark red. If it’s supposed to be a mixed berry, that was lost on me, because this was a true Life Savers Cherry flavor. It’s zingy and intense, except for the foamy layer which gives it a bit of air without diluting the flavor completely.

I appreciate that Life Savers didn’t go out and make too many berry flavors to fit into this mix, just because they do five flavors in their rolls. Three is a good mix and all three of these were successful, though probably not a good match for my favorite flavor ranking. Now ... if they make a citrus mix, we’ll have something to talk about.

Right now I think they only come in the large resealable package, but will probably be available in the king sized packages as some point. They’re similar to the Wonka Whipped Wingers which I believe had natural colors in them.

Related Candies

1. Storck Mamba Sour Gummies
2. Van Slooten Flowers & Butterflies Mix of Sugared Liquorice
3. Wonka Springy Double Yummy Gummies
4. Wonka Whipped Wingers Gummies
5. Puffy Candy Corn
6. LifeSavers Tangy Fruits Gummies
7. Lifesaver Gummies

I’m taking a few days off. I’m on a cookie vacation. (No, that’s not a vacation from cookies, it’s a vacation with lots of cookies.)

I’ll be back later this week with more candy, but in the mean time, enjoy this photo of a Fran’s Almond Gold Bar which was “buttery caramel, toasted almonds and dark chocolate.” (Full package photo.)