It’s the day after Halloween and a lot of kids are sitting around ranking the candy they took home from Trick-or-Treating. Many come down to three piles - the good chocolate stuff, the tasty sugar candy and then the bad sugar candy. The grown up candy like Necco Wafers often ended up there. You might eat it, but only after everything else is gone.

Stark Assorted Candy Wafers are another one of those crunchy disk candies (now made by Necco since the merger back in 1988) that just don’t come to mind as a favorite candy. But they’re still a valid candy format. What sets the candy wafers apart from other candies are the texture and flavor variety. The wafers are made from a dough of sugar held together with gelatin and vegetable gums which is colored and flavored then stamped out into coins.

There are 19 candy disks in the package. It’s a bit more packaging than Necco Wafers. There’s a little brown paperboard tray that the candies are stacked in, and the whole thing is wrapped in clear cellophane, instead of the glassine wrapped roll of Necco Wafers.

There are six colors: White, Yellow, Pink, Orange, Green, Purple.

The texture is slightly airier and crunchier than Necco Wafers. They’re also not as dense as Sweehearts. The flavors are subtle but the colorings are a little more vibrant than Necco Wafers.

Green is Lime. It’s light and a little ordinary but pleasant.
White is Wintergreen. I liked that this one was white, because the Necco Canada Wintergreen mints always have an weird aftertaste. These aren’t as strong, but have a clean wintergreen flavor.
Purple is Grape. At least I think it’s grape. It’s very subtle, only slightly flavored and on the bitter side towards the end for me.
Yellow is Banana. Again, it’s a very subtle flavor. It’s not caustic, just a sort of vanilla pudding with banana notes.
Pink is Strawberry. It was awful, but this is just me and my problem with Red40 food coloring. There were some fragrant berry notes, but mostly bitterness.
Orange is Orange. Sweet with just a hint of zest to it.

Overall, the flavor offering is hit and miss for me. I liked wintergreen, banana and orange, but that left me with only half of the flavors as keepers. They’re exceptionally durable, I’m sure they store well and travel well. But they weren’t minty enough to keep them as an Altoids alternative and not flavorful enough for me to call them a treat. I wouldn’t be surprised if these go uneaten at Halloween. But hang onto them for decorating Gingerbread Houses.

Related Candies

1. Original Necco Wafers Return
2. Life Savers Pep-O-Mint & Wint-O-Green
3. Cool Honey Altoids
4. All Natural Necco Wafers
5. Canada Wintergreen
6. Necco Conversation Hearts (Sweethearts)
7. Astra Flying Saucers

Sometime about a year ago I picked up some Root Beer Puffs, which were like buttermints but flavored like the soda. A few weeks later I got a note from a company called Red Bird Brand that makes candy puffs in a huge variety of flavors. It took me quite a while to find them, but I did pick up Soft Assorted Puffs at the 99 Cent Only Store that includes 15 different flavors. (Though perhaps not always in the same bag.)

The flavor variety is, well, extraordinary: Peppermint, Cherry, Lemon, Green Apple, Wintergreen, Strawberry, Orange, Grape, Peach, Blueberry, Butterscotch, Watermelon, Cream Penny, Cotton Candy, Passion Fruit. There’s a menu guide on the back that shows the key for the combination of colors and stripes. There are about 25 candies in the bag, but the flavors were not distributed evenly.

One of the differences between this style of Puffs and the traditional Buttermint of After Dinner Mint is the size. These are quite large, at about 1 inch across and all of them are individually wrapped. (No more candy dish with the stuck together.)

Cherry was bold and easy to spot. It’s a flavor that’s both heavily scented and with a light tartness to it. It was smooth and had a good melt, but overall, it’s not usually my favorite though at least this didn’t have a lot of red coloring in it.
Lemon smelled rather like lemonade drink mix. The flavor was a bit on the metallic side, but mostly reminded me of lemon meringue.
Green Apple is a strange flavor for this candy. It’s not intense enough to really stand out, so it may as well be lime.
Wintergreen is quite medicinal, with a wholesome Root Beer sort of flavor. Because it was green and not pink, like many wintergreen candies, I didn’t notice any extra aftertaste from the artificial colors. I would eat this one again. (But I only got one in the bag.)
Strawberry and cotton candy looked very similar, but I’m pretty sure this was Strawberry. It was light and fruity, but not floral enough. It was almost like a strawberry lemonade because of the little tangy note.
Grape was more intense than I expected with full on tartness but very little grape flavor. The softness of the whole thing was good, but the flavor was too artificial.
Peach was bland with a little note of peach fuzz or apricot. It was not that tempting overall.
Blueberry was what the whole bag might have smelled like. It’s quite fruity, a little floral and not really what I’d call a candy flavor, more like an air freshener.
Butterscotch is warm and sweet, a little on the maple side. I liked this one quite a lot.
Watermelon was pure nostalgia. It tasted like a Bonne Bell lipsmacker. It was one of the more intense flavors in the package and I both loved it and hated it. I’m not really that fond of watermelon candies, as I don’t eat watermelon for the flavor anyway. But this had that fresh flavor that balanced the sweetness and the tartness of the rind and a green flavor.
Cream Penny was a mystery. This one is all white with a dark red dot in the center. I still don’t know what it’s supposed to be. It was sweet, but had no other detectable flavor notes so I’m going to say that it’s vanilla.

The flavors not in my bag: Peppermint, Cotton Candy, Passion Fruit and Orange.

For the most part I didn’t like the fruity flavors. The others like butterscotch and wintergreen were more to my liking, even the unflavored Cream Penny were pleasant.

One of the other items I picked up many months ago were the Red Bird Soft Hot Cinnamon Puffs. The bag holds only 4 ounces and was also $1.00, this time at Dollar Tree.

The puffs themselves are quite nice, I liked them more than the variety package. There’s a floral, sort of honey note to them. But they’re also quite cinnamony. I wouldn’t call them hot though, it was a nice heat but they never approached anything like the fire of an Atomic Fireball.

The cinnamon smell is strong, even when they’re in the package, so I had to keep them separated from other candies.

The package for the Assorted Puffs said it was Gluten Free, they’re also Kosher Pareve and appear to be vegan ingredients.

It was strange that I didn’t get the classic Peppermint in the Assorted mix, which is what Red Bird Brand is known for. Overall, the texture was good, they softened up nicely. The package mentions that they’re rather hard when they’re first made, but if you prefer a softer puff, to open the package and wait ... it was true. After a couple of months, mine reached the melt in your mouth texture that I was expecting.

Related Candies

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2. Katharine Beecher Party Mints
3. Pennsylvania Dutch Candies - Root Beer Puffs
4. Cedrinca Gran Mix
5. King Leo Dark Chocolate Crunchy Patties
6. Mint Cremes from the Makers of Jelly Belly
7. Canada Wintergreen

While on vacation last month I picked up some candies from the bulk bin at a candy shop. They were individually wrapped compressed dextrose Candy Rings. There was no label on the bin and nothing on the wrapper, so I can’t be sure of the brand.

I found three flavors: Cherry, Lemon and Lime.

They’re 1.33 inches wide and 1.6 inches tall. They’re flat, about a quarter of an inch thick. There’s a little gem design on the crest of the ring, two circles with a diamond shape in the center. It’s a clever bit of design, they’re stamped out like giant pills instead of being molded like most hard candies.

As adornment they’re not very comfortable. The rings are sized for small fingers, so they fit on my pinky and barely on my ring finger. The bands are chunky. With a file I suppose I could have made the ring hole bigger for my middle finger, as I think that would work best given the size of the ring. The design is cute, and the pieces are sizable.

I know that there have been a few makers of a few different kinds of compressed dextrose candy rings over the years. The version I got as a kid, I recall, was much chalkier and easier to bite than this version. They’re quite dense, like eating a piece of fired porcelain instead of some school chalk.

The flavors are mild, more sweet than tart, more perfume in most cases than flavor. The compressed dextrose they’re made from is less sweet than sucrose, but also lacks the full buoyant mouthfeel of sugar. Cherry is lightly tangy with an awful lot of jammy florals and a hint of cough syrup. Lemon was quite bland with even less tang than the cherry.

I prefer my SweeTart type candies a bit more chalky. I like less density, a little more air in them so that they can be crunched. I also prefer more flavor ... and maybe some other flavors. But for a cheap little wearable treat, these were passable. I’m glad they’re still around.

Related Candies

1. Trolli Gummi Bear-Rings
2. Bratz Candy Cosmetics
3. Peeps Lollipop Rings
4. Ausome Jewelry Kit
5. Oriental Trading Company Candies

Candy Corn broke out of its traditional flavor set at least 10 years ago. It’s only natural, since the fondant candies known as mellocremes were capable of so much more than just being different colors for different holidays: reindeer corn and bunny corn.

But Halloween has always paid host to the more interesting varieties. Lately we’ve seen caramel apple flavors, fruits like tangerine and green apple or toffee. Some candy companies have even taken to covering them in chocolate. Brach’s has a large variety these days, my favorite from their assortment is still the Brach’s Halloween Mix, which is not candy corn but little Halloween shapes like bats, pumpkins and maple syrup jugs. They’re lightly flavored and come in cocoa, maple, banana and whatever that honey flavor candy corn is.

The Brach’s S’mores Candy Corn straddles the summer and fall line, as S’mores are often a summer camp favorite but can easily be made in the fall around a crackling fall bonfire.

If I understand the point of these correctly, it should be a chocolate base, marshmallow middle and graham cracker flavored top. I have to say that they’re pretty ugly. The base is a dusty purple and bleeds into the white center.

They smell like a cross between the reliably over-sweet Candy Corn and graham crackers. The base is vaguely cocoa, but in the most watered down and flavored fashion. The middle layer is wonderfully vacant of flavors, kind of like a marshmallow. The orange tip has a distinct cereal and cracker note to it, like a graham.

The effect is something that’s very candy corn-like in flavor, but not very convincing as a S’more. I don’t see the point, really, especially since they’re not very attractive.

S’mores Candy Corn contains gelatin, no surprise as most candy corn does and certainly marshmallows do. It’s also made in a facility that processes everything else:peanuts, tree nuts, milk and eggs plus it contains soy and sesame.

As a side note, Brach’s has changed hands quite a few times in the last decade, and this has made some of their products a bit inconsistent. The company was owned by Farley’s & Sathers most recently and they have merged with Ferrara Pan and the whole company is now called Ferrara Candy. The Candy Corn manufacturing for Brach’s was moved off to Mexico at least two years ago and I’ve heard many reports from die hard fans that it’s not the same any longer (even though the ingredients list appears the same). I agree, it doesn’t seem as smooth and consistent as it used to be and I have switched to recommending the Jelly Belly Candy Corn if you’re actually going to eat it. Brach’s is still fine for decorative purposes.

Related Candies

1. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
2. Pumpkin Pie Gourmet Candy Corn
3. Toffee Flavored Chocolate Covered Candy Corn
4. Brach’s Chocolate Candy Corn & Halloween Mix
5. Milk Maid Caramel Apple Candy Corn
6. Zachary Candy Corn & Jelly Pumpkins
7. Brach’s Autumn Mix

In the ranking of Halloween candy, hard candies were usually pretty close to the bottom of the list. Unless it was Jolly Ranchers. A handful of green apple and cinnamon were welcome in my trick or treat bag, and even better if the home gave out the sticks.

It’s fun to see Hershey’s Jolly Rancher brand branching out a little bit for Halloween with their new Jolly Rancher Caramel Apple Lollipops. I found these at Target but saw them earlier at CVS and RiteAid (for at least a dollar more) so I think Hershey’s has given them very wide release.

It’s hard to believe that these will topple the current seasonal Caramel Apple Pop favorite from Tootsie.

The smell is confusing. I get a lot of buttery notes, but it’s like artificial butter flavoring or something. The flavor is immediately tangy and overly sour apple. But then again, this is a Jolly Rancher candy, so it I guess it just has to be mostly green apple. The green and caramel color swirls look like the flavor should vary, but I didn’t detect enough of a respite from the tartness of the green apple in the caramel.

The texture is good, I didn’t notice any voids or sharpness. The pieces were all perfectly formed and didn’t have any of that sticky/deformation/melting problem that the Tootsie Caramel Apple Pops have.

Overall, though, these are just too tart for me and don’t have enough actual caramel or toffee in them. However, they do seem to be free of actual dairy products, so if you’re looking for a caramel product without milk, cream or butter, this might be for you. I’m not planning on eating the rest of this bag, but I’m confident the neighborhood kids won’t be disappointed on October 31st.

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Big Bite Caramel Apple
2. Limited Edition Milky Way Caramel Apple Minis
3. Werther’s Original Caramel Apple Filled
4. Tootsie Caramel Apple Pops
5. Festival HiCHEW: Candied Apple & Cotton Candy
6. Milk Maid Caramel Apple Candy Corn
7. Caramel Apple Sugar Babies

For me, Klondike Bars always seemed like a candified version of ice cream. So it seemed a bit odd to see that there was a new line of Klondike Bar themed candies, under license from Unilver and made by Flix Candy.

I picked up the Klondike Mint Chocolate Chip: The Candy! at Dylan’s Candy Bar, which is walking distance from my office. The candy bars there are stupidly expensive, this was $2.29, which is pretty steep for something that isn’t fair trade, organic, shade grown and packaged in a reusable, recycled tin. But the back of the package does say that they’re made in the USA.

It’s been years since I’ve had a Klondike Bar, but here’s how they described this room temperature,shelf stable version: Mint chocolate chip center covered in dark chocolate flavored coating.

Though it’s easy to shudder at what the chocolate flavored coating might mean, I reminded myself that most ice cream novelties also aren’t made with real chocolate, in order to get the right mouthfeel on a frozen dessert, many use other tropical oils in addition to the chocolate solids.

sugar, whole milk, palm kernel oil, semisweet chocolate, butter, cocoa processed with alkali, corn syrup, hydrogenated palm oil, cocoa, salt, natural and artificial flavors, soy lecithin, oil of peppermint, coconut oil, yellow 5, blue 1, vanillin, TBHQ, citric acid.

First, it’s not one big block, it’s four one inch square pieces. That’s fine with me. That was always one of the most frustrating things about Klondike Bars, they were too big for me to eat before they started to melt from holding them.

The coating is actually okay. It’s not greasy or slippery or too soft or too crunchy. It’s actually chocolatey. The filling is overwhelming tough. The pieces smell strongly of peppermint. The center is kind of like a frosting cream though not grainy. The center is a little smoother, maybe a little fattier than the filling of a York Peppermint Pattie. There’s a salty note to the center, which moderates the sweetness. If there were chocolate chips anywhere in the middle, I missed them.

Ultimately, I don’t see much reason to eat this instead of a York Peppermint Pattie or if I’m really going decadent, the Trader Joe’s Honey Mints. But I admit, the packaging is pretty good.

Related Candies

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2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Honey Mints
3. Nestle Girl Scout Cookie Bars - Thin Mints
4. M&Ms Mint Dark Chocolate
5. RM Palmer Peppermint Patties
6. Flix Sour Gummy Pop Corn
7. Sunspire Peppermint Pattie

The trend towards mixing savory and sweet has been going on in the confectionery world for quite a while. Combining salty, crunchy pretzels and sweet milk chocolate is not a strange notion. There’s no reason that any number of herbs and spices can’t be combined with chocolate to great effect. It’s great to see different cultural takes on, like curry or smoked chili or lavender.

The Lindt Wasabi bar is certainly not the first chocolate bar to include the Japanese horseradish. But the others I’ve had were from Japan (the KitKat) or from small chocolatiers.

The bar was just introduced, but when I saw it at Target, it already had a Clearance label on it (marked down from $2.49 to $2.11) while the expiration isn’t until the end of November. I believe Lindt already has a successful bar with their Chili and I also liked the Touch of Sea Salt Dark bar.

This bar is not particularly dark, it’s only 47% cocoa solids. And the ingredients aren’t anything special either, the wasabi is artificial.

Though I don’t like a lot of spicy foods, such as those made with chili peppers, I am fond of horseradish and wasabi. (I also enjoy curry and ginger.)

The bar smells sweet and earthy, with notes of horseradish right away. But there’s also a sort of metallic note to that as well, like a bag of pennies. The bar has a wonderfully smooth melt, though it’s quite sweet. It’s smoky and the chocolate is rich but immediately overpowered by the prickly wasabi flavor. It’s not terribly spicy, but has a little mustard seed kick to it and warms my throat.

As far as an enjoyable confection, this is not. It’s a novelty to me, and 3.5 ounces was far too much. I’m fine with the occasional fine chocolate that uses it as an accent for some sort of combination but for the most part I want my chocolate to either challenge me to search my taste archives for flowers, tea, exotic fruits and fine cognacs or to comfort me with the gentle flavor of plain old chocolate.

Related Candies

1. Haribo Hot Sticks
2. Nestle KitKat Sakura Green Tea & Wasabi
3. Jelly Belly Tabasco
4. Hot Tamales 3 Alarm
5. David’s Signature Beans Jelly Bean Sampler
6. Lindt Holiday Almonds
7. Vosges Bombalinas - Black Pearl Cashews

The Skinny Cow line of candy from Nestle gives consumers the option of buying candy that has fewer calories than most other single servings.

The Skinny Cow Divine Filled Chocolates with Caramel is a slight offering, only 130 calories packed into only 1 ounce. As far as that making it a lighter version of candy, its caloric density is great than York Peppermint Patties (113 calories/ounce) or 3 Musketeers (122 calories/ounce). However, compared to other nuttier offerings like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (147 calories/ounce) or Snickers (134 calories/ounce), it sounds like a better choice. But the biggest issue becomes the satisfaction, because there’s no point in the empty calories of a treat if they’re not full of pleasure.

Line up the cute little medallion shaped pieces and you’ll be impressed. They’re adorable and because they’re so flat, even at about a third of an ounces they look like a lot of candy. They’re about 1.5 inches across. They smell like, well, sweet.

The pieces have a little stripe of sticky caramel inside. It’s not so much caramel as salty buttery flavored syrup. The milk chocolate is passable; it’s at least real but lacking in an satisfying chocolate flavor. The caramel’s salty kick balances out the overly sweet chocolate.

They’re disappointing, especially since I’ve had the Dove Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Promises, which are only 135 calories per ounce and about half the price per ounce. (Of course it’s up to you to control yourself and not eat a half pound in one sitting.)

Related Candies

1. Nestle Skinny Cow Divine Filled Chocolates with Peanut Butter Creme
2. Dove Sea Salt Caramel Dark Chocolate Promises
3. UNREAL #5 Chocolate Caramel Nougat Bar
4. Trader Joe’s Les Chocolats Belgique (Belgian Bars): Caramel, Chocolate Buttercream & Speculoos
5. Nestle Skinny Cow Dreamy Clusters
6. Nestle Skinny Cow Heavenly Crisp
7. Milky Way Simply Caramel