Feeling a little sluggish after having an hour ripped from your lazy Sunday?

How about a little spot of sweet espresso and some dark chocolate to get your going?

I picked up these little Espresso Filled Dark Chocolate nuggets at Cost Plus World Market. I think they’re made by Mieszko, a Polish candy company. I was hoping they’d be like the Ferrero Pocket Coffee that are so hard to get here in the United States.

The packaging was nicely done. The stand up pouch has a zipper lock for re-sealing. Each individual piece is wrapped in a paper-backed foil and then a thin cellophane over that to seal it up tight. Often I worry that filled chocolates will be cracked or oozy, but every one was perfect.

The little domed rectangular nuggets are about one inch long, 3/4 of an inch wide and about the same high. The dark chocolate isn’t particularly dark, the package says that it’s at least 40%. It smells rich and dark, but that’s about as good as it got on that front.

The chocolate shell was nicely tempered and thick enough to be a strong container for the liquid center. The chocolate is smooth but far too sweet and lacking in bold chocolate punch. The espresso goo inside is a smooth and syrupy texture. It smells nicely of coffee but is sticky sweet. I liked the sweet roasted barley notes to it, but it wasn’t what I’d call espresso at all, I’d call it a Postum syrup.

It’s too bad, the price was decent and the fact that they’re pretty easy to find if you have a Cost Plus World Market nearby would make them a great item for coffee lovers. But these aren’t for coffee lovers, they’re for people who heap spoonfuls of sugar into their espresso and call themselves coffee lovers. In reality they’re for sugar lovers who like coffee flavor ... nothing wrong with that and here’s a candy to go with that. (I know, I said at the top of the review this might be the caffeinated pop to get you going after the time change, I was wrong.)

Related Candies

1. Javaz - Milk & Dark Chocolate Covered Coffee Beans
2. Bouquet of Fruits Vinyeard - Wine Filled Chocolates
3. Java Twix
4. Trader Joe’s Espresso Chocolate
5. DeFranco’s Espresso Secrets
6. Pocket Coffee

The new LifeSavers Gummies Bunnies & Eggs are charming little Easter themed gummis that come in five different shapes and six different flavors.

The bag has the old LifeSavers logo and design elements to it (the rolls are rather different these days). It also features the bug-eyed bunny that appears on the Jelly Beans.

The flavors are Lemon, Apple, Orange, Tangy Cherry, Tangy Punch and Watermelon.

All the candies are sherbet colors, soft, opaque pastels. They’re bouncy and squishy, not quite greasy but they definitely cling together readily.

I expected them to be big, about the same size as the hoops known as LifeSavers Gummies, which themselves are larger than the hard candy version. Instead they’re actually smaller than the little images on the package. These cute and plump little shapes are barely the size of a traditional gummi bear. (I threw an M&M in there for you to see the scale.)

Blue is Tangy Punch - it reminds me of Hawaiian Punch. It’s tangy of course and has an artificial flavor to go with the tropical fruit.

Green is Apple - it’s far less tart than I expected. A little like apple juice.

Orange is Orange - it looks like sherbet and tastes rather like it too, soft and mellow with a light sour note but mostly a juice flavor.

Red is Watermelon  - at first I thought it’d be cherry. The watermelon reminded me of Jolly Ranchers in the best possible way. Fresh, a little more intensely fruity than the real melon and of course an artificial version of the actual flavor.

Lemon is Yellow - I didn’t care much for this one, it had a metallic note, like drinking lemonade in a can.

Pink is Tangy Cherry -  this is not the cherry I associate with LifeSavers. It’s far too mild and though it’s called Tangy Cherry, it’s not terribly sour at all.

On the whole they’re adorable, rather mild but nothing extraordinary. Gummis for Easter aren’t that common, so it’s nice to see a themed product. There is no allergen statement on the package but it does contain gelatin and of course artificial colors & flavors. It doesn’t say anything about gluten or nuts.

Related Candies

1. Au’some Easter 3-Dees Gummy
2. Disney Pixie Perfect Gummies
3. Necco Paas Gummi Baby Bunnies
4. LifeSavers Tangy Fruits Gummies
5. Albanese Gummi Butterflies
6. Lifesavers Jellybeans

Peeps Dark Chocolate Covered Marshmallow is pretty much the biggest thing to happen to Peeps. Oh sure, they’ve dabbled with cocoa flavored Peeps or maybe put them inside a chocolate shell, but an actual chocolate dipped Peep made by Just Born is pretty revolutionary.

First thing, they’re singles and they’re individually wrapped. Other Peeps are sold in trays with more than one serving. So each one will be fresh and ready to eat. (This may or may not be a good thing, I’m not sure if Just Born is going to make Chocolate Covered Stale Peeps.)

I’m going to start with the dark chocolate covered version because that’s what I was attracted to first, but I also have the milk chocolate version. They’re nicely priced, I think the regular retail is about 80 cents, but I picked these up at RiteAid at two for a dollar.

(No, the Chocolate Peeps do not poop M&Ms ... that’s just there for scale, you silly goose.)

The big thing about Peeps in their chick format (not the bunny format) is that they sit upright. A standard array comes in a conjoined row of five weighing 1.5 ounces. In this case a single Peep is covered in chocolate and sits on its side. They’re huge but well detailed for a chocolate enrobed item. (Think about how hard it is to get details on the blanket covering something that’s extruded in the first place.)

Each piece is one ounce and biting into it answers several questions I had:

First, it’s a yellow Peep in there. Unlike a standard Peep which is only colored on the outside sugar crust, this Peep has coloring all the way through the marshmallow. (Not really something I’m fond of, in fact, I prefer the Ghost Peeps for Halloween which have no artificial colorings.)

Second, there is no sugar crust. It’s just a skinless Peep covered in chocolate.

The dark chocolate coating isn’t a terribly complex chocolate or even that dark (there’s no percentage on the package). It has milk fat in it (but it’s not like we had any hopes that a chocolate covered marshmallow was going to be vegan, did we?). The shell is rather thin, perhaps a little thicker than I’m accustomed to with the Russell Stover versions.

The marshmallow texture is airy and far lighter and less latexy than I experience with Peeps. I can put my tongue through it in my mouth, kind of like a smooth sugary foam instead of a marshmallow.

It’s sweet of course but not grainy. The dark chocolate has a bittersweet and dry quality to it that helps round out the fake vanilla flavoring.

The Peeps Milk Chocolate Covered Marshmallow comes in a bright yellow wrapper (kind of violating the unspoken industry standard that blue is milk chocolate). It was extremely easy to spot when I first walked into RiteAid, so they can definitely say that the package fits the brand.

The interesting thing that I noticed about the ingredients is that it doesn’t seem that these are just your regular individual Peeps run through an enrober. These appear to be a different formula. The marshmallow portion goes like this: Sugar, corn syrup, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, whey (milk), gelatin, cocoa processed with alkali, and less than .5% of the following: invertase, natural and artificial flavors, soy lecithin, yellow #5 and potassium sorbate.

Regular sugar-crusted Peeps contain: Sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, contains less than 0.5% of the following: potassium sorbate, artificial flavors, yellow #5, carnauba wax. (The wax, I believe, is the eyes.)

The sweetness and moistness of the marshmallow is even more noticeable over the dark chocolate version. The milk chocolate shell has some good dairy notes, but it isn’t quite as creamy as I would have liked. The good thing is that it held together well, I didn’t have big flakes coming off as I bit into the fluffy marshmallow.

The texture differences were rather minor here, not at all like the ordinary sugar crust but not enough of a contrast to provide added interest.

Mostly I found the milk chocolate version too sweet though the fake vanilla was actually kind of fun - like a White Toostie Roll is fun for a while and then I realize that there is food out there with real flavor.

I don’t quite understand why they had to make them yellow inside, I think a lot of parents might have preferred them to leave out the Yellow #5.

I know that many bakeries, candy stores and fudge shops have been dipping Peeps and offering them to their customers for many years, so this version may be a bit of an adjustment and some may prefer the inner sugar crusting.

The package says that they may contain peanuts, tree nuts, egg and coconut - in addition to the ingredients soy and gelatin. They are gluten free.

Related Candies

1. Peeps Mash Ups - Savory
2. Russell Stover Marshmallow Rabbits
3. Pete’s Gourmet Confections: Marshmallows
4. Peeps inside a Milk Chocolate Egg
5. Peeps Mash Ups
6. Peeps

The Jokerz Candy Bar from Go Max Go Foods is the last of their vegan candy bars on my list for review.

The happy red wrapper features jaunty typography and little playing card suit symbols in lavender. The name has one of those Z things on the end of it, I’m not sure if it was because there as already a Joker bar and they had to pick another name (actors usually go with a middle initial). Or maybe that was to make it cool and hip. As cool and hip as a vegan who doesn’t eat real chocolate. Much of the wrapper is spent explaining what’s not in the bar. There are no dairy ingredients or cholesterol, no hydrogenated oils or trans fats and it’s free from artificial flavors and colors. Their description on the website is a little more appealing:

When your idea of the perfect candy bar is all about peanutty goodness, then we’ve got you covered. If layers of dry roasted peanuts, buttery-tasting caramel, and rich peanut nougat, sweetly wrapped in a delicious chocolately coating sounds like a little slice of heaven, then smile, the Jokerz(tm) bar is for you!

The bar, if you couldn’t already tell, is a vegan version of a Snickers. But really it’s just inspired by the Snickers, as there’s very little that’s the same except for the inclusion of peanuts. The bar I got was a little worse for wear. A bit melted on one side, this is generally the hazard with mockolate candy, which often has a lower melting point than chocolate. But the good thing about mockolate is it doesn’t lose its tempering as easily - so the texture that exists is generally the same after resolidifying.

The construction inside is a smooth and dense “nougat” with peanuts on top and then layered with a caramel-like chew. It’s all covered in a thin layer of rice-milk mockolate. The bar is a bit flatter than Snickers (about the same weight though, which is 2.07 ounces), but also a bit longer (about 4.25 inches long).

The bar does smell good, like opening a can of Spanish peanuts. Lightly toasted, the nut aromas are not at all dark and there are hints of toffee sweetness.

The texture had a few similarities to the Twilight - a chewiness but no buttery caramel flavors. The good news is that the grassy and green tasting peanuts covered up a lot of other things that I found lacking in this bar. The chocolate coating felt greasy (possibly because parts of it were melted & reformed) and the nougat center simply had none of the fluffy qualities associated with American nougat nor the silky dissolve of the European versions.

The bar was filling, too filling for me, I was pretty satiated after about a third of it.

I liked it better than Twilight and Buccaneer, but then again I like Snickers better than Milky Way or 3 Musketeers for the simple reason that I like peanuts. I’d rank it as my second favorite of the Go Max Go bars, but really, don’t make me eat any more of them.

On the whole I don’t like things that pretend to be other things: fake meat, fake fur and certainly not fake chocolate. But these bars go further, they try to emulate complex things like caramel and nougat, which can be done, but I have to wonder why. There are plenty of other fabulous vegan things that can be done with sugar and chocolate (and nuts) - trying to pretend to be something else instead of something originally awesome is just an exercise in disappointment.

For a vegan version of this candy, try Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews (also called Chew-Ets) in the dark version. Far cheaper but not free of hydrogenated oils.

(For anyone interested in the candy maker’s reaction to this post, check this out.)

Go Max Go is not organic, not fair trade, not Kosher and is made in a facility with dairy, eggs, wheat, peanuts and other tree nuts. They do market themselves as dairy free and gluten free, but there can be traces because of their manufacturing practices.

Related Candies

1. Go Max Go Mahalo Candy Bar
2. Zingerman’s Zzang! Candy Bars
3. Crispy Cat
4. Sjaak’s Vegan Chocolate Assortment
5. Snickers Xtreme

The Mahalo Candy Bar is a vegan version of Almond Joy. The big difference, besides no milk, is that it’s one big log of a candy bar instead of two pieces and it’s more than double the price.

The packaging belies its special place: it’s not that crazy dreadlocked, barefoot and patchouli drenched candy bar. Nope, it looks like a little plastic wrapped, sugar sweetened tropical paradise. It bears all the signs of Hawaiian hospitality, including the name Mahalo, which means thanks and praise, while the hibiscus flowers which are abundant on the islands. The description on their website for the bar is:

If you crave a gently sweetened coconut candy bar topped with three whole dry roasted almonds and covered in a luscious chocolately coating… hang loose, the Mahalo(tm) bar is for you!

Oh, chocolatey coating. Hmm, that doesn’t sound quite as paradise-like. I actually knew that going in with these bars. I’ve looked at them before at the store and online and just wondered what they were thinking. Dark chocolate is vegan, in fact, it’s pretty easy to find. So why go with this rice milk mixed with cocoa and palm oil. How on earth is palm oil better or more vegan than cocoa butter. (Well managed cacao plantations are more diverse than palm plantations because cacao needs shade, so there are other canopy trees - less monoculture.)

The bar looks pretty good. The mockolate coating has a few bloomed spots, but I don’t hold that against them, the texture seemed just fine. (I know that coconut can be very difficult because it’s also fatty.)

The bar smells like coconut and hot chocolate. The bite is soft and chewy. The coconut center is moist and the coconut bits are big and sticky. The almonds are nice, but I could have used one or two more at this price. They added a nice crunch though. The mockolate coating was barely noticeable but had a strange “not quite milk” flavor to it that I can only say is like cereal.

Go Max Go Foods makes a series of candy bars, a vegan version of several classics. This one is by far the best, mostly because it’s all about the chewy and sweet coconut and the chocolate is not the focus. With real chocolate this would probably be a much healthier and tastier bar but since there are few vegan coconut bar options, this is an excellent choice except for the price.

If you want vegan, try the Sunspire Coconut Premium Dark Chocolate - it’s cheaper, real and actually tastes better. (Review here, scroll past the foul milk version.)

Go Max Go is not organic, not fair trade, not Kosher and is made in a facility with dairy, eggs, wheat, peanuts and other tree nuts.

(For anyone interested in the candy maker’s reaction to this post, check this out.)

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Almond Joy Pieces
2. Sunspire Coconut Bars
3. Almond Joy
4. Regional Flavors: Key Lime, Pina Colada & Huckleberries
5. Crispy Cat

If the statistics braniacs are correct, you’re less likely to receive chocolate this year than a year when Valentine’s Day falls on a weekday. This is because the major heart-shaped confectionery purchasers are men and when the holiday falls on a weekend the celebrations are more likely to be date-related than object-related.

I picked up this box of Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Hearts with Rich Truffle Filling on a weekend (long before Valentine’s Day though). The box holds 7.05 ounces and 16 Belgian truffles. Well, the package calls them truffles, I’m not convinced as you’ll see in a moment.

The flat and simple box has a stylized cartoonish design on the front though the overall format is similar to the Belgian Fancies I bought before Christmas.

I like the overall design, it’s simple and spare and not so precious or frilly that it couldn’t work for either gender or as a gift between friends or family.  The box does and excellent job of protecting the candies, which were all shiny and flawless.

The hearts are nicely sized for a single bite. They’re about one and a half inches at the widest, about three quarters of an inch high.

The ingredients list for these non-flavored bonbons is extremely long. In my perfect world the definitions of things like ganache and truffle are pretty strict. A truffle is chocolate mixed with extra dairy fats like butter or cream. That’s it. There can be flavorings, inclusions and maybe even nut butters but then it becomes a bonbon with a truffle ganache base filling. The Belgian maker of these has things in here like corn syrup (third ingredient) vegetable oils (fourth ingredient) and some other things like glycerin, crystalline fructose, mono & diglycerides and citric acid.

The result of those ingredients is not so much of a mock ganache but something that I think of as really good chocolate frosting. The thing is, the reason to put all that extra fat into ganache is to make the melting point lower, so that it actually melts in your mouth quicker than chocolate. (Cocoa butter has a higher melting point than dairy butter.) Putting all those different oils in there just isn’t the same and things like corn syrup add moisture, which makes it chewy and gives it an almost-caramel like pull when it’s bitten.

Now, all that aside, they’re not bad to eat. The chocolate shell is rather sweet but very smooth. The flavors are berry and a little bit on the woodsy spice side. The semi-sweet shell plays well with the very sweet center. There’s a slight fudginess to it, I hesitate calling it a graininess but it simply tastes sugary instead of chocolatey. For a store bought box of chocolates, they’re not bad, but at $5 for a box I expect a little better. In fact, I wouldn’t mind paying an extra dollar for fewer ingredients and a more intense chocolate punch.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Belgian Chocolate Fancies
2. Valerie Confections: Pour Homme and Pour Elle
3. See’s Cinnamon (Hearts & Lollypops)
4. Trader Joe’s French Truffles
5. Choxie 3 Ounce Chocolate Bars
6. BonBonBars: Malt Ganache & Scotch

I was a little dubious when Ferrara Chocolate entered the segmented spherical fruit made from chocolate market late last year. But I was impressed with the quality, availability and price. Ferrara Pan is best known for its other spheres such as Lemonheads and Atomic Fireballs. They used to be the importers and distributors of Toblerone, Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Cote d’Or chocolate, but when Kraft decided to handle that themselves, Sal Ferrara saw an opportunity to get that niche of sales for his company and moved into chocolate molding.

What’s most exciting about the new brand is the inventiveness of their “Chocolate Oranges”. The initial items were pretty much carbon copies of the existing Terry’s Chocolate Orange (Milk, Dark and Milk Chocolate Toffee Crunch). But now that the initial move into stores is over and hopefully folks sampled over the holidays they’re settling in and pushing the envelope a little more.

The Valentine’s Day version of the chocolate orange is part of the strategy to keep the oranges around for all holidays. This one is Strawberry Milk Chocolate and features a Valentine’s message on every segment.

There are 20 segments in the sphere. The red foil wrapper has a sticker that says Burst then Enjoy, but I do poorly at tasks that require just the right amount of force (watch me bowl sometime). So I just cleave it apart by wedging a knife between the segments.

There are ten messages on the slices, some are icons and others are little sayings. Be Mine, True Love, Only You and Hug Me. There’s no Marry Me but there are little pictures of a cupid, a set of kissing lips, a rose and the iconic Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture. (Well, it’s not quite the same icon, the O in LOVE is upright, not tilted.)

The scent is lightly floral, a mix of milk and strawberry. It reminded me of strawberry Nesquik. The chocolate is smooth but very sweet, has a good roasted chocolate note to it as well as the flavor of strawberry. There’s no tangy component, no freeze dried strawberry bits.

Each of the molded segments is nicely done. Mine were shiny and pretty much perfect - the only hitch was sometimes I broke off part of the design when separating it from the center.

The mix of strawberry flavor and milk chocolate isn’t exactly my favorite, but for what it is, it’s very well done. The chocolate is smoother than what I’ve been used to with Terry’s though absolutely still as sweet.

The idea of doing multiple designs on the segments is pure genius - it actually made me want to take apart the sphere to look at them all. Sharing it would certainly be in order, especially for Valentine’s Day. The price is certainly right at about $2.50 at most stores.

Related Candies

1. Florida Tropic Oranges
2. Ferrara Chocolate Oranges
3. Ferrara Milk Chocolate with Almond Nougat
4. Terry’s Chocolate Toffee Crunch Orange
5. Limited Edition Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms
6. Whoppers Milkshake Strawberry
7. Meiji Gummy Choco
8. Terry’s Chocolate Orange Confection

I love variety, in fact I crave it. I was excited to find this selection of three different kinds turron (torrone) in this box from El Almendro. It includes Turron Duro, Turron Caramelo and Turron Crocanti.

Each piece is about one ounce (there are seven so I got three of the Duro) and individually wrapped. In fact the package was wrapped a lot. The box was wrapped in cellophane. There tray inside was wrapped in cellophane and each of the pieces is wrapped in cellophane. They’re very fresh.

The most remarkable thing about all three varieties is that they’re mostly almonds. Each lists the ingredients as 60% almonds.

Turron Duro is a light and crunchy turron. This version is common in both Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. El Almendro is Spanish and the best thing about it, of course, is that in Spanish you trill the double r ... it’s like extra exercise for your mouth, so you work off more calories.

The finger is three inches long and one inch wide, so it’s a nice bar-like portion. The white nougat is crispy and filled with nuts and has the scent of marshmallow, almonds and honey.

If you’ve always wanted more of those little nougat bits in a Toblerone, this is the stuff. They’re tacky but mostly crunchy, only mildly sweet with oodles of almonds. The honey notes are prominent but never quite dominate because there are just so many nuts. My favorite of the three,

The Turron Crocanti variation has a transparent amber version of the turron instead of the milky white stuff. Here the caramlelized sugar flavors win out over the honey. There’s no egg white in it, so it’s more of an almond brittle. It’s also a little more bitter as candy part is quite dark and burnt tasting (in the best way possible).

The Turron Caramelo was a little confusing to me at first. Every time I looked at it, I though ... oh, it’s a fig turron! And then I’d eat it and it’d be a sesame turron.

The candy looks like something I’d get in a dish at a Chinese restaurant. It smells quite dark and toasted, like sesame oil. Sesame isn’t always a good pick for me. I enjoy Sesame Snaps (those sesame finger cracker things) and Sesame Brittle (those little fingers wrapped in cellophane and sold at health food stores) and of course I’m a nut for Halvah. But sesame has a dark side - a side that reminds me of burnt hair and flaming plastics. The bars were extra hard and crunchy, which was a little disturbing as I’m worried sometimes that I’ll break my teeth on candy I’m reviewing and then where will I be!

The flavor is actually quite pleasant after I smashed the bar around inside the package when I had my second one. The sesame overshadows any honey or almond and definitely ventures into the bitter burnt notes. This was my least favorite.

I’m glad I got a variety that confirms how much I prefer the version that has egg whites in it. Now I just need to find a package that has them in these perfect sized fingers. Often the Spanish turrons come in dinner plate sized wheels, which means messy smacking & breaking.

It’s pretty wholesome and filling stuff, at only 110 calories per stick and the fact that it’s mostly almonds and all natural might make some parents pretty happy.

Related Candies

1. Fard’s Persian Pistachio Nougat
2. Trader Joe’s Lumpy Bumpy Bar
3. Flamigni Torrone
4. Valerie Lemon Hazelnut Nougat
5. Nougat de Montelimar
6. Trader Joe’s Torrones