The combination of sweet and savory is nothing new. Peppers and chocolate were traditionally mixed together in Central America. Here in North America we’ve come full circle again with the new craze of adding spicy peppers to everything.

One of the classic hot pepper sauces is McIlhenny Company’s Tabasco sauce, made in Louisiana from tabasco peppers. Tabasco sauce was first produced in 1868, so it’s a wonder that it’s taken this long for it to be combined with chocolate. (Though I do recall a strange hot pepper chocolate fudge someone gave me in the 90s.)

I picked up this little tin of McIlhenny Co Tabasco Brand Spicy Chocolate that holds 1.75 ounces at Cost Plus World Market. Right now they’re featuring it in their Christmas area with the stocking stuffers, but I think they carry it year round.

Like other Chocolate Traveler products, it’s a disk of chocolate divided into eight “slices”. The circle of pieces is about three inches in diameter, so each little slice is about 1.5 inches long and about one inch wide.

The portioning is great, each piece is only 30 calories and less than seven grams.

The pieces are thick, easy to grasp and pull out of the tin and bite. The chocolate is semi-sweet (55% cacao), not terribly smooth and any graininess I noted was probably from the peppers. There are no milk products added, so this can be considered a vegan product (though it’s processed in a shared facility with dairy, peanuts and nuts if it’s an allergy issue).

The sweetness is a little distracting, but gives way to a well rounded woodsy chocolate flavor. The spicy burn of the red pepper comes in slowly but is quite noticeable, especially as a cumulative effect over several pieces. The pepper has a distinctive and notable Tabasco note to it, as there is a little bit of distilled vinegar in there.

As someone who’s not overly fond of Capsaicin heat, this was probably about as hot as I can take. So if you’re craving something really hot, this is probably not going to do much for you. The tin is absolutely lovely and would probably be useful to hold small things like jewelry, maybe some earphones or sewing items. It’s a great gift item for less than $5 mostly because of the packaging, but since Christmas can be a hard time for gift giving, this might fit the bill for a gift basket for a pepper fan or a stocking stuffer.

Related Candies

1. Cowgirl Chocolates Mild Milk Chocolate Sarsaparilla
2. Compartes Chocolates
3. Bequet Gourmet Caramels
4. Lillie Belle Farms Assortment
5. Chuao ChocoPods
6. Dolfin: Anise and Red Pepper
7. Hot Tamales and Hotter Tamales

Mars has finally hopped into the white chocolate game with both feet. Their new Dove White Chocolate Silky Smooth Promises stand alone as the only mass-market true white chocolate in bite size pieces.

I don’t know if this is a regular item or a seasonal offering from Dove. They’ve already proven that they can make a good white chocolate, which has been their base for their rich Peppermint Bark offerings for the third year in a row.

The package is a stylish amber and gold design with the Dove logo featuring most prominently. The see through part reveals the pieces are foil wrapped in two different shades of gold with white snowflakes.

Hershey’s has their White Chocolate Meltaway Bliss, but that’s a filled candy, with some sort of palm oil & cream inside. The Dove White Chocolate is truly a white chocolate product, in that it contains only cocoa butter and dairy as its fat base without any other vegetable fats.

Still, it’s pricey stuff. The bar was just shy of 8 ounces while the true chocolate varieties at the same price are over 9.5 ounces.

The flavor is oddly buttery, as in milky with that sort of churned flavor to it. However, there’s more of an aged dairy taste than a fresh milk flavor. There’s a light hint of salt (45 mg per 5 pieces).

The texture is firm but has a smooth melt, not nearly as silky as the regular Dove Promises but still decadent. It’s sweet, and that sugary quality does give it a but of a thick and sticky quality as it dissolves. Sometimes though it tasted a little on the rancid or perhaps slightly stale side of things. This could be because it picked up some flavors from other items (such as some chocolate flavored marshmallows), but considering the fact that they’re tightly foil wrapped and then in a heavy plastic bag, they shouldn’t be doing that.

White chocolate is definitely a tough item to do well. These are good, and true white chocolate is hard to find, especially in the grocery or drug store these days. The ingredients are pretty good: sugar, cocoa butter, skim milk, milk fat, soy lecithin, salt, natural flavor and PGPR. They’re made in a facility that processes peanuts and tree nuts. There’s no mention of gluten. They’re Kosher.

It’s a good quality product for the price, but it’s not going to be my go-to white chocolate. I’ll still opt for Green & Black’s super-vanilla infused White Chocolate which is also fair trade. But if I needed something festive and foil wrapped, I’d grab a bag of these.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Eggnog Almonds
2. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
3. Dove Peppermint Bark
4. Cookies ‘n’ Creme Showdown
5. Hershey’s White Chocolate Meltaway Bliss
6. Ritter Sport White Chocolate with Hazelnuts
7. Green and Black’s White Chocolate

Trader Joe’s often does classic looking candies but with a “too hip for the room twist” on the flavors.

The Trader Joe’s Classic Holiday Candy Mix qualifies as classic solely in its looks. They’re cute little pillows and waffle pieces of hard candy but come in a curious array of flavors that are as much tropical as they are wintery. Pomegranate, Cherry Cream, Passion Fruit, Cranberry Orange and Lemon Ginger. The flavors are all natural and the colors are created with vegetable and fruit extracts.

The packaging is simple, the box is a little smaller than a box of raisins or prunes. Inside is a half pound of hard candy in a simple cellophane pouch.

The pieces have that classic Holiday Mix look to them. Most are the standard pillow style of hard candy. The hard candy is briefly pulled (either by hand on a hook or by machine) to add air and a silky shine to it. That is then wrapped around a slightly aerated but not as attractive center. The the log is then rolled down into a rope which is then put into a cutter that gently squeezes the candy as it cuts it. Other pieces are rolled through a mold that give the waffle weave before they’re cut.

(I’m reviewing the candies from right to left)

Cherry Cream is deep red with amber stripes. The cream flavor is a little artificial, like a butter flavor instead of a real creamy note. Kind of like a cream soda. The cherry flavor is good, like a black cherry but with a sort of burnt berry pie note to it. Sometimes I thought that it tasted like Dr. Pepper.

Cranberry Orange (orange and dark red) was easy to spot, as the pieces were mostly half orange and half red. The orange flavor was front and center, the cranberry was just a tartness in the background with a little strawberry floral note.

Pomegranate (pink, white & deep red striped pillow) It’s enchanting to look at an a nicely rounded pomegranate flavor with a lot of raspberry notes.

Passion Fruit (peach and yellow waffle)  is a lot like fruit punch. It was tart and has a light berry note to it along with sort of syrupy melon flavor and some deep honey perfumes.

Lemon Ginger (yellow and white) were the easiest to figure out. This one tasted a little sparkly. Most of the pieces were the flat waffle but there were a few short straw ones too. The lemon is quite zesty and the woodsy ginger has a very slight warmth to it.

The candies are made in Mexico. I believe this is the same facility that also makes the Trader Joe’s Old Fashioned Sweet Sticks and the Life Savers all natural knock-off Sweet Story (and probably also the Organic Lollipops which are also sold as Yummy Earth). They’re made with glucose syrup which is from wheat, so they may not be suitable for gluten-free folks. There’s no other statement about allergens such as nuts or dairy products. They’re made with cane sugar but no other animal products so it’s up to you if you think they’re vegan. Kosher.

It’s a good price for all natural hard candy. It’s not extraordinary candy and probably only suitable for someone who actually like hard candy. The charming homespun quality does present a beautiful tableau in a dish and would probably be great as a decorative element on a Gingerbread House.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Candy Coated Licorice
2. Papabubble Amsterdam & Pillow Fight
3. Brach’s Christmas Nougats
4. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Mints
5. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
6. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Crisps
7. Regennas Clear Toys
8. Ribbon Candy

Trader Joe’s always has a wide range of holiday candies with a balance of new and novel with classics.

Their new Trader Joe’s Minty Melts sound a bit on the classic side. Dark chocolate squares with a festive minty stripe.

The box holds 7.5 ounces and was $4.99. They’re Kosher and gluten free. There is no ethical statement about the origin of the chocolate.

The box is long (11.5 inches) but opens easily to serve. The inner box bottom is actually fully printed so you can pull it out and put it on the table or buffet if you don’t want to put them on a plate. The pieces are stacked, two high and two wide.

I was pleased with the ingredients, it’s real dark chocolate at the semi-sweet level of 56% cacao. The mint stripe is made of real white chocolate as well, with cocoa butter and real peppermint oil. There’s a touch of coconut oil in there, but it’s very low on the list, falling into the less than 2% area.

They’re almost perfect cubes, about 3/4 of an inch all around, though just a little shy on the height. The stripes aren’t equal. The base layer is thicker than the top and mint white chocolate middle. The appearance is a little rustic. They’re a bit scuffed on the edges and the sides aren’t always straight/square/plumb.

The dark chocolate is rich and has a good cocoa flavor. There are little gritty moments every once in a while. The white chocolate center is a little dry and chalky feeling, just not quite a fully chocolate smoothness that I was hoping for. The flavor is very well balanced, milky sweet but not throat searing, with an appropriate touch of peppermint that doesn’t overwhelm the dark chocolate.

The texture doesn’t quite hit it for me, but perhaps that’s because I was hoping for something a little creamier. However, I like the fact that it’s a Peppermint Bark without the crushed peppermint candies. While that’s a nice candy, too, I wanted to taste the smooth textures together. The name Minty Melts led me to believe that these were meltaways, but they’re not, they’re a solid chocolate product. Nothing wrong with that ...

These are sure to go over well in social settings, just the right size portion for guests or for snacking.

Related Candies

1. Peeps Peepsters (Milk & Dark Chocolate)
2. Christmas Mint Round Up
3. Trader Joe’s Mint Joe Joe’s versus Mint Oreos
4. M&Ms Premiums
5. Smooth n Melty
6. Hershey’s Mint Truffle Kisses
7. Trader Joe’s Peppermint Bark White Chocolate Bar

In the world of fair trade chocolate, it’s hard to find a balance between the ethical sourcing of the ingredients and the actual likeability of the finished product. One brand that has struck a good, mass appeal approach is Divine Chocolate. They’re based in the United Kingdom, but the chocolate is made in Germany.

Their product range in the United States is primarily 3.5 ounce tablet bars, with a few holiday items each year. The ingredients are Fair Trade certified as much as possible.

I picked up the Divine 70% Dark Chocolate with Ginger & Orange at Cost Plus World Market. I like the idea of a chocolate bar with a little bit of flavor and maybe even a candy-like flair to it.

I really like their new bar mold. The old one was simple and generic. The new one is the same format, but with little icons in each of the pieces. I like the thickness of the bar and the divisions - easy to snap apart and ideally sized for a bite.

The bar has an excellent and crisp snap. The scent is a bit woodsy, mostly from the ginger but with a well rounded cocoa note to it. The ingredients were not simply candied orange and candied ginger though. Instead it was something called Orange Granules which were made from orange juice, apples, sugar, rice flour, fructose, pectin, citric acid and orange flavor. Seems odd to make something that’s normally considered garbage (orange peels). The ginger is also just natural ginger flavor, no actual pieces.

The result are little sticky, slightly tacky orange bits. They’re good in the sense that they taste fruity, a little zesty and tangy with a lot more juice taste than orange peel. They’re not at all fibery, though they did get stuck in my teeth.

The dark chocolate is smooth with a silky melt and well rounded flavor. There’s a little hint of bitterness to it, but it’s tempered by the woodsy but slightly drying ginger. I was hoping for a little warm kick from the ginger, but that never really formed.

Overall, it’s a very good bar, it’s also a crowd pleaser, in the sense that most folks will go for a fruity bar over a straight 70%. I like the package design and the added design elements on the bar mold now. It would be nice to see fewer ingredients on the list, but at least they’re all real things.

Though the bar gets high marks for being fair trade, Kosher, non-GMO and vegan, it is made on shared equipment with wheat, milk, almonds and hazelnuts.

Related Candies

1. Divine Milk Chocolate with Spiced Cookies
2. Equal Exchange Dark Chocolate: 65%, 71% & 80%
3. Divine 70% Dark Chocolate with Raspberries
4. Sweet Earth Chocolates
5. Christmas Mint Round Up
6. Divine Fair Trade Chocolate
7. 3400 Phinney: Fig, Fennel & Almond and Hazelnut Crunch
8. Zotter Candy Bars

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a candy origin story quite like this before: The Original Harrogate Toffee was designed to clear the palate of the putrid taste of Harrogate’s Sulphur Water, famous in the 19th century for it’s healing properties.

Think about that for a moment. A candy was invented to cover up the taste of a drink that most of us would consider poison. (I’ve lived in an area with sulfur water before, we didn’t drink it.)

There’s no mention on their history page about the disposition of the Harrogate’s Suphur Water.

I bought my first tin of Farrah’s Original Harrogate Toffee (the larger of the two tins) back in 1995 when I first visited London. I picked up a few varieties of British-style toffee and this was the closest to what American’s think of as English Toffee. (That’s another long and convoluted thing I’m not going to get into right now.)

The tins are classic and honestly why I bought the candy both times.

The smaller tin holds 3.5 ounces, which ended up being 10 pieces of candy. The little toffee blocks were inside a cellophane pouch and wrapped individually in waxed paper twisted at the ends. Each piece is a little over a third of an ounce.

The ingredients are natural except for the flavoring. It includes lots of different kinds of sugar: sugar, glucose, cane sugar, demerara sugar, brown sugar, butter, soy lecithin and artificial lemon flavor.

The candy is a cross between hard candy and toffee. It’s mostly sugar but has a nice note of butter to it, which also gives it a cloudy appearance and interesting “cleave” when crunched. It’s sweet and has mild burnt and toasted sugar notes and a light kiss of lemon zest. It’s quite different from most other toffees or butterscotches.

The price is a bit much, but I assume I was paying for the tin. It was $5.99 for the teensy thing with its handful of candy in it. But it’s nostalgic and classic and the tin has a hinge on it and will likely find a spot in my desk for binder clips or flash drives once the candy is gone.

My desire for this may change if I find myself drinking a lot of sulfur water.

Related Candies

1. Lindt Excellence Toffee Crunch
2. Terry’s Chocolate Toffee Crunch Orange
3. Walkers Nonsuch Toffee
4. The Apothecary’s Garden: Herbs (and some Bees)
5. The Real Jelly Babies
6. Barley Sugar Candy
7. Meiji Chelsea Yogurt Scotch

I mentioned in an earlier Candy Tease that Lindt has some new holiday items. In addition to their new hollow chocolate figures of Teddy Bears, Snow Men and Santa they also have some holiday new Lindor Tuffles in Holiday Spice plus their usual holiday offering of Peppermint.

I also spotted this coppery bag of Lindt Holiday Spice Almonds.

It’s a tiny bag. It’s a cute bag, but it really is tin, especially when you consider that 1/3 of the height is just empty “flair.” But still, it’s dense. Jam packed with 3.5 ounces of roasted almonds in milk chocolate with holiday spices. Ah, the vague holiday spices. They’re so vague that on the ingredients list, they’re not even specified as holiday. They’re just spices.

The almonds vary widely in size, some as small as a Peanut M&M and some appear as large as a peach pit.

The candies are a little more complex that what was described. The almond at the center is lightly toasted. Then there is a little sugar shell on top of it. That is then dipped in milk chocolate and finally finished with a dusting of powdered sugar.

They smell a bit like amaretto and custard. The sugar on the outside is a little dusty, a little messy. The milk chocolate coating is smooth but quite sweet and with a strong dairy note. The spice flavor there is mostly the amaretto, but perhaps a little touch of cinnamon. The sugar shell on the inside is lightly crunchy but not thick at all. The almonds at the center were fresh and overall good quality. They work well either chewed for the combination of textures and flavors or slowly melted and dissolved through the layers.

I don’t usually care for amaretto, and in this case it wasn’t very strong. It’s a very sweet combination but also rather different from so many other chocolates and holiday items, I found it refreshing. I would have preferred a better, more specific description on the package though. Amaretto is not a spice and I don’t expect my real almonds to also be flavored with it unless we’re in the territory of marzipan.

While I may make fun of the packaging, I did like how efficient it was. There are two layers, an inner waxed paper and then the decorative metallic mylar. It had a sturdy, flat bottom and didn’t take up an excessive amount of space.

They’re made with wheat, dairy, almonds and soy plus they’re processed on shared equipment with peanuts and other tree nuts. Their cocoa is sourced responsibly and sustainably though not certified fair trade but also sourced from a wide range of locations (many not associated with slavery or brutal unrest). Read their statements here which specifically state that no supplier, anywhere in their chain can use forced labor.

Related Candies

1. Cinnabon Pecan Clusters
2. Divine Milk Chocolate with Spiced Cookies
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Almond Toffee
4. Lindt Fioretto
5. Pumpkin Pie Gourmet Candy Corn
6. Ginger Chews: Hot Coffee
7. Hershey’s Almond Joy Pieces
8. Lindt Chocolate Bunnies (Dark & Milk)

In a candy tease last year I mentioned the existence of new flavors of the iconic flavored Tootsie Rolls. The line is called Frooties. They were introduced in the 1970s when actual penny candy still existed. Last year a few new and perhaps trendy flavors were introduced including CranBlueberry as well as Frooties Root Beer.

I finally found some while on vacation back in September at a little candy shop in Cayucos. I bought a handful of them at 10 cents each and ate them without a review. (I was on vacation.)

I kept looking for more, but no one seemed to carry them. Over the weekend I was shopping at Smart & Final and ran into the bag pictured - it contains 360 pieces and almost two and a half pounds. It’s the size of an airplane pillow. Yeah, it was silly, it was $5.99 but I’d already tasted them and knew I wanted to review them. I had no rationale to get rid of the excess after review, no Halloween Trick or Treaters coming to my door. I fully planned to eat them myself.

The candies are small, they’re the smallest size of the Tootsie Roll, a little more than 3 grams each and only one inch long. They were very fresh, soft and easy to upwrap. The wax paper is simple, just twisted at the ends and classic.

They look kind of like Tootsies, they’re brown and don’t smell like much. But biting into one, it’s satisfying. The Root Beer flavors are well balanced, a mix of cinnamon and wintergreen with only the lightest acidic bite like a soda. The chew is smooth and slightly creamy. It’s not sticky and not too sweet. If I eat a lot of them, I get a bit of a warm mouth buzzing sensation, similar to something I experience with wintergreen flavors.

They come in other flavors, but I’m not terribly interested in them. Root Beer candy is hard to find and this strikes the right balance of warm spice and smooth chew. Sure, it’s probably like chewing hardened Ben Gay, but I actually like that. I’m sure I’ll manage to eat all 360 pieces eventually.

They’re made in the USA, certified Kosher in a peanut free, gluten free and tree nut free facility. It does contain dairy though, so it’s not for vegans.

Related Candies

1. Trolli Soda Poppers
2. See’s Lollypops
3. See’s Pumpkin Spice & Root Beer Lollypops
4. Canada Wintergreen
5. Brach’s Soda Poppers
6. Kenny’s Licorice Pastels & Root Beer Twists
7. Jelly Belly Soda Pop Shoppe
8. Bottlecaps