Sometimes house brands can be a little mystifying, but this one really caught my eye. Walgreen’s Candy Classics Australian Traditional Black Licorice Smothered in Real Milk Chocolate.

The matte beige & powder blue wrapper does give it that classic look, though the mylar/plastic packaging made it feel modern (as did the presence of a web address on the back of the package).

It also comes in a raspberry licorice version, which I also bought but was disappointed to find it crumbled to bits (so I’m not reviewing it now).

The bar is attractive and looks like it could easily be an unsalted pretzel rod covered in milk chocolate.

It smells nice, a bit like anise and chocolate cake.

The bite is soft, the chocolate barely flakes, which is a great relief after the red licorice catastrophe.

The licorice at the center is quite soft and has a strong molasses flavor - the chew is almost jelly like, but has the satisfying rib-sticking of a wheat-based confection. The anise and licorice notes are rather mild and more of a generic spice cookie feel. The chocolate is sweet, not terribly chocolatey but seems to seal in all the flavors well.

It’s nice to see an Aussie licorice being sold at American candy prices. It was a nice change up from Twizzlers, Good & Plenty or Crows, which are really the only plain licorice products sold in single serve packages any longer.

My big hesitations are why they put artificial colors in a chocolate covered item. But my guess is that this licorice is available bald.

Aussie readers, do you recognize this bar? (I was thinking it was RJs but those aren’t real chocolate.)

I’m eager to try the raspberry again and see what else Walgreen’s is going to put in their Candy Classics brand.

Note: The calories made no sense on this package. 220 calories for 1.4 ounces is insane for a chocolate covered licorice. It says 2.5 grams of fat, 22 grams of carbs and 2 grams of protein (that makes 120 calories or so) ... I can’t figure where the rest of the calories are coming from. The ingredients are Sugar, Treacle, Wheat Flour, Molasses, Chocolate, Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Licorice Extract and then a bunch of less than 2% things.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered Gingersnaps
2. Kookaburra Choc Coated Liquorice
3. Darrell Lea Licorice & Ginger
4. Kookaburra Licorice
5. Panda Bars

I popped into See’s yesterday to see what was new for the summer. The Root Beer Lollipops are back in stock (through mid-August), so if you were a fan of those (mini review here), then pop by for your fix.

I realized that I’ve never reviewed the See’s Lollipops in their classic array. The nice thing about them is that they’re summer-proof but also that they’re pretty cheap.

On top of that, they’re creamy and satisfying, last really long but only 70 calories each. They come in four regular flavors that are available singly (don’t forget your free sample!) or by the box: Vanilla, Chocolate, Butterscotch & Cafe Latte.

Vanilla Lollipop

Vanilla looks like a block of nothing. The color is a creamy white, the texture & tint of glossy trim paint.

It smells sweet and vaguely like French vanilla ice cream. The flavor is like a toasted marshmallow - a sweet vanilla with a little hint of bourbon and butter.

It’s a smooth pop with a slightly oily dissolve, which only supports that feeling that I’m eating solid ice cream. It’s sweet, but doesn’t feel cloying or sticky. The pop lasts a long time, too.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Chocolate Lollipop

The chocolate pop doesn’t look like much. It’s not quite shiny ... it’s not really matte either.

It smells like brownie batter.

The texture starts smooth but quickly degrades to an oddly rich but chalky experience. It’s like the mud at the bottom of the cup of hot chocolate. Not that I don’t love that mud, but in this case the texture is rather rough like a cat tongue. 

It’s rich, and does deliver quite a bit of the chocolatey experience without melting. But the chalky/sand paper never quite thrills me.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Butterscotch Lollipop

The color is lovely, like a rich caramel.

The immediate flavor on my tongue was salt. It was very salty to me, but perhaps that was because I was eating the vanilla one right before that.

The texture is ultra smooth, and has the same creamy & buttery melt. The caramelized sugar notes were good but the strongest flavor by far was salty butter.

I liked how smooth the block is, though this is one that I noticed how awkward the pops are in the mouth. It takes a while to smooth away the corners. Over the years this has been my favorite pop mostly because of its simple & true flavor but also the super-slick texture.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Cafe Latte Lollipop

This was the “softest” pop of the bunch. It was a little sticky from the humidity, which gave it a caramel consistency on the outermost layer.

The scent is like dark roast coffee or espresso, but the flavor is like coffee with lots of milk and some sugar in it. There’s a slight coffee bitterness to it, but for the most part it’s like a Coffee Nip with a stick in it.

I appreciated the silky texture and the stick prevented me from gluing my teeth shut as I often do with Nips or Coffee Rio.

Rating: 7 out of 10

A mixed box is a great addition to a vacation when you need a little pick me up, or something to keep you occupied at the office when wrangling endless spreadsheets of metadata.

Related Candies

1. Das Lollipops
2. See’s Cinnamon (Hearts & Lollypops)
3. Coffee Rio
4. See’s Pumpkin Spice & Root Beer Lollypops
5. Coffee Nips
6. Tootsie Rolls & Fruit Rolls
7. See’s Scotchmallow Eggs
8. See’s Awesome Nut & Chew Bar

I’ve known about Zingerman’s classic candy bars for quite a few years, but finally found a local source for them a few days ago. I really wanted to see them in person, because while the Zingerman’s website is so fun & quirky with their little illustrations, I’d like more than a picture of a box when sinking $7 for a candy bar (yes, that’s what they are on their website).

I got the What the Fudge? and Ca$hew Cow Zzang! Candy Bars. The box heralds that they’re “taking candy bars back 100 years!” which I’m guessing they think that’s a good thing.

The boxes are smaller than I expected, 4.5” long and 1.25” high/wide. But the label says that the WTF? is 3 ounces. I looked at them out of the package and I thought there was no way it was 3 ounces, that’s more than a Snickers bar! (But sure enough, I used the postal scale at the office and they both came in at about 3 ounces even after I took out my photo-bites.)

So the fact that they’re sizeable almost makes up for the sticker shock - at least at the Larchmont Larder they were $3.95 each.

The What the Fudge? Zzang! Candy Bar looks deceptively plain out of the wrapper. The box says: Milk chocolate fudge, Muscovado caramel, and malted milk cream dipped in dark chocolate.

Biting into it, I didn’t seem that complex. In fact, I didn’t think it tasted like much more than sweet, sweet fudge covered in chocolate.

The top layer of malted milk cream was smooth, but a bit frosting-like. The milky flavors came across distinctly when I pulled the parts of the bar apart, but I didn’t really get much malt. The milk chocolate fudge is sweet and doesn’t have much chocolate punch but has a melty smooth texture with a slight grain. The “caramel” isn’t quite a gooey caramel, it’s more of a grainy buttery layer with some distinct molasses notes of the Muscovado sugar.

Most importantly, because of these extremely sugary innards, the chocolate coating is a very dark, rather bitter bittersweet chocolate.

The package says the serving size is the full 3 ounce bar, which is far too much for me in one sitting. (The box also had the cryptic tally of 260 calories for the full bar, which is pretty much impossible for any candy that contains fat ... and chocolate was the first ingredient ... I’d go for something along the lines of 130 calories per ounce for this bar, bringing the total to 390.)

The Cashew Cow Zzang! Candy Bar, as you can tell, was a little bloomed when I got it home. Happily the texture of the dark chocolate coating did not seem to suffer too much from the slight. The bar consists of Milk chocolate, cashew butter gianduja, cashew brittle & roasted cashews dipped in dark chocolate.

Though this bar is only reputed to be 2.5 ounces, it’s actually larger than the WFT? bar. (Also, when I weighed it after my bite, it still came in at 2.8 ounces, so their manufacturing process is a bit generous.)

It smells dark and toasty.

Instead of the layered order of the WFT?, the Cashew Cow is a muddled combination affair on the inside. The general look of it is a fluffed gianduja with some inclusions of nuts & crisped rice.

The center does have lots of textures going on: shards of brittle, cashews and crisped rice - all with varying degrees of crunch. The nutty background flavor is cashew with some buttery bits and the malty crisp of the puffed rice. And then the salt, there’s a lot of saltiness.

Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I found it a bit chaotic. It definitely wasn’t as sticky sweet as the WTF? bar, but this one seemed a bit too hefty for me as well.

The good thing was that both bars were distinct and unique ... I didn’t feel like saying “this is like a Milky Way” or “that’s like a Butter Brittle Hazelbar.” At $7 a bar, I’d be miffed ... at $4, I felt like it was a fun ride. I still prefer the BonBonBars as far as upscale candy bars go ... but again, these are nothing like those so it’s never going to be a one for one comparison and it might just all be about personal taste.

Here’s Victoria from Candy Addict’s review of these two bars, CPB Gallery reviewed & photographed the Original bar and Chocolate Ratings reviewed the Original and Cashew Cow.

Related Candies

1. Q.Bel Crispy Wafer Bars
2. Short & Sweet: Hazelnut Bites
3. 3400 Phinney: Fig, Fennel & Almond and Hazelnut Crunch
4. BonBonBars: Malt Ganache & Scotch
5. See’s Awesome Nut & Chew Bar
6. Lake Champlain Five Star Bar

While picking up a birthday cake for The Man a few weeks ago at Lark, a neighborhood bakery, I also sampled some locally made artisan nut brittles.

Morning Glory Confections makes a short list of nut brittles in quirky flavor combinations: Chai Tea & Cashew, Cocoa Nib, Coffee Bean & Pecan, Fleur de Sel & Peanut, Indian Curry & Pistachio and New Mexico Chili & Pumpkin Seed.

I’ve tasted all of them, but chose to buy a little package of the Chai Tea & Cashew. It wasn’t cheap, the 2 ounce package that contained four slender planks cost $4.95. But the artisan name was supported by the tantalizing ingredients:

Cashews, sugar, corn syrup, butter, chai spice (it included a list), Darjeeling tea leaves, baking soda, Madagascar vanilla extract, Kosher salt.

The glossy and narrow bars are lumpy with the cashews within and speckled with the tea & spices.

It smells a bit buttery and like warm tea and spices ... a bit like carrot cake, actually. The cashews are toasted to a crunchy light brown and have a darker flavor to them than I would have expected. The salt comes forward first then a little kick of creamy butter and the crisp flakiness of a toffee.

The baking soda keeps the salt note a bit on the mineral side of things, but also keeps the candy from tasting too sickly sweet. The key with Morning Glory brittles, all that I’ve tasted, is that it’s not about the nuts. While the nuts are nice, it’s about the flavors imparted to the brittle.

While I really enjoyed my four pieces, the price is just staggering (oh sure, it’s not so bad when you buy a larger quantity at $32 per pound.) I appreciated that the inner wrap was actually a zip lock to protect my precious bits from evil, evil moisture.

(I would also take this opportunity to recommend Lark’s cakes. They have an impressive carrot cake that is both beautiful and fulfills my husband’s and my particular issues: he doesn’t like raisins and I can’t eat walnuts. So it’s all about the moist carroty cake with warm spices and a light, not-too-sweet cream cheese frosting. We’ve picked up this cake three times in the regular size and one of the itty two-serving size since they opened.)

Related Candies

1. Ginger Chews: Hot Coffee
2. Seeds of Change: Dark Chocolate with Mango and Cashew
3. See’s Pumpkin Spice & Root Beer Lollypops
4. Sanders Caramels & Titans
5. Wha Guru Chew
6. Dagoba Chai

Trolli is a big gummi brand in the United States. Originally founded by a German (actually West Germany at the time) company named Mederer Corporation in 1981, they quickly established an American production facility in the United States in 1986.

Though you wouldn’t notice it as a candy buyer, Trolli has passed through quite a few corporate hands over the years. First Favorite Brands, Inc bought them in 1997, but went bankrupt and were bought out by Nabisco in 1999. Nabisco sold them off in 2000 to Kraft. Then Kraft sold all their candy brands to Wrigley’s in 2005 and within that same year it was acquired by Farley’s and Sathers.

Trolli has the distinction of innovating the Gummi Worm. Not only was it a new shape (one that kids love to play with and adults might find a little off-putting) but it also features multiple flavors in one piece.

Trolli’s Sour Brite Crawlers not only have that duo of flavors, they’re also fluorescent colors with a slightly sour grainy coating.

There are three flavor varieties in the bag, though there is no directory or description of what they are:

Orange & Green = Orange & Lime - these are not Sour Patch or Sour Skittles style sour ... they’re just a little more tart than the regular gummis. The flavor combo here is a nice mix of citrus. The lime is rather ordinary and I don’t think I’d care for it much in a plain gummi, but it goes well with the juicy and tangy orange. Some good zest notes to keep it from being all about some sort of bland punch flavor.

Pink & Blue = Strawberry & Raspberry - nice berry mix though the distinction between the two isn’t terribly clear. I liked the tangy bite to the chew and the graininess on the outside especially on this version.

Yellow & Red = Lemon & Cherry - the cherry flavor was dominant when I opened the bag, so I fully expected both ends of this worm to taste the same. Cherry is, well, a light sour cherry without the dark woodsy “black cherry” notes. The lemon side is distinctive, a good lemonade flavor though not quite sour enough for a product that calls itself sour.

On the whole, a fun candy. The colors are, as described, very bright. They’re nicely made, the bag was fresh and cheap ($1.59 at Target). The only hesitation is that these in no way qualify as a sour candy.

Related Candies

1. Albanese Gummi Butterflies
2. Super Sour Worms
3. Krunchy Bears
4. Brain Candy! (gummi brains)
5. Gummi Lightning Bugs
6. Gummi Clown Fish
7. Haribo Gummi Bears vs Trolli Gummi Bears

I’ve been on a kick to find summer-friendly chocolate. M&Ms certainly fit the bill but of course that doesn’t help Candy Blog readers who are already well aware of them.

While wandering around Mel & Rose’s wide selection of imported mass-produced candies I finally found Galaxy Minstrels in single sized packs.

The package seemed light and didn’t seem to have a lot of candy in it, but I’m always game for something new to me.

Galaxy is a chocolate brand made by Mars and sold in the UK and selected parts of Europe (if the languages on the back of the package were any evidence, I’d say Greece/Cyprus and Spain). Though many folks consider Dove to be the American equivalent of Galaxy, there are a few subtle differences. (My previous Galaxy review.)

Minstrels are big, about .75 inches in diameter. They’re like giant M&Ms but the proportions are more like Nestle Smarties - a bit flatter.

All of the candies are dark brown ... no color varieties here. These are serious candies, somber and easy to pick up.

The flavor is like chocolate milk, slightly weak but sweet & rich chocolate milk. It’s not strongly chocolate ... it doesn’t even have a distinct cocoa flavor, it’s more about milk. The crunch of the shell is good - crispy and without any additional flavors (like I experience with Smarties, which have a bit of a Cheerios flavor).

They’re completely different from M&Ms as far as I’m concerned, they’re more like white chocolate than milk chocolate. Looking at the ingredients list I can see that they’re not even qualified to be called chocolate in the United States, which has more stringent standards than the UK, which allows vegetable fat and whey - though it still has a strong proportion of cocoa butter as it is the second ingredient. (I’m lumping this in both the mockolate and chocolate categories.)

They’re really nice, I had two packages and ate both. There’s a slight malty tone to it, it’s milky without being sticky sweet like Cadbury and of course the bold disks make them fun to play with. If these were widely available, I’d certainly pick them up regularly, especially to pair with pretzels, Sugar Babies and almonds for a summer trail snack.

I mentioned last week that Cadbury in the UK is going Fair Trade; Galaxy in the UK is moving towards certification with the Rainforest Alliance for sustainable cocoa growing.

Related Candies

1. M&Ms Premiums
2. Head to Head: M&Ms vs Koppers Milkies
3. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
4. M&Ms Line
5. Revels
6. Mars Maltesers

The Werther’s Original line has really expanded over the past few years. Known best for their classic toffee/hard caramel candies they’ve expanded into caramels and chocolate. Their newest product, Caramel Dreams combines the two.

The package says: Rich Creamy Caramel Covered in Smooth European Chocolate.

The bag is an interesting soft matte mylar. My bag was puffed up from a lot of air, which I assumed was to like the air in a bag of potato chips - meant to protect the contents from getting smashed. And it did its job well. Each little piece I picked out looked pretty close to perfect.

Each little molded chocolate is wrapped in the classic golden folk/cellophane wrapper that Werther’s is known for.

They smell a little milky, a bit like Cadbury chocolate. The caramel center is quite liquid and gooey, so I don’t recommend biting into them expecting a chewy caramel. They’re best enjoyed popping the whole thing in the mouth.

The caramel center is smooth, a bit thick & sticky with a slight salty note to it. It’s more on the milky side of caramel than toasted sugar flavors.

They’re very pretty, well crafted and decently priced. If you’re a fan of Rolos, Cadbury Caramello or Dove Promises Caramels you might also find these to your liking. I think I’ll stick to See’s or perhaps something a little more nutty like Snickers for my caramel needs or just some Sugar Babies.

The other varieties in this line are CaraMelts and Caramel Mousse. (Candy For Dinner has photos of CaraMelts & Caramel Mousse.)

Related Candies

1. Caramilk Deluxe
2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels
3. Big Mo’ Bars: Peanut Butter & Creamy Caramel
4. Dove Promises (Caramel & Almonds)
5. Werther’s Original Chewy Caramels
6. Sugar Babies
7. Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels
8. Head to Head: Rolo vs Caramel Kisses

When I reviewed the upcoming Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces, I didn’t realize how crowded the field of dark chocolate lentils was getting.

Mars has expanded their line of M&Ms Premiums (which is barely a year old) with a new variety: M&Ms Premium Dark Chocolate.

The package calls them deeply decadent, rich and intense dark chocolate. They do look deep and dark, the package is a stirring red and brown affair that really jumped off the shelf at me at Target last week.

Like many mass-marketed dark chocolates these days the semi-sweet chocolate is more than cocoa beans, sugar, emulsifiers and vanilla. Inside these little morsels are three different kinds of dairy: milkfat, skim milk and lactose.

The deep maroon/purple metallic coating looks like food (the blue almond ones don’t actually look like something you’re supposed to eat, they look like fingernail polish).

As a solid chocolate piece, they’re not terribly large like some of the other layered versions, most are about the same size as the Peanut Butter M&Ms.

The scent is a soft cocoa, sweet and woodsy. It’s a mellow chocolate with a decent soft melt, but a not-quite-smooth texture. It’s a little chalky and has a bit of a dry aftertaste. They’re pleasant and certainly attractive but don’t quite hit me with a strong premium taste or texture. (This is the hazard of eating stuff like this after an Amano bar and an Askinosie.)

They don’t taste that different from the Dark Chocolate M&Ms either, they just lack that crunchy shell, so they’re a bit less sweet. (There’s also salt in there.)

They’re a great candy to chose for aesthetics over taste, but I admit that the field of good chocolate in lentil form is pretty narrow. (If you’re really looking for great little morsels, go for the Valrhona, they’re not little tiny pieces but they are awesome.)

Related Candies

1. Limited Edition M&Ms Coconut
2. M&Ms Memorable Moments (Disney)
3. Head to Head: M&Ms vs Koppers Milkies
4. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
5. Peruvian Candies
6. M&Ms Line