Koakuma from UHA are a curious little candy. They’ve taken their wildly popular Puccho and combined them with the flavors and colors of the Gothic Lolita style popular in Japan. Koakuma means “little devil” and the package sports the little character all over it. With a heart shaped face, little bat wings and on the bottom of the pleated bag, she rides a trident like a broom.

These little candies come individually wrapped inside larger pouches. The taffy base is black with rich colored stripes and then studded with gummis.

Koakuma Peach Rose

I’m not usually fond of peach flavored candies. Don’t misunderstand, I’m a huge fan of fresh peaches, canned peaches and even dried peaches. There’s just something about many peach flavored candies I’m just not fond of.

No matter, because these don’t taste like peaches. It smells like peaches, but it tastes like mildly tart floral berries.

The little gummy bits provide and interesting texture to the bouncy chew. It was very fresh and soft and pretty darn good. I was really surprised I ate most of the bag.

Koakuma Blueberry Rose

I’ve never really been that impressed with blueberry as a flavor. I often get it confused with raspberry in candies, and this one is no exception. It tastes like raspberry and a little floral note thrown in there with the rose. But I have to say that I’m impressed that the color actually looks like blueberries instead of like something pharmaceutical.

Again, bouncy and chewy and fresh and thoroughly enjoyable.

Both of them were nice, but the specific flavors just weren’t my favorites. I think I’d like a strawberry with rose or maybe a grape and violet. I bet they’d make a fun gift for someone who’s intro Goth though. (Who doesn’t like candies that match their nail polish?) There is another flavor called Cassis & Grape that I saw on JList for $1.80 (which has lots of other Gothic Lolita cosplay stuff to complete the look).

Here are some other reviews:
Japanese Snack Review & Giant Jeans Parlor

I thought I was done with the series of Easter candy, but then I remembered that I had these organic treats that I picked up at Show West.

Surf Sweets is a line of organic candies made by Santa Cruz Nutritionals. No artificial colors, no artificial sweeteners, non-GMO and gluten free but they look and taste just like mass-consumer brands.

The treats I’m sampling are their Jelly Beans, Fruity Bears and Gummy Bears. Since their colors are natural, they look a little more muted than many other candies, but still very pleasant and sparkly. Surf Sweets are also fortified with vitamin C (though it takes half a package to get a full day’s supply).

The jelly beans started off with a bang when I picked up the light yellow one and found it to be a tasty grapefruit. The beans are about the size of Jelly Belly, but a little less regular in shape. The shell was a little more grainy than many other jelly beans I’ve had lately, but very fruity with a good balance of sweet and tart. The other flavors, as far as I could tell were: Lemon, Orange, Cherry (no bitter aftertaste!) and Strawberry.

These are marked Vegetarian on the package, using fruit pectin as the gelling agent. They do have beeswax on them so some vegans may find them objectionable.

These are called Fruity Bears but I was just calling them jelly bears. They’re not rubbery like gummis, just soft and chewy with a slight bounce to them. They also use pectin as their gelling agent.

The little sugar sanded bears are very cute. They seem to come in the same flavor set as the jelly beans: Grapefruit, Lemon, Orange, Cherry & Strawberry.

I liked these a lot. I liked them a lot more than the jelly beans because the flavor was in the jelly, not in the sugary coating. The citrus flavors were my favorite.

These are also marked vegetarian but contain beeswax.

The Gummy Bears honestly looked no different than any other gummi. The little bear shapes were rather like the Trolli with their well definted paws and eyes. The gummi texture was bouncy with excellent well rounded flavor - good sweetness, good fruit and good tart. The flavors themselves were a little muddier in their distinctiveness. There was a berry, lemon and orange. There may have been two berry flavors, the colors weren’t that different and neither were the flavors.

These were not vegetarian because of the presence of gelatin and not completely organic.

I found them online for $1.75 a bag, which is about $10 a pound ... a bit more than Jelly Bellies and other gourmet sugar candies. If you’re looking for a slightly more wholesome candy for your kids (especially for their Easter basket) that doesn’t look like a compromise to them (unless they’re reading the packages), this is a great option. The flavor and eating experience is exactly the same - so your kids won’t feel like they’re getting a compromise candy. Let’s face it, part of the appeal of candy to kids is the look of it, and these gummi bears, in the palm of your hand, look like gummi bears. They won’t miss the artificial colors.

Related Candies

1. Super Sour Worms
2. Chocolate Covered Gummi Bears
3. Sour Gummi Bears
4. Pure Fun & Yummy Earth Organic Hard Candies
5. College Farm Organic Naturepops

I found a great new candy store over the weekend. At the suggestion of a reader (thannks Jenny!) I journeyed to City of Commerce to visit Garvey Nut & Candy. It’s a warehouse, mostly wholesale, but they also sell retail. The bulk (and I mean bulk) of their products are sold in full cases, but it’s cash & carry, so no shipping costs incurred.

They had a small selection of items that were sold from open boxes. Just about all of it was from their Easter inventory. At FANTASTIC prices. One of the finds was the Jelly Belly Deluxe Easter Mix ... at $2.35 for a 9 ounce bag, it’s unheard of. The Jelly Belly online sells the same bag for $4.99 (in a prettier store, I’ll admit). If you’re planning a big party or wedding and live in the LA area, this might be just the place for you. High end chocolates and mints to bulk wrapped candies to nuts and nut mixes. For the Easter goodies they had the large packages of Peeps of all kinds for 99 cents, jelly beans (all sorts of Jelly Belly seasonal products), deluxe chocolate eggs (fudge, peanut butter, vanilla), baskets, tins and foil eggs by the kilo (some by Madelaine, which are quite tasty).

You may have to ask them for prices on many items and you may need help finding things. (Their website isn’t very good, so don’t bother.) They have funky hours too: 8AM - 4:30PM on weekdays and Saturday 9-2 (until Easter, then they’re closed on Saturdays until August). I’ll probably head back down there for a look at their Halloween goodies in the fall.

Garvey Nut & Candy
6416 Flotilla Street,
Los Angeles, CA 90040
(323) 890-5890

Okay, enough of that, you came here for some candy, didn’t you?

The Deluxe Easter Mix contains assorted pastel Jelly Bellys, bunny corn, mellocremes, gummi eggs and malted chocolate eggs. (It’s also supposed to contain chocolate eggs, but I picked through the bags to find one that had more malted eggs ... which I promptly ate. If you want a full account of them, check out Sera’s review at Candy Addict.)

The bulk of the mix seemed to be populated by these friendly fellows: Mellocremes. (Click on the photo for the full shape assortment.)

They’re flavored lightly: grape, lemon, lime, strawberry and vanilla. The flavors are light (especially light for a company that built itself on extra flavor). I didn’t care for lime at all, but the lemon and strawberry were quite nice. I don’t know which color was supposed to be vanilla (maybe there are white ones, I didn’t have any in my mix).

This is the Bunny Corn, and it’s pretty much the same recipe as the Mellocreme but a different shape. They tend to be a little firmer and as you might guess, they’re just like Candy Corn. They’re not flavored.

If the Mellocremes in white taste like this, I might be more fond of them. I rather like candy corn, in small doses.

There are only two colors on these, which seemed a little skimpy. Candy Corn usually has three colors (orange,  yellow and white). But I guess Bunnies travel light.

The Jelly Belly website calls these Orange Creme Non-Pareil Eggs, which doesn’t really sound like much fun. So I’m going to call them Crunchy Gummi Eggs. They’re super-cute, with pastel colored crunchy spheres (non-pareils) on the outside and a tangy orange gummi on the inside. They’re larger than a jelly bean, about the size of a foil wrapped chocolate egg that you can often find in Easter baskets.

They’re much like the Crunchy Bears I reviewed a while back, except these only come in orange, which is fine by me. The gummi is super-soft and the crunchy coating gives it some fun ... it’s the crunchiest thing in the bag. Jelly Belly also makes a slightly related product with the Champagne Bubbles and Berries.

There were also some Jelly Belly scattered in, they came in Berry Blue, Cantaloupe, Cotton Candy, Island Punch, Lemon, Lemon Lime, Pi?a Colada, Pink Grapefruit, and looked oh-so-coordinated with everything else. (I picked out all the pink grapefruit while shooting the photos.)

Overall the mix was very pretty, and attractiveness is important with holiday candy. But I wasn’t really that keen on some of the elements (the Mellocremes, especially). It was a good introduction to the whole line of Easter treats, so now I know what to buy in a solo bag - the Orange Creme Non-Pareil Eggs. At normal mortal prices of $4.99 a bag, I’m not that wild about the whole shebang (so they get a 6 out of 10) as a sub-$2.50 find, they’re a 7 out of 10.

My next door neighbors went to Peru for three weeks and brought back a huge cache of Peruvian (and South American) consumer candies. (They also brought some cookies, but I’ll try to keep this focused.) I find it quite fun to sample the consumer candies of all countries and regions and Peru was no different. So here are nine candies from Peru:

Name: Lentejas
Brand: Nestle
Size: 36 grams

These little guys probably look familiar. They’re chocolate lentils ala Nestle Smarties. Only they’re not quite Smartie-like ... they’re the same size as M&Ms (Smarties are just slightly flatter and larger than M&Ms). The shell on these is very thick and crunchy. The colors are unbelievably bright.

The chocolate itself is only so so - grainy, too sweet and completely lacking in chocolate taste.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

Name: Prime Peruvian Milk Chocolate
Brand: Winter’s
Size: 100 grams

This bar had a lovely photo of the cloud-wrapped city of Machu Picchu on the box. Inside the box the large chocolate tablet was inside a plastic wrapper that looked exactly the same.

The bar was attractive: a dark looking milk chocolate.

The snap was not as sharp as some dark chocolates can be and it had a rather soft bite as many milk chocolates do. The flavor is rather milky, in a goat-cheese sort of way, with a little tangy note. The flavor of the chocolate was also strongly raisiny. It was very pleasant though completely different than most other milk chocolate bars I’ve had.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Name: Cua Cua
Brand: Lacta (Kraft)
Size: 18 grams

This is one of those bars that looks huge. The package is about the size a set of Twix bars, yet it only weighs 18 grams. This featherweight bar is all wafers with some light mockolate coating. Between the wafers is a little cocoa cream.

The bar, called Cua Cua, I’m guessing is a play on the sound a duck makes.

The bar smells sweet and a bit of chocolate. It’s also a little smoky smelling, though I couldn’t quite figure that out from the ingredients.

The smoky notes gave it a little bacon flavor that I wasn’t really happy with. The wafers were crunchy and foamy - providing more light texture than taste in this party in my mouth.

The mockolate was of course waxy and unappealing. It often flaked off the bar when I bit into it. I’m a big fan of wafer with cream (I can’t imagine how many pounds of Nabisco Wafers I’ve eaten over the years) but this one just wasn’t quite as ducky as I’d hoped.

Rating: 3 out of 10.

Name: Ca?onazo
Brand: Costa
Size: 26 grams

This bar calls itself “barrita ba?ada rellena con crema de chocolate” which I’m guessing means chocolate filling with crisp wafers bathed in chocolate.

The crisp log of wafer was interesting, kind of like a sweet Cheeto. The chocolate filling was like a frosting, with a good chocolate taste and slightly grain. Like the Cua Cua, this was a light bar. Though it’s big it only weighs 26 grams (and is the size of a Snickers ... which are 58 grams). Unfortunately the coating on the outside isn’t chocolate and it’s rather waxy and uninteresting.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

Name: Gomas Eucalypto
Brand:  F y D Inversiones, SAC
Size: 125 grams

These are crazy! Crazy, I tell you.

They’re little gummis covered with granulated sugar. About the size and shape of an incense cone. Nice and soft but with a good gelatin bounce. They look like they could be green apple or lime or maybe even spearmint. But they’re not. They’re mentholated eucaplytus flavored. Just like Hall’s Cough Drops.

They’re sweet and aromatic and tingly.

It’s rather refreshing to get a cough drop that’s not all crunchy and hard, instead it’s soothing and invigorating all at once.

Definitely a winner in my book.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Name: Nikolo
Brand: Arcor
Size: 30 grams

The packaging here is pretty, it’s a white thick plastic wrap with a bold brown logo for the name of the bar and pretty little pictures of the nuts in the bar.

The label says, “tableta con sabor a chocolate rellena con mani almendra y cereal crocante” which means “peanut, almond and crispy cereal filled chocolatey bar.”

The chunky look of the bar reminded me of Legos and was just about as tasty.

The nuts were fresh and crunchy and gave the bar a promising aroma, but the mockolate in this bar was waxy, chalky and just so bad. Look at it in the photo ... does that look like something you’re supposed to eat or something I molded out of dung?

Rating: 2 out of 10.

Name: Golpe
Brand: Arcor
Size: 27 grams

If it weren’t for the Arcor brand on this, I’d be looking forward to this bar. The label says “Oblea rellena cubierta con caramelo y cereal crocante, con cobertura sabor chocolate” ... which translates to (courtesy of the wrapper, thankyouverymuch) “Filled wafer, toffee, crispies, all covered with chocolate flavor.”

Oh Arcor, again with the chocolate flavor? Is that why your company motto is “Le damos sabor al mundo” (translation: We flavor the world)?

It’s a nice looking wrapper and it made me think of soccer.

The bar looks promising as well, with it’s crunchy studded mockolate. Inside are wafers with creme filling and then a scant covering of glistening caramel (I’m guessing that’s the toffee). The wafers are nice, and the toffee adds some nice flavor to the whole thing, but the bar had a rather chemical taste, like licking fresh dry cleaning. I don’t know if that’s the taste of Carbox/Methylcellulose (the last ingredient on the list), but it made my tongue buzz.

After this series of Arcor products they are now on my list as the Worst Candymakers in the World. (Granted, I haven’t tried everything made by everyone yet.)

This candy bar was made in Chile.

Rating: 2 out of 10.

Name: Sublime
Brand: Nestle
Size: 22 grams

This is a cute little bar. The wrapper says, “Chocolate Blanco de leche con Mani” which is “white milk chocolate with peanuts.” Doesn’t sound too bad.

And it is pretty cute to look at.

The chocolate is rather sweet, but also has a salty bite to it, which helped the peanut flavors stand out. I’m wondering if this was not de-odorized cocoa butter (most white chocolate is deodorized, so it has no chocolate flavor to it). It just may have been that the milk flavors with the peanuts were strong.

It was actually pretty good white chocolate bar. A little grainy but not the least bit waxy.

This bar was made in Bolivia.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Name: Princesa
Brand: Nestle
Size: 38 grams

This is a cute little bar and of course has a upscale appeal of a regal name like Princesa. The ingredients are promising too, real chocolate in there.

The bar says that it’s “chocolate relleno con crema de mani” which means “chocolate stuffed with peanut butter.” Yum!

The chocolate here is dark (though there’s some milk listed in the ingredients, it’s way down the list). It’s a creamy though sweet bar. The peanut butter is very smooth and creamy as well and is completely overshadowed by the chocolate.

There’s a little spicy taste in the background, kind of like cinnamon.

This is a nice bar, not as peanutty as I expected, but as sedate and reserved as you’d expect from royalty.

Rating: 6 out of 10.

I’ve been eying the stuff on the Oriental Trading Company website for years, just wondering if it was any good. I really have very little need for four dozen candy rings, but I just wanted them so much.

So I put together what I thought was a modest order of items that I knew I couldn’t get anywhere else (they do carry a lot of items you can find in the grocery store like candy bar miniatures):
1 x Valentines Candy Rings (4 dozen) - $4.95
1 x Everyday Candy Rings (4 dozen) - $4.95
2 x Gummy Candy Band Bracelet (1 dozen) - $2.95
1 x Candy Shot Glasses (6 each) $4.95

(More on the Candy Shot Glasses next week!)

The Gummy Candy Band Bracelet came in four colors, each with a different inspirational word on them.

All of them were less than stellar looking. They looked and felt a bit dry to the touch, kind of like old Play Doh. They were each individually sealed in little clear cellophane sleeves (and those were all inside another sealed bag) so I don’t think it was a storage issue on my side. However, I did buy them on sale (they were normally $5.95 a dozen and I got them for $2.95, so maybe you get what you pay for).

Purple :: Faith :: Grape - very dark and pretty purple, and I only think it was grape flavored, it was hard to tell. Faith has a strong bitter aftertaste to it for me.

Yellow :: Strength :: Pineapple - pretty good! A nice floral fruity flavor with a good tangy bite and no weird aftertaste. Strength is good!

Green :: Hope :: Apple - tangy and fruity and actually pretty tasty. Hope is edible!

Orange :: Dream :: Orange - also rather tasty. It had a good rounded orange flavor with both the zesty notes and the tangy bite. Dream had a slight aftertaste to it, not a bad one, but a little like chemicals or artificial flavors.

On the whole, I liked the novelty of the bracelets, but as you can imagine the reality of wearing a gummi on your wrist isn’t that appealing after about five minutes. You can gnaw it off your wrist, but if it’s all about the taste and texture, these leave a bit to be desired. I think I’d prefer a clear gummi like Haribo makes instead of this opaque stuff.

They make other varieties for different holidays, there’s a Halloween set and I thought they had an Easter one (but I can’t find it on the site now).

It’s not something I’d order again and I’m kind of sorry I got two dozen now. 4 out of 10

The Everyday Candy Rings are just stunning to look at. Instead of the chunky ones that I used to buy when I was a kid that were impossibly thick and uncomfortable to wear. These are petite little compressed dextrose creations, rather similar to the Candy Blox I reviewed earlier this week.

The rings are small, or fit small fingers. I could only get them on the top of my smaller fingers or my pinkie (my ring finger size is an eight). The bands come in four differen colors:

Pink Band :: White Jewel - After eating this one, I’m not afraid of the pink ones. A light raspberry flavor, it has a little bitter aftertaste but overall I find it agreeable. This is the only one that made my fingers a little discolored.

Yellow Band :: Orange Flower - the candy is a soft lemon flavor, no sour tang to it.

Orange Band :: Pink Flower - this one was bad the first time I had it, a bit sour in an unpleasant “bad burp” way. Subsequent ones were just fine. They taste a little like Froot Loops.

White Band :: Yellow Star - I think this is pineapple. Again, soft with only a light flavor and no tartness.

I really liked these. They’re compact and even though they don’t really fit my fingers they’d be great for kids because they’re not too much candy and are less likely to make a big mess. They’re also darned attractive.

They’re individually wrapped and easy to stow in your pocket (so I plan on carrying them around to blogger events to hand out to my new friends). The flavors are okay - not quite as tasty as the Candy Blox, but they all arrived in great condition (only one out of the 4 dozen was broken). The price per item is only 10 cents each, so if you’re planning a theme party for a little girl (Princess!), this might make a nice addition to the favors.

I give these an 8 out of 10 ... definitely something I’m going to keep on hand as the Candy Blogger.

Sometimes a candy is so gorgeous it stops me dead in my tracks. Not that it looks tasty, it’s just so darned photogenic. Intense colors, fun textures, inventive shape ... it’s all so compelling.

I’ve seen these bears in bulk bins all over the country and didn’t know who made them until I went to the All Candy Expo. Turns out Albanese Confectionery makes a lot of gummis, including the exotic flavors you’ll find at Dylan’s Candy Bar (banana was really interesting!) and the super cute Gummi Army Men. I even unwittingly had one of the huckleberry ones last year. An ‘A’ on a gummi bear’s tummy means Albanese (the best way to spot them in bulk bins), another difference is they’re also a little larger than a Trolli or Haribo bear.

The most freakishly beautiful candies of their line are their Krunchy items. Krunchies are soft gummis coated in little crunchy nonpareils. The mix of the soft bouncy texture of the gummi combined with a little sour bite of the “sticky” element and then the crunchy candies is just plain fun. (But you know, it’s functional too, the candy coating also keeps them from sticking together.)

They make other varieties of the Krunchy items such as gummi rings, worms and hearts and most come in different colors for different holidays.

These gummis come in six flavors: Cherry (red), Lemon (yellow), Watermelon (pink), Apple (green), Orange (orange) and Raspberry (blue). As usual, the citrus ones were my top faves, but the apple and raspberry were ranking pretty high, mostly because gummis in that flavor aren’t that common. But the weirdest part was the watermelon one, it just had a weird bitter aftertaste to me ... and the stranger thing is that I had the same experience with the Sandy Candy watermelon flavor too, so maybe there’s just something that reacts oddly with me.

If you see them in bulk bins, fear not! They’re as tasty as they are pretty.

(Albanese has a limited web store but the prices are FANTASTIC, usually you pay a premium when you order right from the company, like M&Ms or Hershey, but they have gummi bears for $2.29 a pound plus shipping. However, they ask some strange and personal details like age and gender. Let me know here if you ever order from them. They also have a factory store in Indiana, which I plan to visit someday.)

Related Candies

1. Albanese Gummi Butterflies
2. Chocolate Covered Gummi Bears
3. Sour Gummi Bears
4. Gummi Lightning Bugs
5. Rocky Mountain Huckleberry Gummi Bears

Brains! Brains! Must eat brains!

I don’t have much to say ... they’re gummis in the shape of brains. The colors vary, some with blue in them, some white and pink or red. But they’re all the same fruity, berry flavor.

They’re lovely, if you like to look at brains. They have nice folds and detail, with a good left-brain/right-brain distinction. They’re soft and very fragrant.

I got mine in a large bag of 6.6 pounds. Yes, that’s as much as two actual human brains weigh! I know that the human brain weighs three pounds because there’s a show coming on CBS mid-season called 3 LBS that’s about brain surgeons! (This is different from the piece of information we gleaned from Jerry Maguire that the human head weighs 8 lbs - which I figure includes the skull and eyeballs and stuff.)

If you’re a zombie fan and are planning a big movie extravaganza for Halloween, you probably need 6.6 pounds of brains. I have the large brains here, they’re about 1 3/4” lengthwise, which is a good size for a three-bite brain. They also come in a little, one bite size. I kind of miss the variety of flavors like you get with gummi bears. But the appearance of a good squishy candy brain is pretty good. They’d be fun cupcake toppers, too.

The Japanese have some strange candies and these have to be right up there at the top. Puccho are pretty popular and with good reason, they deliver just about everything. They have variety in both the experience and the range of flavors, great packaging, they’re inexpensive and of course you can share them easily.

There was a wide variety of flavor combinations at the store and I was especially interested in the Cola one but wanted to stay away from the yogurt ones (I like yogurt, but not as a flavor).

The Cola (in the red package) was awesome. The little piece had white and brown stripes in the candy and every once in a while there was a little piece of cola flavored gummi or a nugget of sour foamy grains. The grains gave it a lemon-cola zap and the gummis gave the soft, Hi-CHEW-like taffy a little bump of longevity.

The second one is a bit more of a mystery. The English sticker on the label calls it Genki Drink, which didn’t really help me to narrow it down because I didn’t know what a Genki Drink is. A little time on Google and I knew EXACTLY what they are ... you’ve probably seen them before, those mysterious brown glass bottles by the checkout at the Asian markets and tea shops that claim to boost your mental acuity and, um, other things.

The saffron colored chews are similarly soft and have a tangy, lemon tea flavor to them but also a floral note that reminded me of violets. There are similar nuggets of white powder that release a little zap of fizz and tartness, but these seem to have a bitter bite to them. The little gummi bits linger and have a little fruity taste to them and help to scrub away any lingering taffy bits in the teeth (that’s how they’re described on the Puccho website).

I definitely found the Cola ones fun and practically addictive except for the later burps that the little fizzy bits seem to generate. The Genki, not so much, even though it probably has infusions of all sorts of healthy things (the only one I’m sure of is vitamin C). I’ll probably stick to my tried-and-true Hi-CHEW but the Cola ones are definitely compelling if I’m in a mood.

Interesting note: the motto for UHA Mikakuto is “Deliciousness is Gentleness”