I tried the Honey Roasted Peanut Roca for the first time at the All Candy Expo in Chicago last summer. It took quite a while before I saw it in the “wild” and I was really surprised that my first sighting was at the 99 Cent Only stores.

I don’t have a photo of the innards, but I can tell you that it looks just like any other Roca. The foil wrapper on this one is coppery-orange but the little turd-looking candy is just like you’d expect.

The aroma was definitely peanutty with a strong initial crunch in the toffee. The toffee softens quite quickly to a firm chew and then becomes very buttery and a tad grainy as the sugar gives up its structure. I didn’t get much of the Honey Roasted Peanut vibe but the toffee was certainly competent (and I’ve eaten a lot of toffee this week.)

The faux chocolate coating on the candy was less than satisfying though. Rather greasy and soft, it was held in place by the peanut bits stuck to it. I appreciate that they’re experimenting, but this particular one was distracting for me. It didn’t add any “chocolate” flavor to the mix.

On a side note I did try the Candy Cane Roca while at the Fancy Food Show. The combination of toffee and minted chocolate was kind of odd, but overall nice. I don’t think I’d buy it, but I’d pop a few in my mouth if they were sitting in a candy dish.

I found the packaging for Honey Roasted Peanut Roca a little odd on this one as well. Perhaps it was that it was sold at the 99 Cent Store, but the incongruous 3 PIECES on the lower left kind of cheapened the whole thing. It also didn’t look like it belonged because of the font and it didn’t have the gold shadow the rest of it had. I know, I’m being super picky here. But I actually looked at the label rather critically when I first picked it up because I thought it was some sort of knock-off.

I think I’m going to stick with Almond Roca.

I’ve often said that you can cover garbage in chocolate and sell it as a delicacy. And we do, you can find chocolate-covered candied orange peels and even dead bugs. (I’m rather fond of the former, not so much with the latter.)

Of course potato chips are hardly garbage, they’re wonderful, wonderful things. I don’t eat them much any longer but I do admit that I miss them. But since my life is all about candy now, something had to go.

When I saw these in the 75% off post-holiday clearance section at Target I figured this was my opportunity to have some chips!

Let me start by saying it’s more chocolate than chip. Each chip is quite heavy but still bears the unmistakable shape and ripple of a potato chip. They even smell a bit of potato chips.

The coating on them smells sweet but not very chocolatey, it smells more like coconut and caramelized sugars. Some of the chips are stuck together, but hey, that happens in bags of chips anyway. There is an unmistakable crunch at the center and a nice hit of salt and an immediate potato chip flavor there.

But something is off about the chocolate. It felt greasy. It didn’t so much as melt as just slide around in my mouth. At first I didn’t know if it was because the chips imparted that but after looking at the ingredients I realized that it’s not chocolate.

Maud Borup’s recipe for milk chocolate goes something like this

Sugar, vegetable oils (palm kernel and partially hydrogenated palm), skim milk, cocoa powder, whole milk, vanilla, natural and artificial flavors, sorbitan tristearate [an emulsifier and skin conditioner], soya lecithin & salt

So, I guess that’s why they’re called “Milk Chocolate Dipped” in quotes. When in reality it’s just the milk chocolate part that should be in quotes. I’m quite sure the dipped part is accurate. But real milk chocolate, at least in the United States must contain chocolate liquor (the slurry made from grinding up cacao until it’s a smooth paste that is often separated into cocoa powder and cocoa butter). Just putting in the cocoa powder does not make it chocolate. It makes it chocolatish or chocolate-flavored. The fat in chocolate should be cocoa butter ... not palm kernel and partially hydrogenated palm oils. (For the record, the partially hydrogenated amount must have been small since the trans fat content was marked as zero on the label, but who knows if the small print is accurate if they’ve already duped me with the milk chocolate claim.)

Anyway, I really wanted to like these because I am a huge fan of chocolate dipping, including savory items like pretzels. But the greasy texture of the not-chocolate coating and the weird buzzing feeling that the chips left in my mouth (I don’t know what that was ... maybe there were some traces of walnuts in there) just makes me wanna chuck these out the window. I’m really glad they were only two bucks and I didn’t pay the original $8 for them because then I would need to sweep up some glass.

(I’ve had other candies from the overlord company that owns Maud Borup and found them quite tasty, so I’m not going to write the company off completely, though I may email the company about my displeasure.)

I reviewed the Payday covered in real milk chocolate earlier this year. That was a limited edition item and was quickly replaced with this permanent offering called the Chocolatey Avalanche bar. Cuz you know, given a choice, no one wants real chocolate. They want chocolate-like products!

The Payday Chocolatey Avalanche is pretty good. It does have real chocolate in there, it’s just mixed with some other tropical oils (and that wonderful, ubiquitous PGPR that’s all the rage right now) so it no longer qualifies as chocolate . Under the mockolate, the peanuts have a good salty hit to them that balances out the sweet and soft nougat and the slight chew from the caramel. The bar tasted slightly of cinnamon, but perhaps it was stored somewhere close to a case of Atomic Fireballs.

The best thing about this bar was that it was fresh. Every last nut on there was crunchy and tasty.

The limited edition offering at the moment, however, is called Peanut Butter flavor Avalanche which also has no chocolate. It’s a peanut butter core, covered in caramel and rolled in peanuts then dipped in a peanut butter coating.

I’ve eaten two of these so far. The first one I wolfed down the night before my CNBC appearance because I wanted to prep myself properly. The bar was dry and though filling, it stuck in my tummy like a rock. The second one I ate (pictured above) was a bit more pleasant. I’m glad I gave it another try. Still, the crumbliness of the nougat center was just too much when combined with the lack-luster peanut coating. If I were a milk drinker that would have been the perfect accompaniment. But candy shouldn’t need to be consumed with a beverage in order to work.

I’m reverting to the regular old Payday. It never lets me down.

Green Tea (Matcha) KitKats from Japan have been around for a while, but it took me this long to get my hands on some. I couldn’t even find a single-serving bar so I had to buy this bag of miniatures. At over $6, it’s not something I’m likely to repeat for a mass produced consumer candy.

These little wafer sticks are covered in a white mockolate flavored with real green tea. The color of the coating is real, it’s a pretty shade of creamy green. It smells of sugar and the delicate scent of matcha. The layers are flaky and crisp, just like a KitKat ought to be. The mockolate coating is very sweet though, so the matcha nuances are lost until you reach a saturation point ... at about the second stick.

A little about matcha. Matcha is a style of preparing green tea that starts with preparing the tea leaves before harvest, where they are covered from the sun for a few weeks before they are picked. After drying they are ground into a fine powder to create the matcha. This powder is used to prepare the tea and unlike regular brewed teas, the hot water is added to the powder and it is not strained out. Think of it as the difference between coffee and cocoa. With coffee we brew the beans by passing hot water through the grounds. With cocoa we grind the beans very finely and add them to hot milk. You get more complex flavors when you consume the whole leaf.

While I found these enjoyable, they were a tad sweet, which covered up much of the green tea flavors. The white mockolate had more of a greasy consistency, since the ingredients go: sugar, vegetable oil, lactose, wheat flour, milk powder and the cocoa butter. The American label on the package may or may not be correct, as I found a huge discrepancy in the reported calories for them and I had to puzzle my way through the Japanese listing. Luckily numbers are universal.

I think these are limited edition, as they’re no longer on the Breaktown.com site, maybe someone can read that label and let me know. (Dont’ worry, these weren’t expired candies or anything, the freshness date said 01/2007 on it.)

If there were ever a case study for how the internet and fan passion can change marketing policy of a corporation, it has to be Coffee Crisp.

Made by Nestle, the Coffee Crisp is a wafer bar with a coffee flavored cream and chocolate-like coating. They’ve been very popular in Canada for years, but for some reason they were never introduced in the United States. For at least five years a web petition/email/phone campaign was circulating to get them in the States and those efforts have finally come to fruition.

At first Nestle responded by allowing American stores order the Coffee Crisp to carry in their stores, but they made no real effort to advertise or give any special deals (as is very common with other candies). Instead Coffee Crisp were often seen in stores near the Canadian border, large urban markets and on internet stores that catered to the obsessed.

If you want to know where to find your own, check out the fan site called CoffeeCrisp.org - they have a special page called Coffee Crisp Sightings. I still haven’t seen them anywhere (including the places where I used to see them before their official introduction).

You can also find info on their official website: Nestle-coffeecrisp.com

The packaging for the bar was changed a little in the past year (as was much of Nestle’s product line) but the candy bars you’ll find here are still made in Canada. I’d hoped that they’d change the recipe a little bit to get rid of the hydrogenated oils ... the bar carries 1.5 grams of trans fats. Some purists probably celebrate them sticking to tradition.

Previous coverage about the petition here and I reviewed the Coffee Crisp last year (a bar I found at a gourmet market ... I wasn’t really that fond of it).

“It’s the candy bar that makes Idaho famous,” whispers the barely visible black print on brown at the bottom of the wrapper. If you love those memory foam mattresses, you’ll love the Idaho Spud.

Well, maybe it’s not quite like that, the Idaho Spud has been around since 1918 ... so maybe tempurpedic was inspired by the candy bar!

So really, what is it? It’s a dense, chocolate-flavored marshmallow covered in fake chocolate and then dusted with coconut. Of course it all looks like a potato.

First, I have to say that I didn’t eat the whole bar ... because there are hydrogenated oils in there. Not just a trace like most candies, I’m talking 1.5 grams.

The center of the bar is rather odd, like a cross between a custardy jelly and marshmallow. The chocolately coating doesn’t seem to stick well to this firm foam, so when you bite into it, it kind of flakes off. The dominant flavor is coconut, which I always like.

The fake chocolate isn’t very pleasant - kind of greasy and crumbly. The whole bar has a rather maple flavor to it, which might be the coconut. The firm marshmallow center is actually really interesting and I enjoyed the firm texture and density of it with the light tough of chocolate. But the combo of high trans fats and the mockolate just turned me off. For the last third of the bar I peeled off the chocolate coating and just ate the center. I’m a big potato fan, so I’m not going to let this dissuade me from my actual favorite Idaho export, but I don’t think I’d ever give one of these to someone as a treat when I returned from a vacation in Idaho.

I’m a malt lover. You know that already. I know some folks don’t like malt, and that’s okay. I’ve got lots of other posts you can look at, so I won’t be offended if you skip to something else.

When I was a kid I loved the Easter malted milk eggs because of the pretty shells. What was especially cool about them is that you could lick them and then use the coloring and smear it on your lips. Back then it was cool to have chalky-looking white or pink lipstick ... maybe if you were lithe had a nice tan and long blonde hair. If you were more macho you’d paint stripes on your cheeks as warpaint (pretty pink and blue warpaint!).

In the comments here, Tripp and Samantha both expressed their affection for these Mighty Malts from Necco. So I sought them out. I found them at Dollar Tree ... which might not be a good place to buy candy, but I found everything else I’ve gotten there to be fresh and palatable.

What freaks me out about them is their texture. Not in my mouth, but just looking at them. They’re matte, but not in a chalky way like the cute little Cadbury Mini Eggs are. The pink ones look kind of like erasers. Actually, the whole pile of them looks like something you’d pry out of a sticky toddler’s hand. Anyway, I had some Robin’s Eggs laying around (I got them from a bulk bag from CandyFavorites when I visited last month).

The Mighty Malts (right) are much smaller than the Robin’s Eggs. The coating, instead of being a hard, crisp candy shell and then layer of “chocolate” is a “candy” coating which can only be described as a combination of trans fatty acids and sugar. Fake white chocolate. Colored to look like PlayDoh.

The outside is at once waxy and sweet. I can carefully shave off the coating with my teeth to create a new naked morsel of malt with practice. (I probably don’t look very appealing with the egg trapped between my lower lip and teeth though as I do this.)

The malt inside is pretty good - crunchy and substantial, it has a good malt hit and a bit of saltiness to it. But that’s not enough for me to recommend these except as a last resort. I paid a buck for four of these little boxes, so I don’t feel cheated or anything. I doubt I’m going to eat the other two boxes, though. I found the malt to be good enough that I’m going to keep my eye out for another Easter version called Goose Eggs, which boasts real milk chocolate (and of course they’re larger, which would imply a greater malt ratio).

Do you ever wish that Chick-o-Sticks came in larger bars? Ever wish that Butterfingers didn’t come with that fake chocolate? Ever want a little coconut on your 5th Avenue?

Zagnut has been around for ages and was once proudly made by the Clark company in Pittsburgh alongside the more famous grandfather, the Clark Bar. For some reason when the Clark company was broken up the Clark bar went to NECCO and the Zagnut bar went to Hershey’s. I have no explanation for this. My guess is that Clark was struggling to stay afloat and of course couldn’t sell off their namesake bar as a way to raise capital.

The bar was first introduced in 1930. (The Clark bar came out in 1917.) In a weird way, we have the military to thank for many of our favorite candy bars. Confectioners were usually enlisted to create ration bars for servicemen as quick and easy-to-carry calories. Servicemen would often get a taste for the bars (most of which were made with nuts and chocolate for a balance of protein, fats and carbs) and introduce them to their families back home.

The Zagnut bar, like the Chick-o-Stick is a great summer alternative to the 5th Avenue, because it has no chocolate coating to melt. It’s a large, flattened log of honeycombed peanut butter and molasses crisp. The flavorful and smooth center has a nice sparkle of salt in it and the toasty coconut on the outside goes surprisingly well with the molasses and peanut flavors. There’s some sort of a peanut/white chocolate coating on the bar, just enough to get the coconut to stick. If anything, this bar seemed more like a 5th Avenue than a Clark. (That’s a compliment.)

It’s a solid, midrange performer when it comes to candy bars, a good backup when maybe you don’t want an Almond Joy or maybe want a little more crunch than a 3 Musketeers. I know some folks aren’t keen on them, but now that Hershey’s has them in their stable, I’m actually seeing them more often. Now all they have to do is replace the hydrogenated oils in there.

Other Reading: Taquitos.net review and here’s what the wrapper used to look like.