The Fascination

Ever since reading Candy Freak by Steve Almond, I’d been hoping to try a Valomilk. In Candy Freak, Almond goes on a journey to visit the last great independent candy factories in America. Among them are Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, Idaho Spud, Twin Bing and Rocky Road. While I haven’t tried all of these candies (those without links), there was only one I really wanted to try because of the book. It was Sifer’s Valomilk.

Many of the “small manufacturer” candy bars aren’t very appealing to me. Sometimes it’s just because they’re not a good combination for me, marshmallow or cherries aren’t really my favorites. Part of it has to do with the ingredients they use. I prefer real milk chocolate to the waxy substance many of them use because of costs and I like a consistent bar. (Goldenberg’s are the only candy that violates that rule.) Most are referred to as nostalgic or regional candy bars.

The Description

Valomilks are the opposite. It’s as if the Sifer’s have gone out of their way to bring the most expensive and elusive ingredients (for a consumer bar) together into one little brown fluted cup. Real milk chocolate, premium egg whites, cane sugar and vanilla. Started in 1931, the Valomilk has an amusing and quaint history, which you can read more about in Candy Freak or on their website. The most important thing to know is that the Valomilk is a tall milk chocolate cup filled with a strong vanilla flowing marshmallow cream.

Now, Valomilks are by no means the only marshmallow cup, but oddly enough there are no plain chocolate and marshmallow candies made by the major three: Hershey, Nestle & Mars.

Each cup is about one ounce and swaddled in the brown fluted paper cup where it was born.

The other similar candy bars would be the Rocky Road, which is an actual bar containing fluffy marshmallow in a long and large plank covered in milk chocolate and cashews. Next there is the Boyer’s Mallo Cup (made in Pennsylvania - review sometime next week), which is a simple, flat milk chocolate cup filled with a flowing marshmallow cream with some coconut in the chocolate. This is not unlike the slightly larger Cup-O-Gold, which is made here in Los Angeles by Adams-Brooks. The Cup-O-Gold also has coconut in it. Then there’s the Idaho Spud, which is a chocolate flavored marshmallow covered in faux dark chocolate and coconut shavings. Naturally, it’s shaped like a potato.

Of course all bets are off on holidays as everyone seems to have a chocolate covered marshmallow shape of some kind.

But no one makes a candy cup like the Valomilk. Which probably explains why it exists to this day. Over the next four days, I’m going to take you on my journey through the world of the Valomilk.

Tomorrow’s episode: How I got a hold of my Valomilks.

I just thought I’d pop a little note up that CandyBlog.net (well, Typetive.com as a whole) is migrating to a new hosting company this weeked.

Hopefully you won’t notice any interruption of our fine standard of service here, but it might mean that some recent comments might get lost and perhaps you won’t be able to access the site and all this sugary goodness for a little while.

I’ll have more info on the how and why come Monday, but you have my apologies if you’re unable to get your sugar fix at any time over the next few days.

UPDATE: (Saturday 9:20 AM) All the missing posts have been restored, but all new comments since Wednesday were lost. I have them as emails, so I’m going to restore them (as best I can). My apologies if yours doesn’t make it back onto the site or if there are any cut & paste errors. I welcome you to add your thoughts again if I missed something.

UPDATED UPDATE: (Saturday 10:15 AM) I’ve restored all of your comments, but if you were watching a post (where you get an email when someone else comments) that’s probably lost. My own comments seem to be lost, but I’ll try to recreate whatever my responses were with new thoughts as well. Thanks to everyone for their patience and support! I’ll slowly be adding back in the lost features, such as the rotating background.

As many of you noticed, on Tuesday I awarded my 2006 Independent Food Award (hosted by tasteEverything) to Scharffen Berer’s Chocolate Covered Cacao Nibs.

If you have time, you should take a look at all five days of awards, but if you’re just interested in sweets, here’s the lowdown:

The Food Section awards The Sweetest Way to Travel Back in Time to Jahn’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlour and Restaurant in Richmond Hill, Queens, NY.

Gluten-free Girl awards The Best Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Sugar-Free Food You Will Ever Eat to the Chocolate Cake at Babycakes, New York, New York

Tasting Menu awards The Best Peanut Brittle I’ve Ever Tasted to Olde World Fudge at the Granville Public Market, in Vancouver, British Columbia. I bet they have good fudge, too.

Sydney Food Dairy awards The World’s Most Luxurious Ice Cream to White truffle ice cream with white bean and fig from Tetsuya’s in Sydney, Australia.

Portland Food and Drink awards Chocolate Better Than Morphine to Sahagún Chocolates, Portland, Oregon. Check out the interview post from the day before, too.

The Domestic Goddess awards Ice Cream I Wouldn’t Hesitate to Beg My Husband to Drive 2 1/2 Hours out of the City For to Kawartha Dairy in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, Canada

World on a Plate awards the Best Wicked Indulgence for $4 to Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookie from Della Fattoria, Ferry Plaza Market, San Francisco, California.

My favorite award has to be this one though:

My Madeline awards The Best Possible Nourishment for a Girl with Largely Impaired Olfactory Neurons: A Perfect Combination of Taste, Texture, and to Vosges Haut Chocolate’s ‘Barcelona Bar’.

April 16th is Easter Sunday. It’s over a month away, but next week I’ve decided to make a theme week devoted entirely to Easter candies.

I’m planning to cover the following items, but if there’s something else you think I’m missing that’s iconically Easter, I’ll see what I can do to get a hold of it:

Peeps
Cadbury Creme Eggs (and Caramel Egg)
Jelly Beans (Jelly Belly and Starburst Jelly Beans)
Cadbury Mini Eggs
Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs (regular size and the new little foil eggs)
Robin’s Eggs (Pastel Malted Milk Balls)
Hershey’s Eggs (why don’t they make these year round?)
Russell Stover Eggs (white chocolate/peanut butter & coconut cream)
Lake Champlain Hazelnut Eggs

What’s your Easter basket favorite? You can check out what I’ve got so far here in my Flickr Easter photoset.

As part of this year’s Independent Food Festival and Awards sponsored by tasteEverything, I’ve been tapped as a jurist to give out an award for excellence in food. (You know it’s gonna be candy.) I decided after my mind-blowing experience touring candy factories in the Bay Area last December that it had to be something that really helped me to immerse myself in the true source of chocolate.

My 2006 Winner of the Independent Food Awards is The Best Things to Stick to your Marshmallow: Scharffen Berger Chocolate Covered Cacao Nibs.

Cacao nibs are roasted cocoa beans, what all chocolate is made from. Scharffen Berger then pan coats them with 62% cacao semisweet chocolate. They’re complexly flavored little buggers, about the size of rice crispies - they’re crunchy, sometimes fibery, sometimes buttery and nutty ... always a surprise. Some flavors are like wine, raisins, coconut, coffee, oak, banana, apricot, sweet almond, grapefruit, cherry, cinnamon, clove ... I could go on and on. They’re like a blank canvas and a symphony all at once. They take over the senses and make you forget your train of thought. The coolest part is that each little morsel is independent of the others - it might have come from a different tree, might have been harvested weeks before or after its buddies in the tube. Eat one and get a sense of the particular, eat a palmful and travel the world.

So, what do you do with these besides just eat them like candy? You can bake with them, as I saw at Tartine in San Francisco, where you can get Rochers (like soft meringues) made with cacao nibs.

Photo courtesy of Chris Hong (via Flickr)

But I’m not really a baker. You can’t just serve an olive boat of these morsels to guests. Then oddly enough the answer came to me in the mail the same week. I was reviewing Plush Puffs, flavored, handmade marshmallows. With proximity being the mother of invetion, I tried putting things on my marshmallow. Actually, I tried mashing my marshmallow into things.

Now, given that I have the title of jurist, it was incumbent upon me to evaluate at least several other marsh-mashables. So I ordered up more Scharffen Berger Cacao Nibs and a full array of Plush Puffs (Orange-Honey, Sam’s Sour Lemon, Maple Pecan and Vanilla Bean) and scoured my kitchen and a few stores for some options. 

In the interests of trying to find the perfect thing to mash into my marshmallows, I pulled a few things out of the cupboard and ordered some others off of Chocosphere. Here are the results:

The definition of pure confection heaven has to be Orange-Honey Plush Puffs with Scharffen Berger Chocolate Covered Cacao Beans. This is the standard by which all other mashmallow-ables will be judged. (Really, why did I go on, how much better could I expect things to get?)

My second favorite thing to mash into my marshmallows has to be these Valrhona Chocolate Covered Orange Peels (Equinoxe Noir des d’ecorces d’oranges confites). They’re tiny pieces of lightly candied orange peel pan coated with 66% cacao dark chocolate. Smooth, sweet, crisp and with a great zesty orange taste. At $4.00 for 1.8 ounces, they’re even more expensive than the Scharffen Berger Cacao Nibs, but as a little dash mixed in with the Cacao Nibs, it’s a welcome little burst of citrus energy. They go really well with both the Vanilla Bean and Maple Pecan ones but unlike the cacao nibs, they don’t work with everything.

It wouldn’t be fair of me to evaluate chocolate covered cacao nibs without trying out the naked ones. So I selected the Dagoba Cacao Nibs, which are also organic. The pieces are less consistent in size and shape than the chocolate covered brethren. They have a wild, alcoholic aroma. Smoky and woodsy to the nose, they provide a huge burst of flavor when eaten on their own but they’re also incredibly acidic and sometimes acrid, astringent and puckeringly dry. When pressed into the Vanilla Bean marshmallow, the sweetness and blankness allows the subtle cacao notes to shine while moderating the overt acidity.

With the success of the malted rice krispies squares, I thought I’d just go with the source materials. This wasn’t as pleasant. The malted milk powder is a bit salty and of course dry. The milk powder, I think, is part of the issue. Milk doesn’t really belong with marshmallow. In fact, it turns out that I don’t really care for the flavor of powdered milk.

I love molasses and my favorite sugar is Billington’s Muscovado. It’s got a sort of whiskey aroma to it, a complexity that you won’t find in refined sugars. I like to let it dry out in chunk and eat it that way. It doesn’t really stick to the marshmallows very well, and frankly, it makes it too sweet.

As a final confirmation about the Chocolate Covered Cacao Nibs, I brought the array of my top contenders to an Oscars (tm) viewing party Sunday night. At the end of the night the marshmallows were nearly gone and so were the CCCN while the plain nibs were largely untouched. On top of that, people were pleased with the fun combination of flavors. (And as a capper we got to taste some new regionally-sourced chocolate ice creams. Yum!)

There is one other company that I know of that makes chocolate covered cacao beans, called SweetRiot. I haven’t tried them yet, but I imagine they too are awesome.

If you’ve stumbled across this posting without first visiting the tasteEverything, have a look at all the other incredible finds from around the globe.

Related Candies

1. Peeps Monster Mash Ups
2. Candy Mash Ups - Marshmallows & Chocolate

Whee! I’ve been discovered by the national media!

CBS News has a blog about blogs called, of all things, Blogophile.

Melissa McNamara did a roundup of food oriented blogs and there I am, at the end of the list:

Candy Blog: A stylish blog, featuring the latest in candy reviews and analysis of trends in all sorts of candy. It will make you hungry.

The latest food blogging tempest in a teapot was brought on by Food & Wine’s column about food blogs (which frustratingly has no links in the text, you have to click on a separate page for the black book listing), In the Belly of the Blog by Pete Wells. It makes some interesting points about food blogging, which should be more than just what you ate. Some blogs do a fantastic job (and plenty that I read regularly were left off his list). I think the biggest thing I can take away from his commentary is the importance of staying on message. CandyBlog.net is about candy ... it’s candy reviews with the occasional analysis of the candy marketplace, nostalgia and of course escaping through consumption. Half of candy, in my opinion, is the look of it, so I strive to give you good pictures.

The great thing is that it doesn’t matter what columnists think about food blogging. The world of blogs means that you can find an audience for whatever you’re writing. Someone out there might just be interested in that cheese sandwich you ate.

We all have Valentines stories and I’ll wager that a good many of them involve candy of some sort. The holiday is inextricably tied to the motto “sweets for the sweet.”

There are lots of stories about Valentines on the news, whole TV specials on the Food Network and of course blog entries. You don’t need me telling you about the history of the heart-shaped box or give you a profile of a man who collects Victorian Valentines. This is the one day where you can get your sugar fix anywhere and everywhere. And I hope you do, because days like this are pretty few and far between.

In a way, CandyBlog.net isn’t about any of that. I’m about candy every day and everyday candy.

That said, this is a good time to talk about Candy Season.

I know I’ve mentioned Candy Season quite a bit. Basically there are four major Candy Holidays in the United States and it starts with Halloween. Then there’s Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter. Candy Season happens to also coincide with cooler weather, which is good for chocolate treats.

Candy Season is a time of great plenty for candy ... limited editions, special shapes and colors and of course sales. Indulgence in candies is perfectly acceptable and encouraged. But what’s best is the fact that candy is packaged for each holiday and quickly becomes dated. Which is great on November 1st, December 26th and of course, tomorrow, February 15th. Half off days.

The candy is just as good (if not better) when it’s cheap. Maybe you buy something you’d never tried or twice as much. Valentine’s candy is even better because it’s cute and often meant to be shared.

While this is supposed to be a day for Lovers, when I was growing up Valentine’s was celebrated in our household as a purely candy holiday, a holiday of giving, usually smaller gifts like mini-Christmas stockings.

Usually my mother gave each of us children a little box of candy. It was usually a heart shaped box of Russell Stovers from the drug store (and of course I’d promptly trade my chocolate covered cherry for a nut cluster or caramel with my brother or sister). But one year, for some reason, she went above and beyond. She went to real chocolate shop in the city and picked out a custom tin for each of us with a specific mix. Mine was full of caramels, chocolate covered nuts and coconut creams and not a single cherry in the mix. I kept the tin for years, putting my tips in there and usually spending the money on candy (my brother thought all the cash was in my Tootsie Roll bank ... hah!).

I’ve certainly gotten plenty of other candy gifts for Valentines since then. Even a goofy little box of Necco conversations hearts are always welcome. I know it sounds hokey, but it is the thought that counts and when someone thinks of buying me candy and they don’t present me with a box of chocolate covered walnuts, cherries and marzipan ... it’s all good. It’s all love.

And I’m gonna love stopping at the store(s) tomorrow. That’s when you can expect some special things on CandyBlog.net. Only one more Candy Holiday to go after this before the end of the season!

I guess as Valentines approaches candy is more on the mind of adults than usual. Here are a few links about candy and chocolate from around the web:

The New York Times has a great story in their food section about single origin chocolates that starts with chocolate tastings, which may become the new wine tastings, where customers are given brief histories and specs of the growing regions and then taste samples but also discusses the politics and practicality of fair trade and organics as it pertains to quality product.

Chocolate that Flashes Its Passport by Kim Severson

The Los Angeles Times has a great story that traces the origins of chocolate making in California (which is a far longer history than you’d suspect) and how the new mavericks of chocolate crafting are making the West Coast their home. The photos are tasty too (incuding a huge shot on the front page of the Food section).

Sweet Surrender by Betty Hallock and then follow it up with her panel’s notes in A Tasting of California Artisan Chocolates. (They liked Boule which was the only one on the list that I’d tried.)

Toodle over to a Travel article about Barcelona and hard candies, with a delicious photo to boot. Barcelona: Hard Candy by Lisa Abend about a couple of Australians making traditional pulled hard candies in Spain.

The Washington Post has quite a few articles today about candy:

A Bag That’s Good Enough to Eat (shown) by Ken Bookman

Taste Test: From Local Chocolatiers - a lovely gallery, tasting notes and recommendations on DC’s favorite candies. (Remember, the Washington Post was the one who helped folks sort through their holiday gelt.)

For those of us not in the area or shipping elsewhere, you might want to check out Taste Test: Valentine’s Chocolates by Mail.

While you’re on the site you might want to check out their interesting article about Chicago, which was once the candy capitol of North America. Sugar subsidies and corporate consolidation has led to a downturn in domestic production of candy in the Windy City. Chicago is Home Sweet Home to Fewer Candy Factories by Kari Lydersen.

Read up! Eat up!