There’s a lot that goes on before our beloved candy hits the store shelves. The same is true with Candy Blog, though it probably looks like all I do is play with candy, take photos of candy and of course eat candy. I also read about what’s going on in the candy business and of course visit trade shows and talk to candy companies, distributors & retailers.

One of the things I always found curious about the American candy business is how some foreign candies are represented in the United States. One such oddity was that the American distributor for Toblerone and Cote d’Or (owned by Kraft) chocolate for two years was Ferrara Pan. Yes, the Lemonhead & Atomic Fireball makers. Well, that deal ended in December 2008. So that left Ferrara free to move into the chocolate bar field without competing with his own interests ... and he’s come up with something that looks familiar yet has its own distinctiveness.

The chocolate is made in Belgium but the rest of the manufacturing is done at the new Ferrara facility in Forest Park, IL. If you like the behind the scenes stuff, you might love this article (which is one of the most blunt I’ve seen about how the candy business is a business and made up of people).

The new Ferrara Imported Belgian Milk Chocolate with Almond Nougat bar has a distinctive shape and a similar construction. It’s an atypical shape (a trapezoidal bar with deep sections) enclosed in a box shaped just like the bar. Yes, it’s a Faux-blerone.

The ingredients are in fact quite nice: milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk powder, chocolate, soy lecithin and natural vanilla flavor), almond nougat (sugar, corn syrup, almonds, honey, egg white, natural vanilla flavor) plus wheat starch as a processing aid.

Inside the box the bar is sealed in a heavy mylar wrap with the Ferrara “F” crest reminding consumers that Ferrara has been making candy since 1908 on it.

It does smell quite good, sweet and milky with just a hint of the promised honey in the nougat.

Biting into it the first thing I noticed was how packed with nuts & nougat bits it was. My issue with Toblerone has long been the lack of enough bits to satisfy me.

The chocolate is quite milky but surprisingly smooth. The milky flavors are lightly caramelized, so there’s a malty & honey undertone to it. The chocolate comes across as rich, but also a little sweet.

I liked the little almond slivers and crunches and the Italian-style nougat which had a hint of honey and toasted marshmallow flavors. The bits are a little tough and sometimes sticky ... I’d kind of like to try the milk chocolate without the nougat & nuts. (Ferrara is planning on making sectioned chocolate balls a la Terry’s Chocolate Orange later this year as well.)

I’d say this is a great addition to a rather open segment of the candy shelf - better than a standard Hershey’s with Almonds and rivaling Toblerone without the price tag. I paid $1.99 for this bar ... on the shelf next to it was Toblerone, for $2.79 each.  The fact that it’s all natural (no artificial vanilla flavor in there) is a bonus.

Related Candies

1. Toblerone Fruit & Nut
2. Ferrara Dark Chocolate Covered Biscotti
3. Lemonhead Fruit Snacks
4. Toblerone Single Peaks
5. Atomic Fireballs
6. The Lemonhead & Fruit Heads

Lindt is well known for their economically priced & widely available Lindor truffle line.

Their line of individually wrapped bites called Fioretto differs from the Lindor Truffles in that it contains no tropical oils (palm, palm kernel or coconut).

These little morsels are more of a cross between Perugina Baci and Ferrero Rocher.

I liked the little stand up bag, it’s simple and not too fussy. What I liked even more is that they sell the chocolates in single flavor bags plus this assortment of all three. To top it all off, Target had them on sale for $2.50 a bag (regularly $3.50). While that sounds like a good deal, it’s not like there’s a lot in the bag - it’s 4.1 ounces and holds 10 pieces.

The Nougat Hazelnut Praline is in a blue wrapper, which may be the universal color of hazelnut.

Inside the cellophane the little candy is further wrapped in paper-backed foil. The pieces are about 1.25” in diameter and barely 1” tall. They’re lumpy affairs with obvious cereal crunchies lurking below the milk chocolate coating.

They smell sweet and milky, and a little like malty rice crispies.

Biting into them is quite a journey of textures. The chocolate shell does have crisped rice bits in it. Then the center is a soft hazelnut cream with crushed hazelnuts in it. The hazelnut aroma comes out quite distinctly once the seal has been broken.

It’s sweet but with a good bit of hazelnut and milk flavor to it. It’s sticky and a bit cloying but the variety of nut & cereal crunches break that up.

Cappuccino was a bit of a mystery, as the package didn’t really have any description. So I was pleased to see it was a milk chocolate shell (not a white chocolate one). It does smell like rich dark espresso with a liberal helping of sugar.

Like the hazelnut, there were crisped rice bits in the shell. The center here, though, had no nuts. Instead it was a creamy coffee, milk & chocolate filling. It’s a bit crumbly but melts easily. It has a strong coffee flavor and even bits of coffee beans in there (not my favorite way to get coffee flavor).

I liked the flavors and the crisped rice covered up some of the bitterness associated with the little crunchy coffee bits.

As I mentioned at the top, there were 10 pieces in my package. As you might imagine there were at least three of each ... and the flavor that got four was Caramel.

The wrapper is a tantalizing burnt orange. It smells a bit buttery and like Stroopwaffles (if you’ve ever had those, you’ll know what I mean).

The consistent element in the Fioretto is the chocolate shell with a moderate amount of crisped rice in it. It’s creamy and sweet, but doesn’t have a super chocolate punch to it, allowing whatever center is there to be the dominant flavor.

The caramel center is smooth and almost like a pudding. There’s a faint cinnamon or mild spice in there, like this is a baked good instead of a chocolate. It’s a comforting sweet flavor and texture, but lacking that bunch of “caramel” that I would expect to have notes of butter, salt and burnt sugar. 

I prefer these over the Lindor Truffle line, if only because they seem more chocolate-based than oily. I would love to see them in a dark chocolate version.

Other views: Candy Addict, Jim’s Chocolate Mission got a dark one (and a lime & white chocolate) and Rebecca at SugarHog.

Related Candies

1. Laica & Caffarel Chocolate Eggs
2. Ghirardelli Luxe Milk Crisp
3. Lindt Chocolate Carrots
4. Lindt Lindor Truffle Eggs
5. Ritter Schokowurfel
6. Ferrero Rocher
7. Baci Bar

A couple of weeks ago I visited a Middle-Eastern market in Orange County called Jordan Market. They had a great selection of hard to find Persian and Middle Eastern confections. They had several brands & styles of Halvah, Turkish Delight and, as the title of this review shows, Persian Nougat.

Anyone who’s been reading along on Candy Blog knows I’m a pushover for nougat. I’ve had Persian nougat before (I get it in little individually wrapped pieces at Mashti Malone’s Ice Cream in Hollywood), but I was attracted to this large box both by the price and the statement on the box: All Natural Persian Nougat - Packed in Flour in the Traditional Way.

I’m accustomed to Turkish Delight being packed in corn starch so figured this would be a similar powdery experience.

Persian nougat it different from French, Italian & Spanish nougat in that they don’t use honey in it. Instead the primary flavor is rosewater (sometimes orange blossom).

The box was shrink wrapped to keep it fresh. Inside the waxed paper sheets fold back to reveal what at first looks like a box of loose flour. A little shake of the box and the lumps of nougat are revealed.

This is the messy part thought. I took out a couple of “cakes” of the stuff and dusted them off with the brush I use to clean my shooting table. Underneath the plain cake flour are little white irregular pieces that look like raw biscuits. They’re about 2 1/2 inches around and lumpy. They smell rather like flour.

The nougat is pretty firm so biting into them is a little bit tough. (Though they are easily cut into bite size pieces with a sharp knife.)

Once I broke through the powdery outsides, it was easy to get a sense of the personality of the traditional Persian nougat.

It’s liberally dotted with green pistachios and has a smooth chew with a strong rosewater flavor. I happen to like rosewater and of course pistachios have a grassy & floral note to them as well. (I think this nougat also comes in an almond variety.) It’s flowery without being too soapy for me, but Robin from next door did think it was a little too much like grandma’s purse. Amy-Who-Spits-Things-Out came by for seconds today though.

Each piece is a large portion, there are 12 in the box which means that they’re each about 1.33 ounces each. Quite satisfying.

I think next time I’ll go for the individually wrapped pieces because my only real issue with them is the horrible mess ... which probably keeps me from eating the whole box.

Related Candies

1. Loukoumi Artisan Confections
2. Ferrara Nougats
3. Nutpatch Nougats
4. Valerie Lemon Hazelnut Nougat
5. Lifesaver Musk
6. Nougat de Montelimar
7. Halvah and Turkish Delight

It’s odd how I look back into the Candy Blog archives when I pick up a new candy and see how seasonal some of my finds are. Over the weekend I went out to India Sweets & Spices for a tasty & dirt cheap vegetarian Indian lunch. The restaurant (which serves cafeteria-style) is also a grocery store. In their refrigerated section, right next to the yogurt & kefir is where they store their candy. I was pretty pleased to see a large selection of Walkers’ Nonsuch Toffee which I really enjoyed two years ago this week.

They carried the nutted varieties, both Roasted Hazelnut and Brazil Nut plus the Fruit & Nut (raisins in caramel?). I opted for the Roasted Hazelnut Toffee.

The package looked pristine. The last packs I got, and everything I’ve seen on other candy review sites show the bars mushed. This one still had its sections intact - I’m guessing since it was stored in the cooled boxes.

The bar is a big slab weighing 3.5 ounces but only about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide - so it’s a dense mass of boiled sugar and milk. It’s scored into 10 pieces and whacking it on the side of the table seems to split it along those marks ... for the most part. (I hit it one time on one of the nuts and got, well, nutmeal for my troubles.)

The hazelnuts are pressed into each piece - one per piece ... there aren’t more hiding within.

While it’s called toffee in England, here in the United States I consider this caramel. It’s firm but softens easily in the mouth or warmth of your hand and makes a satisfying stiff chew. It stays completely smooth until it’s gone - no graininess at all.

The hazelnuts were roasted to perfection - crunchy, buttery and nutty. The combination of the texture and the burnt sugar notes & butter of the caramel was amazing. I wanted to gobble the bar up, but of course it has a limiting factor on it ... the caramel must be chewed and it takes time.

I wish there were twice as many hazelnuts. But still, pieces without nuts were awesome. No hint of rancid butter or nuts (which I do get sometimes with caramel products). Even better - I got this bar for $1.09 (I paid $1.77 for the last ones I bought). It’s a great deal for a quality product.

If I can’t get this again soon, I might just make my own hazelnut caramels.

Related Candies

1. Bequet Gourmet Caramels
2. Short & Sweet: Hazelnut Bites
3. Ritter Sport White Chocolate with Hazelnuts
4. Grandma’s Caramels
5. Walkers Nonsuch Toffee
6. KitKat Temptations: Hazelnut & Coconut
7. Das French Salted Caramels

I was at the drug store a few weeks ago and wasn’t really thrilled with the selection of candy. Well, it was a nice selection but I’ve tried all of that stuff before. Then I spotted the new display of Russell Stover & Whitman’s Samplers (they’re owned by the same company now) and was debating whether to review a full box of candy from them.

Instead I wussed out, blaming the heat that it was impractical to bring a large amount of chocolate into my 90+ degree home. So I got one of each of their little 1 ounce boxes - just as a teaser. I thought, here’s an opportunity for Russell Stover & Whitman’s to wow me ... they have two pieces to do it. For the opportunity to snare me, I gave them $1.25 for each sample sized box.

Russell Stover Private Reserve features two pieces of their premium assorted chocolates. The red foiled box is elegant and simple.

I have no idea what they are, the box tells me nothing specifically about them, well, it specifically tells me the combined ingredients and that’s about it. I only have the shapes go on. Inside is a little tray with spaces shaped like the candies.

The nut looking one was in fact a nut flavored paste inside ... perhaps a gianduia since far down on the list of ingredients were hazelnuts.

This was terrible. It looked great, I’ll grant you but had an odd waxy & greasy feel to it. The hazelnut paste as more of an amaretto flavor, which is fine with me ... though confusing because the nut shape was kind of like a walnut and kind of like a hazelnut but definitely not an almond.

The second one was a lovely milk chocolate covered caramel. The caramel was stiff & had an excellent pull. It had a good combination of toasted sugar flavors and a touch of butter. A little bit of vanilla. It was sweet, the milk chocolate was decent but didn’t really contribute much of a chocolate punch.

The Whitman’s Reserve was the same price, but honestly didn’t look as appealing on the box. It bills itself as a Premium mini collection as if a pair is a collection. Like the Russell Stover, it makes no mention on the box as to what’s actually in the box besides the ingredients. As far as the actual ingredients go - they both use vanillin (fake vanilla) but otherwise rather decent source materials.

The large and puzzling piece here was the white chocolate item with the stripes. It does look just like the one on the box - both pieces are pristine - so I’m satisfied right away with the appearance.

Sniffing it brought me no closer to discerning what it was (no nuts, that was certain, though). It smells simply sweet & milky.

The bite is soft and I decided it was either a poor excuse for a truffle or simply a chocolate cream. It’s a milk chocolate center - sweet and greasy but at least not as sweet as the white chocolate coating. It doesn’t do a thing for me.

Happily the second piece was identical to the second piece in the Russell Stover - a simple milk chocolate covered caramel. I couldn’t tell it apart at all and that’s not a bad thing.

For the $1.25 I spent, I got two pieces of candy. One I liked and one I didn’t. So for the future I’ll probably stick to the Russell Stover Pecan Delights, which are usually a better value and of course a good variety of textures & flavors. (They can now be found in a “candy bar” format for about the same price in stores.)

Am I missing something about the appeal of Russell Stover & Whitman’s boxed chocolates?

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Private Reserve Vanilla Bean Brulee
2. Storck Chocolate Riesen
3. Caffarel Gianduias
4. Russell Stover Organic Pecan Delight
5. Dove Jewels
6. Whitman’s Sampler Tin

Divinity is one of those candies I’ve never bought before. I’ve had it plenty of times, but it’s always been homemade.

But I was in a nutty & nougat mood on vacation earlier this month, so I picked up this Wheeler’s Pecan Divinity bar. It looked like a fluffy change from French-style nougat. But after opening it and photographing it I was left wondering ... what is divinity?

Divinity is a mixture of sugar and egg whites and of course nuts (I usually encounter it made with walnuts). It’s kind of a cross between marshmallow and nougat - it has the fluffy texture but uses no gelatin like marshmallows do and doesn’t include honey like nougat often does. (More at About Candy.)

This particular divinity bar is quite large, about seven inches long, two inches wide and one inch high. Though that sounds big, it’s quite light - clocking in at only 4 ounces.

It looks like the innards of an old-school Mars Bar (what is now a Snickers Almond) except made with pecans.

Splitting it open it comes apart easily, with a slight graininess to the fluff apparent without even tasting it. I was a bit disappointed when I split it to see that the nuts weren’t incorporated completely, they were just sitting on top. It’s not that I wanted more nuts, but I like nuts that have been imbued with the sugars of a nougat or divinity as well as the flavor they impart.

The divinity smells like egg whites and vanilla. The texture is airy and light but extremely sweet - much sweeter than a meringue, which is mostly egg whites with a little sugar. Instead this was mostly sugar with a little eggs to bind it together. The nuts gave a good woodsy note to it, but they really weren’t as dense as I wanted.

The sweetness and graininess was just not what I was looking for in my store-bought divinity. But since I have so little reference to what real divinity is supposed to be like, I have little notion of whether or not this is good for what it’s supposed to be. In a vacuum I have to say that I’m hard pressed to finish the bar and that’s mostly a disappointment because I paid $6.50 for it.

Related Candies

1. Elmer’s Dark Chocolate Heavenly Hash & Gold Brick Eggs
2. Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road Bar
3. Ferrara Nougats
4. Nutpatch Nougats
5. Massam’s Nougat
6. Nougat de Montelimar

Toblerone is hard to miss in a store. The boxes are yellow and of course shaped like the contents - a segmented prism of milk chocolate studded with little almond nougat bits.

The name Toblerone comes from the founders name, Theodor Tobler and the word torrone, which is the name of the almond & honey nougat. There have been a few other sizes & shapes of the bar over the years as well as dark chocolate, white chocolate and layered versions.

This year was the first time I saw the new Toblerone Fruit & Nut in stores. The box is a curious design, half yellow, which is easy to dismiss as the regular variety and the other side is purple with a gradient in of the two colors in the center.

Even though it’s called fruit and nut, the only substantial difference here is the addition of raisins. (I wonder why they’re not currants, which I think would be more exotic and evocative of European mountains than plain old dried grapes.)

The bar smells sweet and milky with perhaps a little hint of malt or honey from the nougat. Breaking the pieces apart it’s easy to see the small raisins in there.

The chocolate is sweet and though it’s milky it’s more on the honey side of the flavors than Swiss dried milk flavors. The texture is smooth, but not quite silky. The little hard nougat bits provide a little difference in texture, but are often sticky & tacky - not quite crunchy or chewy. The actual almonds are hard to find (even on the ingredients list they’re below honey, which means there isn’t much).

I like the size & shape of the bar. It’s easy to portion & then store the rest for later in the box. (Though I did end up replacing the foil wrapping it came in with some more heavy duty kitchen foil because it was destroyed by simply opening it for the photo.)

It’s a pretty bar and certainly a bit of a change from the 100 year old traditional one ... was it worth waiting a hundred and one years for? No. I think if I’m going to go for an inexpensive European bar with raisins in it, I’m going to go for the Ritter Sport Rum Trauben Nuss (though I don’t think you can even get them in the States any longer). But if you’re a Chunky fan and looking for something that’s better quality and more pointy, this might be for you.

Related Candies

1. Toblerone Single Peaks
2. Chunky
3. Sno-Caps, Goobers & Raisinets
4. Dark Raisinets
5. Ritter Sport Capuccino and Rum Trauben Nuss

When on vacation I often pick up candy that fits in the intersection between my candy tastes (pretty broad) and The Man’s (not quite as broad but also includes many red flavors). Often we share things like Swedish Fish, Goetze’s Caramel Creams, dark chocolate with nuts or gianduia.

On our travels we selected some Marich 72% Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews at the Sweet Offerings shop. Yes, they were expensive at $6.95 for a 4.5 ounce package but they weren’t for Candy Blog, they were just for eating. But I enjoyed them so much and was positive that I’d be referring to them again that I needed to review them.

Well, I couldn’t find them. Instead I ended up with the pictured Marich Organic Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews which were similarly priced at Whole Foods.

The box seems like a little bit of overpackaging, but they do the job of protecting the candy inside (which is just in a cellophane bag). The box is 9 inches tall and 3 and a half inches at the base ... far larger than a four and a half ounce packet of candy really needs to be. It could easily be two inches shorter and not press on the candy at all. (But maybe they use the same format for a large variety of weights and this is simply efficient.)

Even though they’re called a Sea Salt Cashews, the sodium levels are quite responsible. The package says that there are 60 mg in a 40 gram serving (about 1/3 of the package).

First, these cashews are huge ... and then the thick dark chocolate coating is, well, thick. So they’re amazingly large. (I would compare them to my thumb, but I don’t really want to repeat the photos of my digits & candy.)

The chocolate is dark and slightly bitter, the grassy and clean flavors of the cashews come through with the deep woodsy and coffee notes of the chocolate. Just three or four of them were quite satisfying. They hardly seemed like a sweet treat though. I honestly did a double take with the first few 72% ones I ate - they hardly seemed like candy because they’re not sweet. It wasn’t the little bit of salt in there that made them seem like they weren’t sugary ... it was the fact that they weren’t sugary. The salt just brought out the flavors.

Some of the cashews seemed over-toasted, to the point that they were actually a creamy brown color, so they were far crunchier and of course had a darker, breadier flavor. I liked the lighter cashews, personally.

I kept the package from the 72% and a couple of the cashews and found that the non-organic ones were made with a darker chocolate, if that’s possible for it to be more savory. (Okay, full confession, that photo includes the packet of cashews from the organic in there, instead of photographing it empty, but believe me, you really can’t tell them apart by looking at them.)

These are incredibly tasty, easy to eat and even though the packages are small and expensive, it’s easy to be satisfied with only a handful. The ingredients and panning is superb - both packages were fresh & shiny.

Inside the flap on the organic version it says Brown is the new Green. Inside the 72% it says Rich, Dark and Gorgeous Has Never Looked Better.

Unfortunately the last ingredient on the list is resinous glaze, so even though the chocolate contains no dairy products, these aren’t vegan. (But they are Kosher.) Another curious note, the 72% dark version contains 20% of your daily RDA of iron! Finally, though I paid the same amount for both versions, Whole Foods is actually cheaper overall - they have the non-organic items for $4.85, which felt kind of like a deal at this point.

Related Candies

1. Morning Glory Confections: Chai Tea & Cashew Brittle
2. Seeds of Change: Dark Chocolate with Mango and Cashew
3. Marich Easter Select Mix
4. Short & Sweet: Fancy Food Bites
5. Romanego Dragees, Cordials & Fondants