The Brach’s Milk Maid Royals candies were always quite special looking. I remember seeing them in the pick-a-mix assortments at the dime store as a kid. I was attracted to the bold foil wrappers that each little flavored caramel rod sported. The looked expensive and sophisticated. The are a lot more caramel choices in the stores now and it seems harder to find the Brach’s individually wrapped candies since the bins of the candy disappeared from many grocery store candy aisles.

Royals Caramels are a layered candy, a flavored center chew is surrounded by caramel. It’s a simple construction that’s helped by the fact that caramel goes with just about everything.

I’ve noticed that Brach’s has recently started repackaging their standard line of candy and sprucing up the flavor assortments to match current tastes. The new Brach’s Apple Caramel Royals come in a stand-up gusset bag and are positioned right next to M&Ms and the new morsel sized candies like York Minis and Snickers Bites.

The package is a lovely apple red but the candies inside are wrapped in neon green waxed paper. It’s kind of an odd, especially because I had two flavors sitting around at one time and I kept grabbing the wrong package. However, Brach’s did use red for their Caramel Apple Candy Corn, so the flavor colors do match on the outside at least.

Unlike the foil-wrapped ancestors, these candies don’t look like much in the wrapper. They’re the kind of candy that would probably sit around with the Tootsie Rolls at the end of Trick-or-Treat until I was desperate.

The look of the candies unwrapped is odd, the caramel looks good - an opaque medium brown color. But the green center is on the blue side, which makes it look a little more like a caramel filled with toothpaste than a green apple candy. Luckily the smell aligns everything again. It’s sweet and with a light apple peel and milk scent. The chew is soft, the caramel and sort of taffy center mix well. It could use a little bit of salt to bring it together. It’s never quite a smooth and creamy caramel, but much more satisfying than the Brach’s Candy Corn Nougats I tried last week.

The ingredients list actual apples plus buttermilk as an ingredient in these, which really makes them one of the closest candies on drug store shelves to actual caramel apples.

The Brach’s Sea Salt Caramel Royals come in the same style of gusset bag. It’s a more sedate design, as the colors are more subdued.

While caramel apple candies are quite trendy right now for fall, the general salted caramel rage is a year round thing and still going strong. It only makes sense that Brach’s, now owned by the Ferrara Candy Company, would expand into some of these mainstream trends.

While they say sea salt on the front of the package, the ingredients list only salt. The nutrition panel shows that there are 180 mgs of salt per serving of 6 pieces. As a point of reference, the Apple Caramel Royals have only 75 mgs.

The Sea Salt Caramel Royals are, well, quite nice! The chew is soft with a little difference between the caramel outside and the sort of pasty chew inside. They’re definitely salty, but it does highlight the brown sugar notes of the caramel. I wouldn’t be likely to buy these again, especially at the price when I can get some really good sea salt caramels from Trader Joe’s or just some Sugar Babies ... but I will finish this bag.

These candies are made in Mexico. The contain milk, soy and egg ingredients. There’s no notation about nuts or gluten, though.

Brach’s Milk Maid Royals have been made since the late 1920s (though I’m sure the wrappers have changed over the years). The flavors are probably also cyclical with changing tastes. The last time I had them I enjoyed the extra-sweet Maple and Butter Rum, but didn’t care for the sherbet flavored Orange. The Chocolate is softer than a Tootsie Roll but didn’t have the reliably long chew.

Related Candies

1. 15 Caramel Apple Candies I’ve Reviewed
2. Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate Sea Salt Cashew
3. See’s Caramel Apple Lollypops
4. Pearson’s Sea Salt Caramel Nut Goodies
5. Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered Sea Salt Butterscotch Caramels
6. Werther’s Original Caramel Apple Filled
7. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels

Dove Chocolate, a Mars brand, often skirts a line in their marketing and products between being a healthy indulgence and pure decadence. The new line of chocolate covered fruit goes for the former but still accomplishes the latter.

Mars sent me some of their new products, including this amazingly large bag of Dove Whole Dried Cranberries in Dark Chocolate. It’s 26 ounces of chocolate covered sugared dried cranberries.

The package makes it look like these are plump cranberries, but they’re the ordinary dried variety. There’s a little bit of sugar added, which is fine, because I’ve had unsweetened cranberries before and they were too puckery,even with a chocolate coating.

The pieces are quite large, and cutting them in half reveals why. They aren’t strangely large cranberries. Instead they’re covered with a lot of chocolate. Often chocolate covered cranberries are flat, but these are very appealing looking. These a plump and a little chew reveals that they’re pretty moist, not leathery. They’re tangy and have a sort of bitterness to them that cranberries are known for, but it’s offset well by the chocolate.

I often find Dove’s chocolate a little bland, but dark chocolate here has a lot of flavor. It’s a rich chocolate pudding vibe, a little woodsy. It’s creamy without being too slick, though Dove does use dairy fats in their dark chocolate, so this is not vegan. (There’s 5 mg of cholesterol in here, which serves as an indication of the level of dairy fats.)

They’re expensive. But there aren’t that many higher quality choices at grocery stores for chocolate covered cranberries. I did find Ghirardelli’s new Dark Chocolate Cranberries are just as good as these but are likely to be harder to find. Steer clear of the Nestle version in their Raisinets line as they’re just terrible.

Related Candies

1. Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Cranberry
2. Simply Balanced Dark Chocolate Mixed Berry (Target)
3. See’s Holiday Pie Truffles
4. Trader Joe’s A Very Merry Mingle
5. Nestle Cherry Raisinets
6. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Powerberries
7. Nestle Cranberry Raisinets
8. Dove Silky Smooth Milk Chocolate Bars

I’ve often wondered why these isn’t an organic version of Candy Corn out there. A few years ago I got a mellocreme mix from Marich, but I haven’t seen in at Whole Foods for at least two years. You can get organic, fair trade peanut butter cups ... you can get M&M knock offs made with natural colors and less sugar ... why no Candy Corn?

Well, Sweet’s Candy Company of Utah has come through with an American-made, Kosher, non-GMO and gluten free Candy Corn.

The bag for Sweet’s Naturally Flavored Candy Corn certainly looks festive. But the little window reveals a bit of weirdness, which is fine if weirdness is what you like in your Halloween treats. The candy corn comes in three different colors. Not three layers in a single piece, three different colors. Yellow, white and orange.

The ingredients are as complex as they are simple:

Ingredients: Cane Sugar (non GMO), tapioca syrup (non GMO), corn syrup (non GMO), invert sugar (non GMO), egg whites (cage-free), coconut oil (expeller pressed, extra virgin), colored with fruit and vegetable extracts (pumpkin, carrot and apple), titamium dioxide (for color), honey, natural flavors, salt, carnuba wax, confectioner’s glaze.

Though they’re using all natural colors and flavors and plenty of sourcing information about the ingredients, the Candy Corn is not vegan since it contains egg whites, honey and confectioners glaze.

The pieces are normally sized and very well made. I guess when you don’t do the layering, there are fewer weak points on the candy, so there was no pile of the white caps at the bottom of the bag at all.

The Candy Corn smells sweet and pleasant, but more like orange sherbet than honey. I tried a few pieces and noticed right away that they were different from each other. Whether intended or not, the different colors are different.

White is nice, pleasantly mild with a sort of vanilla marshmallow note. It didn’t have the honey flavor that I’d expect from my candy corn, and was also missing that little note of salt I was craving.

Yellow is similarly mild, but has a sort of, well, root flavor to it, like a vague sort of boiled carrot thing going on in the background.

Orange is ever so slightly tangy and has an orange note.

I really missed the layers, I like eating each layer as a separate bite, as I imagine they taste different or sometimes have slightly different textures. The candies had a high gloss on them, the glaze kept them from being sticky but did mean that it took a moment for them to start dissolving unless I chewed them. The yellow one was the only one that seemed like it didn’t belong, the white and orange were perfectly acceptable as a natural alternative to the convention version.

Even though these are all natural and gluten free, they’re made in the same facility with peanuts and tree nuts. There’s no statement about dairy.

Related Candies

1. Spangler Candy Corn Circus Peanuts
2. Brach’s Caramel Macchiato Candy Corn
3. Brach’s S’mores Candy Corn
4. Jelly Belly Peas & Carrots Mellocreme Candy
5. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
6. Marich Halloween Mellocremes
7. Toffee Flavored Chocolate Covered Candy Corn
8. Zachary Candy Corn & Jelly Pumpkins

What the world needs is more versions of the peanut butter cup.

What Theo Chocolate is offering in their new line of peanut butter cup are the following qualities: organic ingredients, ethically sourced chocolate, kosher, no palm oil or soy ingredients and free from genetically modified organisms. The new cups come in two varieties, milk and dark chocolate, and the dark chocolate is vegan. Though they’re Theo Chocolate branded, they’re actually made in Canada.

The Theo Chocolate Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups were $2.25 a package, I picked them up at the factory store in Seattle (I’ll have a write up about the factory tour after Halloween) but they should be available at stores that carry Theo Chocolate soon as well. The packages are 1.3 ounces, so they’re only .2 ounces smaller than the usual Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup packages. Theo uses peanut butter from CB’s Nuts, a small batch nut roaster and butterer.

They’re not your ordinary round cups, nope, these are little heart shapes. They’re .65 ounces each, a nice size with a more even proportion of chocolate to peanut butter than some cups with thinner chocolate shells. There’s no oily puddle on the top, but my cups were probably extremely fresh since I bought them at the factory store.

They smell very toasty, the chocolate is crisp and has a good snap to it. The peanut butter is not fatty or oily, but also not quite crumbly. The overall roasted notes of both the chocolate and peanut butter are very strong. For a milk chocolate product, this is only very barely sweet. If you’re a fan of the more savory elements of peanut butter and chocolate, this is probably a good match for you.

The texture of the peanut butter is similar in particle size to Reese’s ... it’s not whipped smooth, there are little crunchy bits and a dryness to it that keeps it from feeling to slick on the tongue. The chocolate is lightly bitter as well but has a milky note and smooth melt.

There’s no notation as to the percentage of cacao, but this photos shows that the milk chocolate cups are very dark looking compared to the dark ones.

Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups Ingredients: Cocoa Beans, Sugar, Peanut Butter (roasted peanuts), Cocoa Butter, Powdered Sugar (sugar and non-gmo corn starch), Peanut Flour (roasted peanuts), Salt, Rosemary Extract, Ground Vanilla Bean [67% fair trade ingredients | peanut butter sourced in the U.S.]

The Theo Chocolate Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups are packaged so similarly to the milk chocolate variety, the sales staff at the factory store would let each customer know as they rang up their order that they’d chosen a particular variety ... so I sense that there may be a change in the future to help distinguish them.

The cups are beautiful, again, a little smaller than the Reese’s Peanut Butter version, but lacking the little fluted paper cups. Instead they just sit on a little paperboard tray. The mold detail includes the Theo logo on the bottom of the cups, if you’re so inclined to actually look at them before you gobble them up.

These have the same deep roasted scent as the milk chocolate, but without the light dairy note to it. The dark chocolate is immediately bitter and creamy, with a very silky melt but a strong coffee flavor. The peanut butter balanced the intensity of the chocolate with a lightness, a little hint of salt and a comforting peanut flavor.

Just one cup was exceptionally satisfying.

These are much pricier than the traditionally produced peanut butter cups on store shelves, but have none of the additional ingredients that give many folks pause. However, they’re still made in a facility that processes wheat, tree nuts, egg and soy so they’re not for those sensitive folks.

Though Justin’s Peanut Butter Cups were first to market with ethically sourced ingredients, I think I prefer these for the texture and intensity.  (But I’ll probably still hand out Justin’s for Halloween since they’re available in singles.)

Related Candies

1. Nestle Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups
2. Theo Salted Almond Dark Chocolate
3. Nectar Nugget Peanut Butter and Almond Butter Cups
4. UNREAL #77 Peanut Butter Cups
5. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
6. Justin’s Organic Peanut Butter Cups
7. Dark Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
8. Factory Fresh Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
9. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Line

I’ve purchased quite a few candy corn themed candies this year, so it was easy to toss the Brach’s Candy Corn Nougats in my basket as well.

Brach’s makes a variety of holiday versions of their individually wrapped nougats, but this is the first year they’ve made a Halloween Candy Corn version. The bag holds 12 ounces of three different color varieties of the candies. They come in yellow, white and orange, just like the layers of candy corn and each features a little image of candy corn at the center. Like many of Brach’s other candies, these are made in Mexico.

Nougat is already very similar to Candy Corn in its ingredients. It’s basically sugar, glucose (sugar syrup), honey and a little protein (in this case egg whites, some candy corn uses gelatin). It’s a little different from taffy in that it’s usually a bit softer chew and has a mild honey flavor. Nougat is usually a smoother texture than fondant, but they should both have a clean and fresh melt on the tongue without much tooth-sticky.

It’s hard to say that these are bad when they succeed at being exactly what they’re supposed to be. They’re a soft nougat that tastes like candy corn. So that’s good.

The chew is soft, really too soft. They’re not quite foamy or puffy like a marshmallow, but not chewy like a taffy. They’re not quite melt in your mouth divine like a French nougat, either.

Related Candies

1. Spangler Candy Corn Circus Peanuts
2. Brach’s Christmas Nougats Mix
3. Charms Candy Corn Pops
4. 6 Candy Corn Candies That Aren’t Candy Corn
5. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
6. Brach’s Cherry Cordial Nougats
7. Eat with Your Eyes: Pinwheel Nougats
8. Nougat de Montelimar

Ah, yes, a holiday candy with a bit of cognitive dissonance.

This is a pumpkin shaped candy that’s flavored like Apple Pie. This is really nothing new, as Russell Stover has more than half a dozen holiday shaped treats that are flavored like baked treats: Carrot Cake, Birthday Cake, Wedding Cake, Pumpkin Pie, Gingerbread, Cookie Dough and Red Velvet. The packaging looks pretty much like the other Russell Stover one ounce pumpkin shaped candies, so I had to look carefully on the shelves to find it.

The Russell Stover Apple Pie Pumpkin is an apple pie flavored fudgy center covered in milk chocolate. At only one ounce, it’s a small little treat.

Since there are two versions of the Apple Pie on shelves, I thought I’d compare them.

The milk chocolate pumpkin is compact and has a nice enrobed milk chocolate coating. It’s not overly sweet but is milky and creamy. It’s a nice balance to the fudgy, grainy filling. It’s like a spice fudge center. It’s mostly a spice blend of cinnamon and nutmeg maybe with a hint of lemon zest but there’s also an apple flavor that kind of floats above it all. There’s just enough salt to keep it interesting. Some of the other cake flavored pumpkins have actual cake mix in them (uncooked flour) but this is just a sugary, buttery center.

I enjoy these sorts of confections in small quantities and the chocolate kept it all together well, even if it kind of kept it from tasting like actual apple pie.

Russell Stover has started making year-round versions of some of their usual holiday items. The Big Bite line includes the Big Bite S’mores (which aren’t sold in any other format to date) and some Big Bite Caramel Apples. The Big Bite Apple Pie actually accomplishes an Apple Pie experience a bit better than the Pumpkin.

Like the Big Bite S’mores, this confection features a graham cracker base.

The Big Bite Apple Pie is twice the weight of the regular Pumpkin but features a large graham cracker base. The milk chocolate coating seems a little thinner, but the spiced penuche fudge filling is about the same. The addition of the graham cracker really brought home the pie notes, but the lack of actual apples and the anomalous existence of milk chocolate in an otherwise chocolateless pie kept this from being the best emulation ... but taking it for what it is, it’s a fun little candy. It’s different, it works.

In some other news, Russell Stover was purchased this year by Lindt & Sprungli, the same company that already owns Ghirardelli Chocolate. This makes Lindt the third largest chocolate company in the United States (behind Hershey’s and Mars, bumping Nestle out of third). It will be interesting to see what sort of changes Lindt will make, and I’m hoping they’re only improvements but they don’t lose this quirky little seasonal line.

Related Candies

1. Brach’s Apple Pie Candy Corn
2. Russell Stover Eggs: Carrot Cake, Birthday Cake and Wedding Cake
3. Dilly Dally Pickle Candy and Barrels of Yum
4. See’s Holiday Pie Truffles
5. Jelly Belly Ice Cream Parlor Mix

If you liked the Despicable Me movies, and more specifically, the Minions, might I interest you some Mike and Ike: Minion Mix?

The box is quite cute. Both the front and back feature Minion characters. (The back is formatted to stand on its end instead of the long side, and has a Minion holding up a banana.)

The mix is not very mixy, it’s just two flavors: Banana and Blueberry. The yellow and blue colors go thematically with the colors of the Minion worker overalls and their skin (?) color.

The blue Blueberry Mike and Ikes are blue. Very blue. The blueberry flavor is, well, a flavor. It doesn’t taste like blueberries, but it’s pleasant enough. It’s tangy and sweet.

The yellow Banana Mike and Ike are great. I don’t know if they’ve done a straight banana before (plenty of banana blends), so this was a pleasure since it’s such an uncommon flavor. It’s sweet with no weird acetone burn to it. It’s just, well sweet banana with a little toffee note like it’s very ripe.

This particular mix hit 100% for me, as I liked both flavors and didn’t need to do any picking. They combined nicely, but were good on their own. I can’t think of anything to improve it. It’s a quality movie tie in, instead of just throwing some movie logos on an existing product, they made something that had a fun little flair that goes with the show. (Kind of like the Jelly Belly mixes that have been coming out lately.)

Related Candies

1. Chocolate Covered Banana Gummi Bears
2. Mike and Ike Strawberry Reunion
3. Bonomo & Doscher Banana Taffy
4. Mike and Ike Autumn Medley
5. Mike and Ike Berry Blast
6. Mike and Ike Italian Ice
7. Banana n Cream & Red Orange Mentos
8. Mike and Ike Alex’s Lemonade Stand

Brach’s has quite a few new candy products on shelves, including some for Halloween. One of the new seasonal twists on Candy Corn is Brach’s Apple Pie Candy Corn.

Brach’s Candy Corn is widely available this year in a variety of flavors and shapes. I was able to find my 4.2 ounce peg bag at the Walgreen’s near my house and on sale. The previous bags I’d seen were over 10 ounces, which is too much of a novelty flavor. (But I admit that I did buy two bags of the Halloween Mellocremes.)

There is no description on the package of what the Apple Pie flavor is supposed to be. Just a picture on the front of a slice of apple pie with a dollop of whipped cream on top. I’m amused the shape of a slice of pie and a Candy Corn piece a similar, though the stacked nature of the Candy Corn layers doesn’t say pie.

It smells like a bad candle (of course I just watched this, so maybe I have Bath & Body works on my mind).

Brach’s Candy Corn is always some of the nicest at stores. The pieces are elegant and tall, and are unusually durable. Many other Candy Corn brands are easily broken or have a problem with sticking together.

These are subtle, just a creamy white base and a caramel middle/top.

The flavor is definitely like apple, like a baked apple. It’s very sweet but has a little hint of salt as well (75 mg per serving). The apple flavor is like a hint of juice, but there’s no citrus tartness at all. The cinnamon note is very mild, but welcome.

It’s not an ideal flavor for adaptation ... though I could see a whole Pie Candy Corn series, with Chocolate Cream Pie, Lemon Meringue Pie, Cherry Pie, Pecan Pie and of course they already have Pumpkin Spice.

Like other Brach’s mellocremes, this contains gelatin so it’s not suitable for vegetarians and not kosher. Though the packaging makes note in several places that they’re America’s Candy Maker (tm), these were made in Mexico.

Related Candies

1. Brach’s Caramel Macchiato Candy Corn
2. Brach’s Carrot Cake Candy Corn
3. Brach’s S’mores Candy Corn
4. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
5. Pumpkin Pie Gourmet Candy Corn
6. Milk Maid Caramel Candy Corn
7. Brach’s Autumn Mix