I’m always on the prowl for great Malted Milk Balls, especially at reasonable prices.

I saw this at Target, Market Pantry Chocolate Covered Malted Milk Balls - Milk Chocolate with a little tag next to it that said it was a new item. I figured for less than $2.00 for more than a quarter of a pound, I should take a gamble on them (naturally, that gamble also means sharing the results with readers).

The package is spare but accurate, there are a bunch of milk chocolate covered malted milk balls in there. It’s a bit generic, but it was enticing enough to catch my eye.

The malt balls are about the same size as Whoppers. The chocolate coating is thin, but of course made of real milk chocolate (not that simulated product on Whoppers). There’s a thin glaze on the balls, which keeps them from sticking together and of course gives them their attractive shine. It does keep it from melting right away though, but with minimal “waxy” notes. The milk chocolate is quite sweet and has the typical milky flavor profile of mediocre American milk chocolate.

The malt center is crunchy and has a tight, small bubble texture. It dissolves well or provides a delightful crunch, depending on what sort of consumer you are. The flavor is not overly malty, it’s more of a salty rice cereal flavor instead of a deep malty flavor. Still, it was satisfying and I found myself eating them without getting distracted by any weird deflated ones or off flavors.

I don’t know quite what all my criteria are for the perfect malt ball, but these aren’t there. The chocolate isn’t quite good enough, though I do like this ratio. The malt center has a great texture for people who prefer that sort of melt in your mouth delicate style, I kind of like the rustic ones that are more like Cap’n Crunch.

I’ve heard rumors that Brach’s has re-introduced their classic real milk chocolate Malt Balls, but since I haven’t found those, these are an admirable substitute, especially as a movie snack. The price is great, too, though keep your eyes out for sales. Though it says 5 ounces on the bag, because of the aerated nature of the centers, the volume felt like a lot of candy.

Related Candies

1. Nestle Milo Bar
2. Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate Malted Milk Eggs (Plus a Bonus)
3. Whoppers Reese’s Peanut Butter Flavored Candy
4. Whoppers Sno-Balls
5. Naked Chocolate Maltballs
6. Cadbury Dairy Milk Whispers
7. Mighty Malts
8. Malted Crisped Rice Squares

A couple of years ago Mars introduced some new candy bars to the United States based on their popularity in Australia. They were called Fling and came in bright pink packages along with lots of marketing directed towards women. They came in three flavor varieties: Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate and Hazelnut.

About a year later the test marketing of Fling waned and a new bar came out nationally, the 3 Musketeers Truffle Crisp. The bar is described on the package as whipped-up chocolate truffle on a crisp layer enrobed in real milk chocolate.

The bars are narrow fingers, nicely domed with drizzled chocolate across the top. They’re light, literally - each weights a smidge over a half an ounce. (For comparison, a single Twix finger is about an ounce.) The package says that each one contains less than 85 calories. Well, that’s pretty easy since it doesn’t weigh much. In reality, the calories per ounce are quite high at 155 but the package limits your portion.

The bar snaps nicely with a light cracking sound. The construction is interesting (and this is where the bar is unique). The base is a plank of chocolate meringue. It’s crispy and airy with a light sweetness and hint of salt and cocoa to it. The truffle on top really isn’t - it’s a mix of cocoa and hydrogenated and/or non-hydrogenated palm and palm kernel oils. (In my world a truffle is made of actual chocolate and some sort of dairy fat.) The chocolatey cream is okay, fluffy but a little greasy and flavorless to my tongue. It’s all wrapped in a good amount of milk chocolate. The milk chocolate is sweet and creamy with a strong dairy note to it. It pulls it all together well.

The idea and execution of this is actually really good. I wish the truffle part was better and having had the Fling in dark chocolate, I know this is actually better in dark chocolate.

I actually like these bars, even with all my complaining about various elements of the promotion, packaging and ingredients. They’re unique and inventive, once consumers try them, I think the rest of the weirdness of the rest of it will be irrelevant. It would also be cool if Mars extended the use of the meringue crisp - I could see them as interesting centers for M&Ms, different flavored cream toppings for this bar (like coffee) and perhaps something berry with dark chocolate.

Though there are no wheat ingredients on the list, it is made on shared equipment with wheat (and peanuts) so it’s not technically gluten free, so try at your own risk.

Update 10/29/2012: I just heard back from Mars, they are discontinuing the Truffle Crisp bar. They just weren’t popular enough. My suggestion for those who love the bar is to write to Mars and propose that they bring them back seasonally. So you can stock up.

Related Candies

1. Nestle Skinny Cow Heavenly Crisp
2. Fling: Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate & Hazelnut
3. Fancy Food Show 2009 Notes - Day Three
4. Parkside Candy Sponge Candy
5. 3 Musketeers Mint with Dark Chocolate
6. Violet Crumble

See’s Candies has been adding limited edition flavors to the regular offerings. Sometimes I time it right when I visit one of their shops. This summer they have their new See’s Candies Double Caramel.

The package describes them as vanilla brown sugar caramel and chocolate butter caramel. So they’re a stacked product inside the milk chocolate shell - the base is the chocolate caramel then a layer of the brown sugar caramel.

They’re available in half pound boxes on the website or at the store in small boxes or in the custom mix. (I don’t think they’ve been added to the classic See’s Nuts & Chews.)

I bought this little box that holds 5 ounces, which is 6 caramels. Yeah, think about that, each caramel weighs over three quarters of an ounce. That’s a pretty dense caramel. The package says that two is a serving, which is just too rich for even me in one sitting (unless I’m sitting for a long time).

As I mentioned before, they’re huge. It’s about an inch and a half in diameter (tall and the base). I couldn’t eat them in one bite, they were definitely two bites. (You can bite them down the center or you can tip them with the bottom perpendicular and bite them so you get either a layer of chocolate caramel or the brown sugar caramel.)

The combination of the flavors is great, the ratios are spot on. The texture of the caramel is soft, smooth and chewy. Neither layer is too sweet. The chocolate one is a light woodsy and deep flavor that has a little touch of coffee to it. The brown butter caramel has a little note of honey and salt along with the light woodsy note of molasses. The milk chocolate has a strong milk flavor, though the melt wasn’t quite as silky as I’d hoped.

If I had one comment to improve these, it’d be less sweet milk chocolate. It’s really sugary, and with all the sugar in the caramel, I’d prefer a darker milk chocolate. But maybe that’d make we want to eat more at once, so I might be better off in the long run with it as is.

Trader Joe’s has some great summertime themed candies in their tubbed goodies. The Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate Smashing S’Mores with graham cracker and marshmallow have been around for at least a year. I looked for them a few times and couldn’t find them and assumed that they were another one of those transient Trader Joe’s products. On my visit over Independence Day weekend though, there were stacks so I grabbed one immediately.

My tub held 12 Smashing S’mores and the label said that it was 7 ounces. (The nutrition panel said that a serving was 2 pieces and there were 8 servings in the package - I can understand there being one or so plus or minus in the average package, but I can’t understand how they could even cram 16 of these little S’mores into the tub at all.)

The ingredients are interesting. It’s real milk chocolate for the coating, the marshmallow uses Kosher gelatin (basically non-pork derived) and the graham cracker part is almost all organic (except for the vanilla and arrow root flour).

The little squares are about an inch to an inch and a half cubed.

The base is a rustic and thick graham cracker coated with a little milk chocolate then a square of marshmallow on top of that. The whole thing is then enrobed in milk chocolate with a decorative drizzle of dark chocolate.

The bite is soft, the marshmallow, which occupies most of the volume is soft, spongy and moist. It’s not that flavorful and not that sweet, so it offsets the other levels of sweetness well. The milk chocolate coating is creamy and better than average though very sweet on its own. The graham cracker was thick and more rough, like a digestive than the sort of grocery store graham cracker I’m accustomed to. The flavor was wheaty with a little touch of honey. The effect of all of it together is great, the pieces are not too big that an adventurous person couldn’t pop it all in their mouth at once, and the marshmallow grabs the chocolate well enough that it doesn’t all crumble apart when bitten in half.

The tub advises popping it into the microwave for 4 to 6 seconds for the traditional S’more treat. The effect of this is to create a completely gooey and soupy interior though the chocolate amazingly doesn’t melt completely. The thing I like best about toasted marshmallows is the toasted part. I could probably just eat the toasted outsides and leave the gooey stuff for someone else, so the microwave option doesn’t really do much for me, but I certainly can see others really digging it.

The big bonus here is that these are Kosher. It’s pretty rare to find Kosher marshmallows, and even harder to find Kosher marshmallow candy products.

Related Candies

1. Limited Edition 3 Musketeers Marshmallow
2. Peeps Chocolate Dipped Marshmallows
3. Campfire Mini Marshmallows
4. Russell Stover Giant S’mores Bar & Mint Dream
5. The Saga of the Valomilk - Review
6. Littlejohn Caramel Marshmallows
7. Dark Chocolate Rocky Road
8. See’s Scotchmallow
9. Hershey’s S’mores

Trolli (owned by Farley’s & Sathers) has come out with a few new gummis lately. They’re probably best known for their gummi worms.

The company sent me some sample packages back in May in advance of the Sweets & Snacks Expo. Summer is a great time for gummis, the sweet and tangy flavors are great for quenching dry mouths and of course as a sugar candy they’re not prone to melting.

Trolli Big Bold Bears come in six flavors: Blue Raspberry, Wild Cherry, Grape, Green Apple, Lemon-Lime and Orange.

My package came with only five flavors, the Wild Cherry was missing. There were only fifteen bears in the bag.

The bears stand two inches tall and have a arms-pan of one inch.

The look alien. The colors are vivid and plastic, the colors aren’t even normal for the classic gummi bear flavors. They look like toys or keychains, really anything but something to eat.

They’re firm and pliable, they don’t stick together and don’t have that greasy coating of some gummi products.

Lemon-Lime smelled spicy and zesty, though a little like aftershave. The flavor was more on the lime side of things though still sweet and maybe even a little fizzy (but maybe that’s just Sprite on my mind). The color was like antifreeze.

Green Apple is vague and muted, only slightly tangy. It’s not a peppy artificial green apple flavor and not even an authentic apple juice flavor.

Orange is reliably zesty and artificially juicy. I enjoyed this one most of all.

Grape was bland and much like a flat grape soda.

Blue Raspberry was more like a fruit punch than a floral berry flavor. It was still good, but just a little more tropical than I expected.

So the name is Big Bold Bears. I did find their colors and size to be bold but their flavors were downright timid. For smaller kids, parents may prefer the larger size (but maybe not the extra artificial colors). The mild flavor may actually be a selling point for adults who don’t necessarily want the overpowering sour gummi worm experience.

The Candy Enthusiast also reviewed them last month.

Related Candies

1. Goody Good Stuff Koala Gummy Bears
2. Trolli Little Green Men
3. Trolli Sour Brite Crawlers
4. Big Bite Gummy Bear
5. Bear Bubble Gum
6. Haribo Gummi Bears vs Trolli Gummi Bears

Trader Joe’s is usually right on target when it jumps on a trend. They seem to know when it’s too early to hop on (and customers will be too scared) or too late (customers will be weary of over saturation). Salt and caramel, salt and chocolate and of course, the combination of all three is right up there on the trend meter. Artisans and high end chocolatiers started the international push about eight years ago, and Trader Joe’s has introduced some fine salted caramels along the way.

Today I have one of their new bars, a 70% Dark Chocolate Bar - Caramel with Black Sea Salt. The design of the box is reminiscent of the Fearless Flyer’s clip art designs with fanciful sailing ships and airships and seaweed. The package mentions that the bar is gluten free.

The package describes the bar thusly:

Exotic Hawaiian Black Sea Salt hails from the Pacific seawater that surrounds the Hawaiian islands. This stunning black salt is evaporated in above ground pools that form naturally from lava flows. Together, its smoky aroma and intense caramel complement this sophisticated dark chocolate experience. Trader Joe’s 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate Bar with Caramel with Black Sea Salt pairs well with a lei, Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt.

Inside the box the bar is sealed in a tough silver mylar package. There’s no design flair to it, but something much more practical. There’s a little stamp that says not only when the bar was made, but also the best by date. (It’s pretty rare for a product to give you both pieces of information.)

I had two of these bars. The first, pictured here, I bought myself. The second was one my husband picked up, not realizing that I’d already procured one. This one was in good shape, glossy and unbroken. The color of the chocolate was a little dead - a little on the coffee ground brown side. The bottom of the bar is studded with sea salt crystals. They weren’t black, they were white and translucent. Some grains were small and well spaced, but others were clumped together or just downright large - like something you’d toss on an icy sidewalk.

The center of the bar is a gooey, near liquid caramel. It’s creamy and silky smooth with a light milky flavor with a strong salty note. The combination of salt from the dusting and the center was sometimes pretty intense. (The package says that there’s only 95 mg of salt here, but I think that’s a little off.)

The chocolate is a little bitter but strong with a fruity and woodsy note to it, kind of like smoked raisins. It’s quite decadent all together, sweet, salty, creamy and a little crunchy if you hit a salt patch.

My big complaint about this bar is the filling at times. The second bar was broken in one place, which unleashed the caramel into the package. Also, if you start the bar, you’re kind of obligated to finish it right away, because the caramel will escape within a half an hour of placing it horizontal. (I guess propping it upright might help.)

Trader Joe’s always makes a good quality product. The packaging was good, the label gave me all the info I wanted to know and the quality was excellent for the price. I don’t think this is my favorite bar, mostly because of the overly-salty spots and the mess factor.

There’s another bar in this set that I saw on the shelf, Trader Joe’s 70% Dark Chocolate - Toffee with Walnuts and Pecans - has anyone tried that as well?

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
2. Equal Exchange Chocolate Caramel Crunch with Sea Salt
3. Lindt Excellence Dark with a touch of Sea Salt
4. Marich Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews
5. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels
6. Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels
7. Fran’s Gray Salt Caramels

Skinny Cow, the line of low fat ice cream made by Nestle, has come out with some candy which is also trying to position itself as being low calorie. In reality it’s just portion control.

I already reviewed the bars, called Heavenly Crisp, and today I’ll tackle their new Dreamy Clusters. The Dreamy Clusters come in dark chocolate and milk chocolate, but since I was buying a full box of these and they were $4.29 each, I only picked up one. (I’ve spent close to $15 on products for review this week, which is a bit steep for me when the average cost of a review item is about a buck.)

The package describes Dreamy Clusters as crunchy crisps and creamy caramel drenched in dark chocolate. That actually sounds fantastic. Kind of like a 100 Grand bar but in dark chocolate.

The box contains more than the wafer bars, there are six packets and each is just shy of one ounce. So the value is a bit better.

The ingredients start off pretty good for candy, but go a little awry after that:

Dark Chocolate (Sugar, Chocolate, Cocoa Butter, Soy Lecithin, Vanilla Extract), Rice Flour, Polydextrose, Maltitol, Vegetable Glycerin, Wheat Flour, Nonfat Milk, Butter, and less than 2% of: Cocoa Processed With Alkali, Cream, Milk Protein Isolate, Sugar, Baking Soda, Yeast, Barley Malt Extract, Palm Oil, Carrageenan (Vegetable Stabilizer), Soy Lecithin, Salt, Erythritol, Disodium Phosphate (Emulsifier), Caramel Color, Natural Flavor.

Maltitol & erythritol are sugar alcohols. They are less sweet than glucose, fructose or sucrose but also have a slightly cool effect on the tongue and can have some side effects (such as intestinal gas and a laxative effect). They don’t make up a large portion of the candy itself, but their presence means that the flavor and satisfaction may be affected.

The pieces themselves are quite small. But that’s no big deal if you think of them as tiny chocolates from an elegant box. I got five pieces in my bag, and I opened two bags. So I’m going to guess that’s the norm. (I also felt the other bags in the box and they seem to be the same, maybe I need to invest in a Candy Blog ultrasound machine.)

The packet that holds them is senselessly large - it’s five inches by four inches and each piece is about an inch in diameter. It does protect them, none of them were smashed though all were scuffed up.

The pieces smell great. They’re bumpy and though they vary in size, they’re pretty consistent in their construction. Each piece is made up of a caramel center with a dark chocolate coating studded with a crisped rice product. The caramel has a good pull, though it’s not a large reservoir, it only provides a small amount of chew and a large hit of salt. The dark chocolate coating is quite sweet but of good enough quality that it didn’t seem chalky or overly bitter. The main notes were raisins and a generic woodsy flavor. The crisps were salty, light and crunchy. They were bigger than the strange new things that they put in 100 Grand bars these days, so I found them pretty satisfying as a textural element. They didn’t have much of a malty cereal flavor.

Five pieces was actually satisfying. The portion sounds small (about half the mass of a Snicker or 3 Musketeers) but the fact that there were five pieces and they had a lot going on (especially if you bit them in half instead of popping them in your mouth whole) might make these a decadent little treat.

I’m annoyed by the use of the sugar alcohols and exceedingly long ingredients list. In a chocolate candy, sugar is not what racks up the calories, fat is. However, instead of substituting the inimitable cocoa butter for something else, they left it in, and just added the crisps which are part air and part lower-calorie fiber/carbs. The nutritional panel for these is decent enough - there’s actually 1 gram of protein and it says 3 grams of fiber.

It’s hard to give these a resounding endorsement because of my misgivings about their marketing (emaciated cows are appetizing?) and their ingredients. Also, the price is needlessly precious - you get half as much candy as a 100 Grand, but somehow it costs four times as much? (I’m basing that off of a $1.25 package of 8 fun size bars of 100 Grand which weights about 6 ounces.) However, these are nicely done for a candy marketed to dieters. They do taste good and without knowing that it’s “diet candy” I’d still eat them.

Related Candies

1. Glico Pocky Cookie Crush
2. Crisp Angell Organic Candy Bar
3. Hawaiian Host Maui Caramacs
4. Gimme Calcium
5. Q.Bel Crispy Wafer Bars
6. Fling: Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate & Hazelnut
7. 100 Grand Dark

I don’t follow ice cream much, I can’t eat that much dairy and if I’m going to have some I’ll make it cheese. But I have seen a line of low calorie ice cream products called Skinny Cow (this concoction used to be called ice milk, which was an accurate description, but the FDA later caved and allowed it to be called low fat ice cream). Personally I’m put off by the appearance of emaciated & bony cows. It reminds me of images of drought and famine; it’s never something I would think any farmer would cultivate nor something I would associate with a healthy choice. The frozen dairy line is made by Dreyer’s, which is owned by Nestle.

The natural extension of removing calories and virtually all of the actual cream from a product that contains the word cream within its name would be to tackle chocolate. The Skinny Cow confectionery line was introduced a couple of months ago with four products. I’ll tackle their Heavenly Crisp bars today. They look and sound like they might be chocolate, but do not in fact contain any of the stuff. They come in two flavors, Milk Chocolate Flavor and Peanut Butter Flavor. I was given a sample of the milk chocolate version a few months back was honestly wasn’t that interested based on the packaging. But then I saw the whole line at the grocery store last weekend, especially the Peanut Butter Flavor and thought I’d give it a try.

The Skinny Cow Heavenly Crisp Peanut Butter looks more like a nutrition bar than a candy bar (though there isn’t much nutrition in there either). The package itself is small, thin and light. The bar is only .77 ounces and the package says that it’s only 110 calories. There’s an accurate depiction of a cross section of the bar and lots of female friendly swoops and curves along with pink accents.

The bar is 4.5” long and 1” wide. It’s also quite thin, at less than a half an inch.

The bar smells good, like peanut butter and sugar, a little like the center of a Butterfinger bar. The bite is crisp and crunchy, the wafers are flavorless, but light and dissolve quickly. The cream between the layers is a salty and smooth peanut butter concoction. The chocolate coating, well, that’s a chocolate flavored coating along with a few ribbons of something yellow that I’m guessing is actually made with peanut butter. The coating melts quickly and has very little flavor that’s able to shine above the peanut butter. It’s sweeter than the peanut butter center, and of course the lighter, creamy texture provides a nice blanket to the rest of the elements.

The combination is quite tasty. There’s a lot of texture and the thinness of the bar means that there are lots of bites to it. For 110 calories, it feels like there’s more to it than a single finger of a Twix which is about the same calories. But let’s not kid ourselves, there’s not much to this, it’s mostly air. The calories per ounce are on par with any other chocolate candy out there, including most actual chocolate candies like Snickers bars, Twix or just plain chocolate.

The Skinny Cow Milk Chocolate Flavor Heavenly Crisp package looks similar to the peanut butter, naturally. I only had one bar of this to try, as it was a sample that I received before they were on store shelves.

The package describes it as delicate wafers layered with delicious milk chocolate creme. It makes no mention of the outer coating, and why would it, it’s mockolate. The ingredients for this bar are dismal for a diet food:

Sugar, Wheat Flour, Hydrogenated Palm Kernel Oil, Nonfat Milk, Cocoa Processed With Alkali, High Oleic Canola And/Or Sunflower Oil, Chicory Root Fiber, Partially Hydrogenated Palm Oil, Maltodextrin, Milk, And 1.5% Or Less Of: Baking Soda, Corn Syrup, Partially Hydrogenated Palm Kernel Oil, Vegetable Emulsifiers (Soy Lecithin, Sorbitan Tristearate), Salt, Natural and Artificial Flavor, TBHQ to Protect Flavor, Ground Peanuts.

The chocolate coating is a little cool on the tongue and very quick to melt. In fact, the melting was such as problem that it was hard to photograph and even hold in order to eat without becoming a sticky mess. The flavor is like a chocolate pudding, more on the milky side, but still with enough of a cocoa punch to be discernible.

It was less satisfying than the Peanut Butter Flavor for some reason. It might have been that it was more sweet or that it has half of the protein.

I really resent portion control sold for premium prices, especially when the ingredients here are so convoluted from actual wholesome and tasty real ones. There’s really no reason not to use real chocolate here if overall health is the goal. Even though there’s added fiber in these bars (that’s the chicory root fiber that’s also called inulin sometimes), there’s only 1 gram per portion. A portion of 70% dark chocolate with the same number of calories has about the same amount of fiber anyway. And real chocolate is usually only four ingredients and usually half the price of this stuff per pound.

So here’s my suggestion. Eat stuff with better ingredients. Try the Q.Bel Wafer Rolls (they’re actually a little lower in calories per ounce plus all natural, about the same price and actually taste better). Trader Joe’s has some great portion control chocolate (the little Belgian Bars or even a 100 calorie Chocolate bar). Or just buy mini KitKats or Pretzel M&Ms.

Related Candies

1. Snyder’s Peanut Butter Pretzel Sandwich Dips
2. Nestle Butterfinger Snackerz
3. Pretzel M&Ms
4. Glutino Gluten Free Dark Chocolate Candy Bar
5. Q.Bel Wafer Rolls
6. Q.Bel Crispy Wafer Bars
7. Cookie Dough Bites