Candy Blog

The Tasty Baking Company has been based in Philadelphia since 1914. Back in 1930 they introduced a new snack cake called the Tandy Take which was eventually renamed in 1974 to Kandy Kakes (to avoid confusion with the Tandy Company).  These were the snack cakes of my childhood. I’m not sure if I had a Twinkie until I was in college,but Kandy Kakes, I’d had plenty of those.

Their most popular item is the Peanut Butter Kandy Kake (they bake a half a million a day as of 2014), which was also my favorite of their products. The Peanut Butter Kandy Kake is a disk of sponge cake (or maybe angel food cake) with a stripe of peanut butter covered in mockolate. Their second most popular item, the Butterscotch Krimpet is also a curious creation made of a sponge cake (sort of like a Twinkie) but with crinkle cut edges and a butterscotch frosting. (Pennsylvania is kind of known for butterscotch confections, see also the Boyer Smoothie cups.)

When I was growing up there was still regionalism for baked goods, Tastykake was really a local company, though recently they expanded south and also took over production of the Hostess brands including Twinkies. This year Tastykake announced West Coast distribution for their more popular items. (Though it says on their website they’re available at some of my local stores, I still haven’t found them on shelves.)

For those of you just discovering this nostalgic brand, you should catch up with this add for Tastykake, I’d say it’s from around 1975, starring Betty White:

First off, are Kandy Kakes even candy and do they belong on the blog? Well, I’ve debated about this for a while. For the past few years when I travel to Pennsylvania, I’ve usually come back with a box (or two) of the Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes. They fit most of my rules for candy in that they’re sweet, portable, shelf stable and require no preparation to eat. However, they’re also baked (but then again so are Twix). I also have the same problem with chocolate covered pretzels. What pushed me over the edge with this review is the fact that Tastykake offered these new Fall flavors: Salted Caramel Kandy Kakes and Karrot Kake Kandy Kakes.

First off, Kandy Kakes is a strange name. Substituting letters in a standard word is usually an indication of lesser quality, just like chocolatey denotes something not-quite-chocolate. Not only that, Tastykake and their product line has a lot of Ks in it. A lot. It’s like they’re going for something wacky (this all predates the Kardashian ownership of the letter).

Words with a k in it are funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a k. Ls are not funny. Ms are not funny.
Willy (The Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon)

So, the name might be a bit juvenile, but maybe it’s also supposed to be delightful. Betty White said some nice things about the ingredients in her commercial in Tastykakes, but for reference here’s what’s in the Salted Caramel Kandy Kakes (yes, I transcribed all this, so forgive any spelling errors as many of these ingredients don’t come up in spellcheck):

Confectionery Coating (sugar, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, cocoa processed with alkali, cocoa powder, whey powder, soy lecithin, salt, artificial flavor), Sugar, Enriched Bleached Flour, Vegetable Shortening (soybean oil, palm oil and hydrogenated cottonseed oil), Corn Syrup, Water, Nonfat Milk, Eggs, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Contains 2% or less of each of the following: egg yolks, salt, modified corn starch, butter, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, monocalcium phosphate), caramel color, soy lecithin, corn starch, mono- and diglycerides, natural and artificial flavor, propylene glycol, mono- and diesters of fats and fatty acids, xanthan gum, brown sugar, lactylic esters of fatty acids, calcium sulfate, caramel, molasses, cinnamon, nutmeg, lactic acid, sorbic acid and potassium sorbate.

The Salted Caramel are described as cakes with chocolate flavored coating and salted caramel filling (naturally and artificially flavored).

The large box (a half a pound) holds 6 of these packages of twin cakes. They’re actually a little weird out of the box because there’s no indication of which flavor it is. (So if I had the Peanut Butter version out of the box, I wouldn’t know ... that little BN initial on the package, what does that mean?)

There’s 90 calories per cake, so the pair is only 180 ... for 1.3 ounces, so not really a low calorie product, just its size helps with portion control.

They smell sweet, but not like anything in particular. The chocolatey coating is noticeably thin and fake. The bite is nice, the cake is soft and a little dry but that’s balanced pretty well by the caramel stripe on top. The caramel is quite salty, though there are only 95 mg per pair. The mockolate is terrible, far more noticeably terrible on the salted caramel version than the peanut butter. There’s no cocoa flavor and certainly no creamy cocoa butter experience. There’s not even any milk in that fake milk chocolate.

It’s pretty dreadful. Maybe I’m not a good judge of pastries, or petit fours or whatever category these should be in, but they’re not actually good candy.

The Karrot Kake Kandy Kakes sound good in theory. But in reality the white coating is suspiciously white. It’s not milky white, though at least this white konfectionery koating has nonfat milk in it. The coating has more titanium dioxide in it than soy lecithin.

However, they do smell good. They smell like a nice spice cake ... a little nutmeg, a little cinnamon, maybe a touch of clove and sweet milk. The bite is soft and a little more substantial than the Salted Caramel as this cake is actually carrot cake ... there’s actually carrot in there and even some raisin paste, orange puree and coconut. The white coating is filmy and there’s another creamy layer in there that’s kind of like cream cheese or perhaps unscented foot balm.

It’s a great idea but the coating completely ruins it for me. (Now, a salted caramel stripe in there and maybe an actual white chocolate coating ... but then we’re into actual petit four world, not cheap snack cakes.

The cakes are made on shared equipment with peanuts and tree nuts and contain milk, soy and coconut.

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2. Russell Stover Cake Assortment Chocolates
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Salted Caramels
4. Party Cake Peeps
5. Russell Stover Eggs: Carrot Cake, Birthday Cake and Wedding Cake
6. Brach’s Carrot Cake Candy Corn
7. R.M. Palmer Cake Batter Cup
8. Cupcake Bites