Candy Blog

Milka is a chocolate confection brand that originated in Switzerland and is now made by Kraft at several factories in Europe. Since Kraft is a global food giant, it makes sense that they’re going to make as many of their brands global as well.

You might notice that I said chocolate confection brand. The reason Milka doesn’t qualify as actual chocolate is a little complicated. In the United States (and many other countries), chocolate can only contain cocoa solids, cocoa butter, sugar and milk (the standards of identity). If there are any other vegetable oils or solids in there (aside from inclusions like almonds or crisped rice), then it has to be called chocolate flavored or a confection. Milka contains both hazelnut paste (that’s certainly not a bad thing, but there’s not enough to kick it into giauduia territory) and whey, which is a milk protein. I like Milka. As a confection alternative to pure chocolate, I prefer the addition of nut paste and a milk sugar/protein elixir instead of partially hydrogenated palm oil.

Kraft doesn’t seem at all concerned about the technicalities of Milka, it’s spreading the bars and candies worldwide on the strength of the milk part of the product, not the cocoa. In the past five years I’ve seen them in stores in the United States quite a bit more, not just at import themed stores like Cost Plus World Market, but also at big box retailers like Target. I found this little Easter treat called Milka L’il Scoops at my local grocery store, Ralph’s.

The candies are described as Milk chocolate confections with creamy mousse filling.

The packaging is precious. It’s a real egg carton, in the sense that it’s made from recycled pulp though it’s bright purple instead of a muted color. The carton has four little sections that hold the foil wrapped egg confections. At the center of the package is a little stack of two purple spoons for eating the filling. Yes, it’s a lot of purple. (Kind of confusing, as many Cadbury items are also identified with purple which is also owned by Kraft.)

The eggs themselves are actually egg sized. I threw a Grade A Large Egg in there for comparison. I’d call these medium eggs, they’re about 2.3 inches high and 1.2 ounces though a little lighter than an actual chicken egg which are about 1.5 ounces.

The foil is thin but not wrapped so tight that it’s hard to get off, like I sometimes find with Cadbury Creme Eggs. The egg inside the wrapper is scored with a thinner shell at the top.

The eggs are to be eaten like a soft boiled egg. The top of the egg shell (chocolate confection) is removed and the little spoon is used to scoop out the filling. This actually works just as advertised. It was easy for me to either bite it off cleanly, or pinch the top gently and pull it off. (I suppose the spoon may be a useful tool as well, since the shell is quite soft and who cares if you get a little chocolate in the filling like you would with a real egg.)

The Milka chocolate confection is sweet and a little nutty, it’s soft and has a good fudgy melt. The cream center is frothy and buttery, almost like a buttercream frosting or whipped topping. It’s made of sugar and fractionated palm kernel oil so it’s a little oily on the tongue.

Overall, I preferred breaking the chocolate up and eating it with the creamy center instead of eating the center straight. Maybe if it was flavored, like a frothy hazelnut paste cream I’d be happier to eat it straight.

I liked this far better than I thought. I was fully expecting them to be another version of Cadbury Creme Eggs. Instead I found that the quality of the shell was better and the creme was actually not so sweet.

These are super calorie & fat bombs. Each one has 190 calories (158 per ounce) which is far more than a CCE. They’re really overpackaged, but at least everything is recyclable. (Well, maybe not the spoons, but I plan on reusing those for quite some time.) They’re expensive, at least twice the price of most other holiday eggs, so make it special. These are also called Milka Loeffel Chocolate Filled Eggs and sell for about $8.00 online, so I was fortunate to get mine for only $4.99. For that price I’d prefer something with a little bit better quality ingredients. However, if this is a favorite of someone you love, then it’s all worth it.

Related Candies

1. Milka NAPS Mix (Assortment)
2. Real Eggshell filled with Hazelnut Chocolate Truffle
3. House Brand Creme Eggs
4. Laica & Caffarel Chocolate Eggs
5. Russell Stover Eggs
6. Melster Marshmallow Eggs

Easter candy is usually themed around elements of spring and rebirth. Some candy is quite literally shaped like the crucifix but most is more subtle in its message.

I was these The Original Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter Gummy Candy at Cost Plus World Market and again at Target. Since it was only a buck at Target, I decided to pick it up. But it’s not exactly an Easter item, even though it was shelved with the Easter candy. Sure, there’s a rabbit, but not everything that features a rabbit is supposed to be Easter themed. After all, no one goes around saying that the Velveteen Rabbit is an Easter book.

The candies are packaged and sold by Frankford Candy of Philadelphia, made in China and licensed from Frederick Warne & Co of London.

The box holds 1.8 ounces of candy which amounts to five rather large gummy pieces. They’re each in a little compartment in a clear plastic tray. That is sealed in a plastic sleeve and the box is also taped shut. (It’s already known that Peter Rabbit is wiley.) It’s a lot of packaging for very little candy.

The gummis are about 2 inches tall if they’re standing upright with ears pricked. They’re made of various colors of gummy, the body is a mostly opaque light brown and the clothes are wholly opaque white or blue. The other details, such as the eyes and whiskers are made of some sort of frosting or sugar.

They’re thick and soft and quite nicely detailed, though the brown color gives the impression that the flavor will be something like caramel or perhaps cocoa.

Three of the figures were of Peter Rabbit (leaving some limits to the narrative of imaginative play if these are more toys than candy) and one Jemima Puddle-Duck and the Fox who tried to steal her eggs.

The package gives no indication of what flavor they are and neither does smelling them. They smell like styrofoam packaging, cinnamon breakfast syrup and flip flops. The gummis are soft and pliable (except for the frosting whiskers and buttons) and even sticky enough to allow them to adhere to glass. The flavor is probably strawberry, but the plastic flavors pretty much overwhelm them. The chew is smooth though I really couldn’t stand more than a bite or two before wondering if that weird burning sensation in my mouth was from the gummis - it wasn’t like eating too much sour candy, it was more like that feeling of too many chili peppers (without the actual heat).

I’m usually suspicious of the quality of candy made in China. I know that only a very small fraction is made by companies who do not abide by clean and safe practices. But I still get concerned. In this instance, it doesn’t matter that I don’t care for the origination of the candy, they taste terrible. The flavor is so muddled with the plastic notes, it’s hard to imagine that I’m not eating a toy. But as a toy, they’re not too bad, just don’t leave them out in the rain.

Related Candies

1. Wonka Springy Double Yummy Gummies
2. Ferrara Pan Chicks & Bunnies Jelly Candy
3. RM Palmer My Little Bunny
4. Au’some Easter 3-Dees Gummy
5. Galerie Decorated Chocolate Shoe
6. Storck Toffifay
7. Frankford Marshmallow Pals

A variety of sweet pastel marshmallows impaled on a stick, wrapped in plastic and sold in a store. Genius!

The Wonka Exceptionals line is available in special Easter holiday packaging.

The Wonka public relations folks sent me this box of their Wonka Exceptionals Scrumdiddlyumptious Chocolate Eggs to review. The box is springy, and I’ll say it veers off towards the feminine in a whimsy sort of way. (The Dove chocolate line’s packaging is more towards elegant feminine sophistication.) But I can also see kids taking a liking to it for the brilliant purple and icons on the packages of flowers, vines and butterflies. They also come in another variety, Wonka Exceptionals Chocolate Waterfall which I also have a sample of.

The box holds five milk chocolate eggs with scrumptious toffee, crispy cookie and crunchy peanuts. Wonka also says that they’re made with natural ingredients, but doesn’t mention on the front that they’re also made with not-so-natural ingredients which include, in descending level of appearance, soy lecithin (I’m guessing GMO), modified cornstarch and high fructose corn sweetener (I never see that used in chocolate, but I do see it quite often in cookies and cereal products so I’m assuming it’s an ingredient in one of the inclusions).

My eggs were a little worse for their trek in the mail. I find that stuff that’s shipped to me actually ends up in worse condition than items I pick up in the stores, so I expect that this is a worst case scenario.

The individual packages are just little plastic sleeve wrappers and are labeled for individual sale.

Since the portion is less than an ounce, the calorie count is much lower than some other “full serving” chocolate eggs. Both versions are 140 calories, and for a candy so high in fat, that’s a satisfying size. The Scrumdiddlyumptious Chocolate is already available in large bars or individually wrapped pieces. I reviewed them when they first came out last year. The combination of ingredients is interesting and definitely unique on the market at the moment.

The construction is simple, a 2.5” long and 1.5” wide egg is molded with mixed in items: crumbled cookies, toffee pieces and little bits of peanuts.

It smells green and nutty and a little milky. The crunch of the chocolate is good, it’s a little soft and immediately has a note of cinnamon and graham crackers. The toffee bits taste a little salty and the peanuts are few and far between but taste like they’re deeply roasted. The chocolate is mild and pleasant, it reminds me more of Cadbury than Nestle. It’s very sweet and at least the cookie bits provide a little relief from that.

It’s not that I loved this, but it’s so much better than Nestle’s other efforts like the Butterfinger Egg, it’s a wonder how they can continue making such waxy, poorly flavored chocolate when we now have proof that they know the difference.

The Wonka Exceptionals Chocolate Waterfall Egg is a a delectable combination of swirled milk and white chocolate.

I’m happy to report that there are fewer not-so-natural ingredients in this variety, just the soy lecithin.

White chocolate maybe the unofficial chocolate style of Easter and I was pleased to see that the white chocolate used here is the real cocoa butter variety.

The white and milk chocolate has a similar smooth texture, not quite Dove smooth, but smoother than other Nestle products. It’s quite sweet but has a milky taste and definite vanilla note to it.

The individually wrapped foil pieces are more consistently balanced between the milk and dark chocolate. I only had one sample of this so I can’t say it’s the same for all of them, but I felt there was too much milk chocolate and not enough white. Sometimes I find that white chocolate can taste a little off quickly, a little stale or rancid. In this case it just didn’t taste fresh to me, but I admit that it was stored with other flavored candies from Wonka, which might have contaminated it.

I like the shape, I like how thick it is and especially when there are chunks or layers in it, how it provides a nice cross section of flavors. The packaging isn’t as fun as the foil wrapped pieces, which I liked a little better, the colors on those are just as appropriate for Easter anyway.

It’s nice to see something a little different for Easter baskets or just snacking. These didn’t wow me with their ingenuity, but the quality difference from the earlier efforts from Wonka that were the Golden Creme Egg means that they’re winners just for showing up.

Related Candies

1. Nestle Butterfinger Pumpkin
2. Wonka Exceptionals: Chocolate Waterfall
3. Wonka Exceptionals Scrumdiddlyumptious
4. Wonka Golden Egg
5. Wonka Golden Creme Egg
6. Dove Truffle and Snickers Eggs
7. Hershey Eggs

I went all the way to Germany to buy a Canadian candy bar.

I picked up the Cadbury Wunderbar at a grocery store. I’ve actually seen them in the United States, heck, I’ve even bought them before, but they were always kind of melted and broken. This one looked lovely and in good condition. Wunderbar is a great name for a candy bar, it works on a couple of levels. First, it’s unique and a bit of a play on words because it sounds like Wonder Bar. But the German word Wunderbar (pronounce that w like a v) means Marvelous!

The front of the package doesn’t do much to illuminate what’s inside though. It just calls it A peanut butter caramel experience. The back, in teensy print, says crispy peanut bar with caramel and cocoa containing coating. Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a bar with a less appealing description, probably because it ends with some sort of comedic euphemism for mockolate (because of the alliteration of the K sounds).

I don’t want to think too much about this bar. It’s a candy bar and it’s supposed to be transiently pleasing. So I’m prepared for just that.

The coating was pretty good for mockolate, a little soft but not at all waxy. Smooth enough to not be grainy but not so great at the melt in your mouth creaminess. The flavor was okay, more milky than chocolatey but mostly it tasted like peanuts.

The center of the bar was like someone had chopped up the center of Butterfinger bar and mixed it in with some Chex cereal then reformed it into a log and coated it. That’s really not a bad idea and it does work. There’s a bit of a softer caramel in there as well, that keeps it all soft and crumbly. There are little shards of peanut butter toffee stuff, too.

I wanted more peanut flavor, but it wasn’t overly sweet and had a little hint of salt as well.

Really it just left me wanting a Clark Bar. But I admire it for not being another Clark/Butterfinger/Fifth Avenue knock-off. It’s more munchable and certainly less messy. It’s also huge, at 1.9 ounces and about six inches long. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it marvelous, since it would be better with real chocolate. So I’ll just call it Tempting (6 out of 10).

Some other views: Exquisite Candy and Jim’s Chocolate Mission.