Candy Blog

Nestle Noir is a line of dark chocolate bars from Nestle. I got two bars Nestle Noir Eclat Caramel and Nestle Noir Cerise from Canada (courtesy of Amber a few months ago).

The large format bars come in a smart black box with a spare and enticing design and the further promise that this is a product of Switzerland.

The dark chocolate is 64% cocoa solids and features pieces of “crunchy caramel” (what US-folks would call toffee). The dark chocolate recipe contains butteroil (milkfat), so don’t expect a pure experience.

The bar is lovely to look at, with nicely molded segments, glossy sheen and crisp snap. In addition, the caramel bits look like they’re nicely distributed.

The chocolate is dark and rich, not complex but rather robust. There’s a bitter tone to it that seems to come more from the caramel bits than the chocolate itself and it’s rather nice. The caramel bits remind me of sponge candy - very dark burnt sugar notes. They’re crispy and pop with quite a bit of flavor considering they’re so small.

I was shunning this bar for months but now that I’ve tried it, I think it’s a really good effort. I wouldn’t spend more than $2 for it, but for something found at the local drug store, the caramel bits really make this one stand out from the crowd of syrupy filled bars.

Rating: 7 out of 10

The other bar was one I wasn’t even going to review (which is why there’s no photo of the bar unwrapped). Cerise ... that’s cherry. I’m not fond of cherry flavor, though I do like the actual fruits.

But then I read the ingredients. Yes, it’s 64% cocoa solids too and has butteroil but it also has real cherries in it. But in addition there are apples and pineapple and later in the listing some artificial color & flavor (though it appears far more color than flavor). It’s a fruit salad in a bar of chocolate. Curiosity wins.

It smells woodsy and rather like maraschino. Oh, and then biting into it, it was apparent that it was more of a cherry-flavored bar than a cherry-studded bar.

The fruit bits are soft and chewy, kind of tangy, a little grainy (as some dried fruits can be when the sugars crystalize) and a rather noticeable shade of pink. They don’t taste like much of anything though. The flavor seems to come from the chocolate itself.

No, this doesn’t work for me at all.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I’m still curious to try their caramelized nib bar. This 64% chocolate base is a bit firmer and smokier than the Cacao Reserve that Hershey’s came out with, so I’d like to compare the two nibby bars.

Related Candies

1. Parkside Candy Sponge Candy
2. Sconza 70% Dark Chocolate Toffee Almonds
3. Enstrom’s Toffee
4. Christopher’s Big Cherry is Big Peanuts
5. The Real Nestle Swiss

Sometimes I let me curiosity get the better of me. And in the case of Limited Edition Junior Fruit Cremes, it wasn’t that exhilarating sense of discovery that made me do it. It was because I’d already seen a bunch of reviews and was pretty convinced that they were bad.

But sometimes I have to find out how bad they are for myself (call it the curiosity of Schrodinger’s cat). Here are a few highlights of what I knew I was in for:

Joann at Sugar Hi: All I could taste was sweet. The raspberry was also sickeningly sweet and reminded me of those candy coated marshmallow Easter eggs that are always leftover on the store shelves weeks after Easter.

AV Club: A.V. Club testers back at the office were pretty dubious about Junior Fruit Cremes, praising their initial tart burst of juicy fruit taste, but not so much the way the flavor quickly passed, leaving us all with waxy mouthfuls of the outer coating.

Sera at The Candy Enthusiast: I couldn’t finish the recommended serving of these since I they were burning out my esophagus with the sugar hit. I am not kidding, my throat just *burns* for all the sugar in this.

Patti at Candy Yum Yum: On the package, the drawings of the cremes look all bright and shiny and oozy in the center. In reality, they’re grayish, and the centers are dry, like a thin mint patty. I can’t even describe the taste. Gross, like a bad grammar school fruit dessert.

At first glance they look a lot like the Pastel Junior Mints that were out around Easter. It’s some sort of white confection (well, pastel colored in this case) that looks like melted crayons but is probably supposed to remind us of real white chocolate. They’re nicely domed and have little belly buttons on the underside like regular Junor Mints.

The smell, well, even if I wasn’t getting over a bout of food poisoning (and I wasn’t when I took the pictures and had a similar reaction), I found the too sweet and fake fruity scent repulsive. It smells more like cheap air freshener than something to eat. And let’s face it, that’s odd for me because orange blossom is one of my favorite ice cream flavors.

The box has three flavors: Black Cherry (the darkest pink), Orange and Raspberry (light pink). They don’t smell any different from each other.

The candy shell is soft and waxy. It melts slowly and reveals a fondant center with a bit more of a flavor pop and some sort of super sweet center. When I say super sweet, I mean that it exhibits extraordinary characteristics not known in nature. It’s as if Tootsie has taken over a particle accelerator and has somehow found a way to use supercolliders to violate the laws of two objects existing in the same space. There’s twice as much sugar in here as was formerly possible in confectionery to this point.

But of course in order to contain this physical impossibility they’ve contained the super dense fondant in some sort of subspace warp field with an oscillating polarity and improbability drive to power it (that’s housed in the little belly button area). I think the base material was a pile of used crayons found behind on of those restaurants that has the paper on the tables & little cups of generic crayons.

The density of it shocks my teeth, and perhaps creates some sort of electrical field or radiation or something because it makes me woozy and gives the bones in my lower jaw a deep ache.

I fear for the scientists creating these, the texture of the candies was inconsistent. The orange ones had a rather soft center, the cherry ones a sort of crumbly one (apparently the firmness effects the glucose delivery via the wormhole or whatever and it wasn’t as painful). Raspberry was the mildest of the three, which isn’t really a recommendation.

I’m all for investigating the cosmos and believe that many problems can be solved through innovation, but these incredible scientific feats are being used for evil. Pure evil.

They must be destroyed.

And the way to destroy a limited edition candy is to look away. Yes, that’s right, don’t buy it, don’t even pick it up and handle it at the store. Just walk away ... keep going. The fate of the universe depends on you. Don’t try to save me, I’m already infected. Save yourself!

I couldn’t give it a rating of 1 for inedible, as I have to applaud the scientific breakthrough of super-density sweetness.

(Special note, these have no candy category. I have 30 or so “candy type” categories like chocolate or mint or chew and these don’t fit into any of them! They simply cannot exist.)

Related Candies

1. Junior Mints Peppermint Crunch
2. Junior Mints Pastels
3. The Shame of Some “Healthy” Candy
4. Brachs Bunny Basket Eggs
5. Inside Out Junior Mints

Altoids has a pretty wide variety of flavors and their newest innovation (from late 2006) is offering their most popular mint flavors covered in dark chocolate. This summer Wrigley’s has not only brought out a new mint flavor, Creme de Menthe, they also offer it in the Altoids Dark Chocolate Dipped Mints format.

The dark brown tin with gold and green accents looks rich and inviting. It was easy to spot on the rack at the checkout at Safeway when I was up in the Bay Area and I was lucky enough to catch them on sale, too, at only $1.50 for the package.

The tin design has been revised a bit in the past year. (Here’s the old and here’s the new.) Inside is a kraft brown waxed paper liner.

The dark chocolate covered mints don’t look like much and look identical to the previous varieties. They smell, well, minty and chocolatey.

I prefer crunching mine. The chocolate cleaves off pretty easily and the mint inside has a satisfying crunch. But the chocolate is pretty good too, though tastes more of mint than chocolate, it’s creamy and has a buttery melt and dry finish.

I can’t quite peg what Creme de Menthe is in the first place, so all I can say is that this variety is for people who would like Altoids but find them too strong.

These are like eating a hardened Junior Mint. The dark chocolate complements the mellow mint well, the mint lingers and feels fresh and cool longer after it’s gone.

I ate the whole tin. While the curiously strong Peppermint variety keeps me from eating more than, say, eight or ten in one sitting, it took me only two sessions to eat this whole package. But of course the package only holds 1.76 ounces, so it wasn’t a huge binge. And my breath smells pretty good now. I think I might prefer the softer bite of something like Junior Mints, Dutch Mints or York Peppermint Patties, but I have to say that the crunch was different enough that these aren’t quite interchangeable. (But they are more expensive.)

As with all the traditional Altoids mints, these have gelatin in them and are unsuitable for vegetarians.

Related Candies

1. Altoids Chocolate Dipped Ginger Mints
2. York Mints
3. Junior Mints - Heart Shaped
4. Chocolate Dipped Altoids
5. Jelly Belly - Full Line
6. York Pinkermint Patties

A couple of years ago I had my first experience with Australian musk lollies.

That time it was LifeSavers Musk, little compressed hoops of sugar with a light musk flavor. It was like eating incense cones (you know, if they were made from sugar and not sawdust).

But I was still intrigued enough to pick up what I thought was a more authentic Australian Musk Lolly. This is from a brand called Black Gold and called simply Musk Flavored Sticks confectionery.

The bag was a bit bigger than I wanted at 200 grams, but then again it was only $3, so it seemed like a fun gamble. I was told that the LifeSavers were a bit firmer than the traditional sticks and this is true.

The little extruded sticks remind me of Conversation Hearts, Altoids or Canada Mints but also a bit like a stripe of dried out frosting. They do have gelatin in them, so they’re not appropriate for vegetarians (well, I don’t think true musk would be appropriate for vegetarians either).

They are strongly scented, kind of a generic “nice smelling shop” vibe. The thing is, I don’t mind it. It’s kind of like rose, orange blossom and Avon’s Skin So Soft. It’s pleasant enough, not bitter or syrupy like some floral flavors can be. But it’s not terribly satisfying. I don’t finish a stick and then think, “I’d like another.” Instead I put the package away and think, “I should write about those at some point.” But I got them back in January and only really put them back in the review queue when I moved offices and had to empty out my desk. (They do make a fine desk freshener.)

If you end up with some out of curiosity and don’t know what to do with the other 180 grams, maybe this reciep for Pink Musk Stick Mushrooms will help. Also check out this essential nostaligic Australian lollies list.

While I like the practicality of Mentos rolls, there’s something about getting Mentos in a box that makes them feel so special.

Santos gave me a huge cache of Mentos a few months ago and I’ve been slowly going through them.

Mentos makes two different basic formats of Mentos. Their regular rolls and the Mentos Plus variety, which is fortified with Vitamin C and sold in boxes. As far as I know the Mentos Plus is for the Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand markets. (We have boxes of Mentos here in the US too, but they’re usually the sugar free variety.)

The one that caught my eye first was the box of Mentos Plus Tropical Mix. It features Pineapple, Watermelon and Mango.

Recently I had mango citrus and Pine Fresh from Japan, so I was curious how these compared.

The yellow one is Pineapple. It’s fresh, tangy and has that slightly pepperish tingle to it. One of my new favorite Mentos flavors. (I really hope they keep making the Japanese single-flavor rolls.)

Mango is the orange one and it has a mellow, melon flavor to it. It lacks that sort of pine sap taste but has some deeper notes that I couldn’t quite place ... and didn’t really belong in something mango flavored as far as I was concerned. It was more like a jam taste than a fresh fruit taste.

The pink one was Watermelon and I have to hand it to them, this was one of the better watermelon flavored candies I’ve had in a long time. It gets that floral melon flavor just right, only the slightest hint of tartness and then a finish that’s like cotton candy.

The box seems less necessary with single flavors like Mentos Plus Black Currant, I figure boxes are great for picking out just the flavor you want.

But Black Currant is pretty special, at least for Americans, since we don’t have that flavor here much. It’s rather like a combination of concord grape and pomegranate with some violets - a dark berry flavor with a musky flavor element to it.

They’re soft and chewy and a lovely lavender color. It’s taken me a while to get used to currant, but I’m enjoying this edition quite a bit. Not that I’d probably buy it over a citrus like Pink Grapefruit or Pine Fresh.

Though these are not marked Kosher or Halal, they do not contain gelatin or any other animal products.

Related Candies

1. Banana n Cream & Red Orange Mentos
2. Mentos Plus Citrus Mix
3. Mentos Fuji Apple
4. Skittles from the UK
5. Starburst Retro
6. Dalandan & Juicy Ponkan Mentos