Candy Blog

It’s fun to see all the kids candy for Halloween, but sometimes adults want something a little special too. Enter Seattle Chocolates Devil’s Delight Dark Chocolate Truffle Bar with Peanut Butter & Pretzels. It’s described as Salted pretzel pieces and creamy peanut butter in dark chocolate that uses Rainforest Alliance Certified™ cocoa. A devilishly delicious combination!. That definitely sounds right up my alley.

It’s nice to see a seasonal bar using ethically sourced cacao, and in this case, it’s no more expensive than other similar bar on store shelves.

Don’t be disappointed if it’s not your cup of tea, there are two others: Bloody Orange Truffle Bar and Dead Sea Salt Truffle Bar.

The bar is compact and uses the same mold as all the other Seattle Chocolates bars I’ve tried. At 2.5 ounces, it’s a bit too much to eat in one sitting and not quite enough for two portions. Basically, it’s perfect for the stingy sharer ... give one section to another person, eat the rest yourself.

The pieces are thick sections that hold the truffle filling.

The bar smells pleasantly nutty with a woodsy chocolate component. The dark chocolate is bittersweet and has a nice, silky melt. The filling is a little odd. It’s very peanutty, which I enjoyed and had some good salty pops. But the pretzel pieces seemed stale, as can happen when mixing with inclusions. I liked the peanut butter part, very smooth and nutty and offset well by the dark chocolate. I think they mix the peanut butter in with white chocolate, which is genius. Overall, I liked it, though I didn’t finish it in one sitting. One of the things I’ve seen that solves the stale pretzel problem is to give them a quick dip in chocolate before mixing them in.

This bar was sent to me as a sample from Seattle Chocolates, but I did see them for sale at Cost Plus World Market.

Related Candies

1. Revisit Reviews: Pretzel M&Ms, Rally Bar and Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road
2. Jer’s Peanut Butter Bars
3. Russell Stover Kris P. Pretzel Bunny
4. M&Ms Sweet & Salty Snack Mix
5. Snyder’s Peanut Butter Pretzel Sandwich Dips
6. Seattle Chocolates Perfect Peanut Butter

I’m always attracted to these beautifully crafted gumballs at the mall in the vending machines. I finally broke down and bought some, just because they’re so pretty. I’m not going to review them because, well, they weren’t good enough to even warrant 300 words.

Necco is an odd company that makes antiquated candies and buys up old candy brands. While the nostalgia is comforting, it’s a little odd when they try to be hip, like when they update their conversation heart mottoes, or came out with a line of Twilight themed candies.

However, for a couple of years they’ve been trying to do more novelty and seasonal candies, many of which I’ve appreciated. They have quite a few zombie themed items and for the first time I was able to find the Necco Skybar Zombie Food. They’re priced well at Cost Plus World Market at 59 cents each, though they were $1.50 across the parking lot at Dylan’s Candy Bar.

I bought two of these, hoping for two different shapes, but ended up with two hearts. The first one I opened was cracked and oozing and sticky. Though that’s probably acceptable to a zombie, I wanted to photograph and eat something a bit more pristine. Luckily #2 was in great shape.

The pieces are exactly one ounce, so it’s a little less than a regular portion and two might be too much.

It’s a striking looking candy. The chocolate mold is well made with an anatomically accurate human heart. My unbroken one looked great, though the packaging does little to protect the candy from getting cracked.

It smelled nice, pleasantly milky and sweet. The chocolate is passable, a little on the grainy side and sweet. The caramel filling is grainy but also not terribly sweet, there’s a cereal flavor to it, not quite a toasted sugar caramel. It’s nicely balanced. Of course the red food coloring left a weird, metallic aftertaste for me, but your mileage may vary.

The whole thing lacks anything else though. For 59 cents it’s passable, but only as a novelty item. If you’re looking for a drug store caramel, opt for the Milky Way Simply Caramel for better chocolate and caramel (though I still wasn’t wild about them either). But if you’re a fan of Cadbury Caramel Eggs, these might be a nice Halloween option. I’d like to say that they’d be great for Halloween trick-or-treat, but I fear that being thrown into a bag with a bunch of other candy is just too rigorous for them, if half of mine were cracked just from the store.

Related Candies

1. Limited Edition Milky Way Caramel Apple Minis
2. Original Necco Wafers Return
3. Kraft & Ferrara Pan Caramels
4. Clark Bar Wicked Mix
5. Sky Bar Twilight Saga - Eclipse
6. The Twilight Saga: New Moon Heart’s Desire Sky Bar
7. Mori Ex Cacao Gift Set
8. Necco Hot Stinky Feet

At first I wasn’t sure what these were. The back of the package says real dried cranberries! covered in rich Ghirardelli chocolate!. But the front says that it’s infused with raspberry juice and a touch of freeze-dried cherries.. A quick peek at the ingredients doesn’t show anything else, except that the cranberries have some sunflower oil in them (makes them more pliable). At first I thought they were like the Brookside fruit things, a little jelly center with some dried cranberries thrown in, but instead they’re actually dried cranberries with some other fruits thrown in.

The Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Cranberry are packaged like the Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews I also picked up at the same time, expect this package is pink instead of light blue. The stand up gusset bag reseals after opening with a zip lock, which is common in these morselized treats these days.

The ingredients and other packaging don’t say how dark the chocolate is, they call it semi-sweet and it has dairy fats in it. I’d guess somewhere around 55-60% cacao.

They smell very fruity, like cooking jam or a baking pie. It’s alluring ... and they are darling little morsels. The sizes are irregular, but each is wonderfully panned with a glossy shine.

The bite is soft, softer than I would expect from a piece of dried fruit. The cranberries are plump (I guess plumped with the other fruit additions and a touch of tapioca syrup). It’s immediately tangy and with that light tannic bitterness that cranberries have. The chocolate is smooth, though not quite silky, it offsets the fruit very well and brings its own dry finish.

I found these very satisfying and preferred the texture of the centers to regular raisins or dried cranberries which can be grainy or overly chewy. Though there’s a lot less fat in here than many chocolate treats, with only 120 calories per ounce, that means there’s also more sugars, though some are obviously from the fruit and not as readily available. There’s also 2 grams of fiber, 10% of your vitamin C and 8% of your RDA of iron.

As if Circus Peanuts weren’t enough of an enigma, now they’re branching out into seasonal varieties.

If you’re not familiar with Circus Peanuts, they’re a fluffy, grainy, marshmallow shaped like a peanut, the same color as an orange creamsicle but flavored like bananas. Every once in a while you see other holiday shapes, like bunnies for Easter. Though I’m only a fan of Circus Peanuts by concept, because once I actually eat one I wonder what I was thinking. They have some sort of hypnotic amnesia field around them, and I often forget I don’t like them and eat them. (I think there’s a genetic component to this, there are some people who are immune to this and know they hate them and can avoid them, then there are others who actually like them so there’s no need for the amnesia.)

Melster Marshmallow Candy Corn Circus Peanuts are basically not banana flavored, but candy corn flavored ... and not just orange, but also yellow and white.

Here are the things that recommend them:
- They’re Fat Free
- They’re Free from Major Allergens (peanuts, tree nuts, milk, shellfish, eggs, fish, wheat and gluten)
- They’re Made in the USA

Here’s the top reason to buy them: You’ve always wanted to like Circus Peanuts but you were turned off by the flavor. Don’t worry, Candy Corn Circus Peanuts have no flavor. (I’m just going to call them CCCP now.)

If you’re a fan of marshmallows in your cereal, like Lucky Charms, these are actually a pretty good version of that as a candy. The original Lucky Charms marbits were Circus Peanuts, but I think these match the flavor better.

These were fresh and do smell lightly like vanilla and sugar. It’s comforting. Rather clean and bright. The bite is soft, but the texture is grainy. They’re like a marshmallow, but much denser ... but not quite a nougat. Really, they taste just like a very sugary marshmallow. If you’ve ever wanted Campfire Marshmallows with more sugar in them, this is for you.

These can’t even muster being divisive like the banana Circus Peanuts, that’s how ineffectual they are. That said, there’s a Peppermint version for Christmas ... Candy Warehouse (who provided these) also sent some of those, I can’t wait!

Related Candies

1. Brach’s Carrot Cake Candy Corn
2. Charms Candy Corn Pops
3. Starburst Original Fruit Flavored Candy Corn
4. 6 Candy Corn Candies That Aren’t Candy Corn
5. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn
6. Melster Peanut Butter Kisses
7. Circus Peanuts
8. Brachs Bunny Basket Eggs