I have more candy than I eat. I eat more candy than I photograph. I photograph more candy than I review.

After the holidays my boss gave me a box of Godiva chocolates that she didn’t want (she gets a lot of candy from vendors and clients). Sometimes candy is good for eating, sometimes it’s good for taking pictures. This was more of the latter.

The old Danish Rolls or Delfa Rolls are back, though now with the name Broadway Rolls. I finally found the black licorice version being sampled at the Winter Fancy Food Show at the Gerrit Verburg (a licorice importer) booth.

These are made in China but bear a striking similarity to the original Danish Rolls.

The construction of the candy is that it’s four small spools of flat licorice strands served up as one long bar in a single wrapper. The Strawberry Broadway Roll I tried before was interesting, but not so much that I would long for it if I couldn’t get it again.

The black licorice is glossy, smooth and quite dark. They’re soft and as long as I unrolled them, were easy to bite. (Biting a whole roll was tough and kind of silly.) Each spool is about 3/4 of an inch tall and one inch wide. Each strip, unrolled, is about one foot (12”) long - though that varied a little bit.

It didn’t smell like much at first, just a bit spicy and like anise. After unrolling and biting one though, it was quite complex and good. The main ingredients are wheat flour, sugar and molasses with real licorice extract and artificial flavors. I’ve noticed that I prefer licorice made with molasses, as I like the mineral and earthy flavors and how they combine with the sweet and spicy licorice. In this case the licorice tasted more like a really good ginger spice cake than a plain black licorice. Notes of cloves, ginger and nutmeg were quite apparent.

For a single serve black licorice, it’s great. It’s hard to find really intensely flavored licorice that’s not overly sticky. This had a good bite that became a bit crumbly and short after chewing, so it didn’t stick to my teeth at all. The aftertaste was a little bitter, but I blame that on the artificial food colors (which is too bad as well). There are some shortcomings to it, but overall I can see myself buying this again, especially since it’s a single serve, fun to play with and interestingly flavored roll.

Related Candies

1. Broadway Strawberry Rolls
2. Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered Gingersnaps
3. Darrell Lea Licorice & Ginger
4. Organic Finnska Soft Licorice
5. Ribbon Candy
6. Haribo Licorice Wheels

Last November Chuao Chocolatier released a new bar and I was very excited. It’s called Panko and it’s a very simple bar. It’s a Dark Chocolate Bar with Toasted Panko Breadcrumbs and Sea Salt. I’ve been searching high and low for it in all the usual places, like Whole Foods, Gelson’s and Cost Plus World Market, but none of them seemed to have it. So I waited until the Fancy Food Show and snagged one there from the kind Chuao folks.

Panko is the name for a specific kind of Japanese-style breadcrumbs. (Panko means breadcrumbs ... well, it means little bits of bread, so calling them breadcrumb breadcrumbs is redundant ... like pizza pie.) Here is a video that probably tells you more than you wanted to know about panko.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a full Chuao bar, I’ve been eating the ChocoPods instead because I prefer the variety. I didn’t realize that the bars had changed so much in the past few years. Here’s a peek at the previous iteration. The bars are now packaged in a matte mylar wrapper instead of foil inside a box. The wrapper opens pretty easily and when I tear it at the seams it works pretty well for re-wrapping the uneaten portion (though I still put it into a zip lock bag). The actual bar is stunningly molded. It’s a custom design of cacao pods with the Chuao logo on the top third of the bar.

The dark chocolate is sweet but has an overall berry and woodsy note. It’s creamy with a good buttery melt and silky texture. That texture is interrupted in a satisfying fashion with the light and crispy panko. It reminded me quite a bit of the Theo 3400 Phinney Bread and Chocolate Bar, which was not as sweet and actually more on the savory side.

The panko texture is a cross between bread and pretzel bits (without the “crust” of the pretzel). The addition of the sea salt in the 60% chocolate keeps it from being too sweet and provides just another little bit of texture.

I give it high marks for munchability ... as long as I can find it. The price is a little steep but it is tasty and pretty to look at. The panko is made from non-genetically modified wheat as well as non-gmo soy lecithin for the chocolate. It’s all natural.

Chuao uses all Venezuelan chocolate in their bars and confections. Aguasanta is a growth initiative which is dedicated to preserving the genetic integrity of cacao and helping to build a sustainable future for cacao in Venezuela.

Chuao also debuted a few newer bars at the Fancy Food Show, including Honeycomb (a sponge candy mixed into a chocolate bar - which I’ve been getting as a thick bulk bark from Whole Foods for a couple of years), Coffee & Anise and CoCo (coconut, coriander and chocolate).

(Yes, I recognize that the package photo up there at the top looks blurry, but it’s not. It’s some sort of printing problem but since this was a sample that was meant to be broken into pieces and tasted up to the Fancy Food Show for tasting, not a demonstration of the wrapper, I hope you won’t hold that against it.)

Related Candies

1. Fancy Food Show 2010 - Day 2 Notes
2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Crisps
3. Chuao Chocolate Blocks from LEGOLAND
4. Daffin’s Candies Factory & World’s Largest Candy Store
5. Chuao ChocoPod Collection
6. Chuao Chocolatier

A weekend trip to the 99.99 Cent Only Store meant a lot of decisions. There’s plenty there that I’m curious to try, and often do, but most of the time it’s my fascination with what may be very bad that gets me to buy something, not the hope that it’s good. (Examples: Beechies Force Chew Candies, Choco-Fudge Mallow Sundae, Skittles Fresh Mint and a roll of LifeSavers that were probably 10 years old.

When I found a little display in the Valentine’s aisle though with some edible body paints and these Decorated Chocolate Shoes I thought that they were actually a good score. The packaging is a little plain, but part of me suspected that these were part of a larger gift package (maybe a basket or box) that were broken up into separate items that could be sold off for a dollar ... and most likely they were from Christmas and still fresh. The expiry date on the shoe was April 2010.

The package is two components: an outer clear plastic box with the label affixed to it with the stretchy silver bow and an inner two part clear plastic “mold” for the shoe. This did a great job of both displaying the candy and protecting it. It was fully taped all around the seam between the two parts, so very well sealed.

There were two things that gave me pause about the purchase. First, it’s made in China. The company that distributes them is called Galerie and is based in Hebron, Kentucky. (They also make gourmet candy corn.) My confidence level in products containing milk from China is admittedly low since the melamine scandal. Second, the ingredients don’t look good. Technically this should not be labeled chocolate, as the milk chocolate contains whey as an ingredient, considered a “filler” by US FDA standards. But I was attracted by the price and size and figured some readers might be as well.

The shoe itself is about four inches long with a 1.75” heel. At 2.7 ounces it’s pretty hefty, so besides that well in the shoe for a foot, it’s solid chocolate. The molding is nice, the chocolate has a good sheen to it and the decorations, though modest at just four pink colored “white chocolate” hearts on each side are precisely painted. (I looked around and didn’t see any other varieties in the store, though I suspect that other versions exist.)

The chocolate smells a bit woodsy, sweet and milky. It’s pretty tough to bite, kind of like eating an Easter rabbit. The texture though is rather smooth. I was pleased with the fact that it wasn’t overly sweet (adding whey actually makes this possible - it helps maintain the texture without adding expensive cocoa butter or cocoa but not sweetness of sugar - in very small amounts it doesn’t influence the flavor).

As a molded novelty item for this price, I’d say it’s excellent. My interest in milk chocolate in the shape of a high-heeled shoe with hearts on it is extremely low, so I can’t say that this is a great gift for me. If you’re looking for a party favor or a little gift where the visual impact is more important than the actual chocolate, this is perfect. Out of the package it can be used for decoration, and as I showed above for scale, filled with M&Ms or Hershey’s Kisses or even a few small chocolate covered strawberries it’s great.

Related Candies

1. Madelaine’s Foiled Milk Chocolate
2. Riegelein Confiserie Hollow Chocolate
3. Lake Champlain & See’s Bunny Battle
4. Upscale Hollow Chocolate: Michel Cluizel & Hotel Chocolat
5. Russell Stover Hollow Milk Chocolate Bunny
6. Palmer Bee Mine
7. Kinder Egg

I was a little dubious when Ferrara Chocolate entered the segmented spherical fruit made from chocolate market late last year. But I was impressed with the quality, availability and price. Ferrara Pan is best known for its other spheres such as Lemonheads and Atomic Fireballs. They used to be the importers and distributors of Toblerone, Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Cote d’Or chocolate, but when Kraft decided to handle that themselves, Sal Ferrara saw an opportunity to get that niche of sales for his company and moved into chocolate molding.

What’s most exciting about the new brand is the inventiveness of their “Chocolate Oranges”. The initial items were pretty much carbon copies of the existing Terry’s Chocolate Orange (Milk, Dark and Milk Chocolate Toffee Crunch). But now that the initial move into stores is over and hopefully folks sampled over the holidays they’re settling in and pushing the envelope a little more.

The Valentine’s Day version of the chocolate orange is part of the strategy to keep the oranges around for all holidays. This one is Strawberry Milk Chocolate and features a Valentine’s message on every segment.

There are 20 segments in the sphere. The red foil wrapper has a sticker that says Burst then Enjoy, but I do poorly at tasks that require just the right amount of force (watch me bowl sometime). So I just cleave it apart by wedging a knife between the segments.

There are ten messages on the slices, some are icons and others are little sayings. Be Mine, True Love, Only You and Hug Me. There’s no Marry Me but there are little pictures of a cupid, a set of kissing lips, a rose and the iconic Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture. (Well, it’s not quite the same icon, the O in LOVE is upright, not tilted.)

The scent is lightly floral, a mix of milk and strawberry. It reminded me of strawberry Nesquik. The chocolate is smooth but very sweet, has a good roasted chocolate note to it as well as the flavor of strawberry. There’s no tangy component, no freeze dried strawberry bits.

Each of the molded segments is nicely done. Mine were shiny and pretty much perfect - the only hitch was sometimes I broke off part of the design when separating it from the center.

The mix of strawberry flavor and milk chocolate isn’t exactly my favorite, but for what it is, it’s very well done. The chocolate is smoother than what I’ve been used to with Terry’s though absolutely still as sweet.

The idea of doing multiple designs on the segments is pure genius - it actually made me want to take apart the sphere to look at them all. Sharing it would certainly be in order, especially for Valentine’s Day. The price is certainly right at about $2.50 at most stores.

Related Candies

1. Florida Tropic Oranges
2. Ferrara Chocolate Oranges
3. Ferrara Milk Chocolate with Almond Nougat
4. Terry’s Chocolate Toffee Crunch Orange
5. Limited Edition Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms
6. Whoppers Milkshake Strawberry
7. Meiji Gummy Choco
8. Terry’s Chocolate Orange Confection