It’s been well over a year since I had my first Pocket Coffee. They’re not easy to find in the United States, so I’ve been looking for an adequate locally-found replacement. I tried the Anthon Berg Coffee filled chocolates as well, but I haven’t been able to find just the espresso ones (the other flavors are a little too sweet for what I’m looking for in this case).

So I was quite excited when I saw these at Trader Joe’s, Espresso Chocolates. The package says that they’re “Rich, Dark Chocolate filled with Liquid Espresso Coffee.” Exactly what I’ve been looking for.

The package holds 3.88 ounces, and by my count, that’s 11 or 12 individual pieces (I can’t remember how many I ate ... except for “all of them.”)

The pieces are about the same size and shape of Pocket Coffee (or Mon Cheri) with a pleasant little wood grain on the top. Like it’s a log filled with espresso ... you know, the kind that you find in the Black Coffee Forest.

The chocolates are gorgeous and all were prefectly formed with no cracks or bleeds. Unlike the Pocket Coffee, these have no internal sugar shell (though they might form one eventually ... see above where I admit that I’ve already eaten them all and can’t experiment). The ingredient are: Cocoa Mass, Wheat Syrup, Sugar, Lactose, Cocoa Butter, Espresso Coffee, Soy Lecithin. Now, I suspect that the Wheat Syrup and Espresso Coffee are the syrupy filling (as I can’t imagine Wheat Syrup integrating well with chocolate and the Espresso filling is definitely sweet).

The filling is thicker than espresso, it’s woodsy and tangy and has a good coffee flavor but also some other notes rather like molasses or barley. The chocolate shell is sweet and tasty.

I’m not quite sure who makes these for Trader Joe’s, but the box says that they’re made in Germany, so I don’t think they’re made by Ferrero (the ingredients aren’t quite the same either). The package is very kind to list the caffeine content: 22 mg for a serving of 4 pieces. Compare that to a small cup (6 ounces) of brewed coffee which has 100 mgs. Sleep easy and have one in the evening!

Notes from the box:

Need a pick-me-up? Try our Trader Joe’s Espresso Chocolates. We’ve taken real espresso coffee and surounded it with rich dark chocolate. Other coffee candies have a cream center or bits of coffee beans. Trader Joe’s Espresso Chocolates have a real liquid espresso center. We recommend eating each piece in one bite to avoid dry cleaning bills.

While it recommends one bite, I like biting off one end and holding it upright, drinking the syrup center, then eating the chocolate. Melting them in your mouth is a completely different experience, because it reverses things and you get your chocolate first and an espresso chaser.

I’m not an energy drink person and I’m not one to start popping caffeine pills either. So what am I to do when I need a little pick-me-up?

A friend of ours who travels in Italy every year suggested Pocket Coffee! Basically it’s chocolate-covered Italian coffee. Because the sweet coffee center is concentrated, it only takes three chocolates to equal a single shot of espresso. Our friends like to get them for traveling as it’s more portable that hot coffee but has the same side effect. I’ve heard that it’s very popular with students, truck drivers and folks on night shifts.

Ferrero is a well-known Italian chocolate brand even here in the United States, with the elegant little Rochers and Nutella as their best-known products. In fact, I’ve never seen Pocket Coffee anywhere in the US before, but not for lack of trying. They’re not even made in the summer, so as a seasonal item it’s likely that getting one out of season means that it’s no longer fresh. But a no-so-fresh Pocket Coffee is just a different experience.

The candy is composed of a syrupy espresso center, then a light sugar crystal shell and then the chocolate. As the candies age the sugar shell will actually grow, taking sugar from the espresso syrup center to create a bigger shell. The ones I tried were a little old (purchased last fall) so they had the extra crystallized shell.

The coffee center is very sweet but smooth with a slightly acidic bite to it. The crystals provide a kind of funky crunch to it, but melt easily if you’re inclined that way. The chocolate is not too sweet and gives a good creamy boost to the whole mix. On the whole the candy is very sweet, a little too sweet for my tastes, but then again, it’s coffee candy. I’m not saying that I won’t eat it again ... though they are messy. If you’re driving, you’re obligated to pop the whole thing in your mouth but if you’re not, feel free to experiment with biting off a corner and sucking out the coffee first.

Finding them in the states may mean ordering online. They’re still being stocked at Capriflavors.com.

JoeD at Slashfood beat me to the punch on this review last week and David Lebovitz has a haiku you might enjoy.

If only Cadbury Creme Eggs had a coffee version!

I saw these mentioned on the Junk Food Blog a while back and then noticed them at the 7-11 and thought, what the hey, I’ll give them a try! I’m generally not into eating things with extra caffeine, especially not sweets as I have sleep problems, but I figured I could sample them before noon.

I don’t know how I could be more annoyed with these.

I love the tins, I think the color and design is great. The text on the tin is a little odd “Finally some mints with BAWLS. Spiked with the same high-caffeine guarana that fuels our BAWLS soft drink, these fizzy sweet mints are the first candies that help you stay up all night. Feel the power of BAWLS mints. Because regular candy is for babies.” First, this is far from the first caffeinated candy. Penguin Mints jump to mind. And if that’s too recent, how about any number of coffee candies. Including those Italian ones with real espresso in them that truckers use called Pocket Coffee. Oh, and the old standby, chocolate covered espresso beans.

Okay, so let’s just step away from the assertion that they’re the first “stay-awake candies”. How about the fact that they keep calling them mints. Now, I understand how sometimes names get co-opted. Like white chocolate isn’t really chocolate, but because it shares some of chocolate’s qualities and ingredients, we call it that. I don’t think that just because your candy is pellet shaped that it can be called a mint. These are not mint flavored. They’re some sort of punch flavored. And that’s fine, but when I’m expecting mint and I get razzleberry, I’m annoyed. 

So, let’s take this candy as if no one showed me the package or told me what it is:

It’s a strangely speckled aqua-blue tablet, about the size of a baby aspirin and the color of a toilet bowl freshener. They don’t smell like much, but once on the tongue there’s a very pleasant tingly sensation, especially if you keep it on the tip of the tongue where the sour zap enhances it. Crunching it or splitting it makes it foam a little more. The flavor is rather bland, something sour and perhaps berry. There’s no indication of what flavor it is (I’ve never had BAWLS soda) but a little search on the web calls it a cross between lemon/lime and cream soda. It’s kind of fun, but gives me the burps. (One of the reasons I avoid sodas.)

I don’t know how caffeinated these little buggers are, but to be safe I only ate about five a day during the time that I was evaluating these. As a candy they’re rather disappointing. I want more flavor out of them, like Pop Rocks. But then again, I’d rather have the fizzy and no caffeine. Way too expensive for candy, but as a caffeine supplement to keep on hand when I have a coffee withdrawal headache, they probably rival that pack of Black Black that I keep at the office. But maybe if they were gonna call them mints they might have wanted to make them, well, mint flavored.

Further reading: Wikipedia on Guarana, Guarana.com on Guarana,  for sale at ThinkGeek, review of BAWLS mints by Eugene at pbworkzpc.com (he gives it a 4/5) and death by caffeine - how many BAWLS mints will it take to kill you?

For those of you wondering, Wikipedia pegs the caffeine content at 5 mg per tablet.

You may recall a while back I got an order from Japan of candies. The last thing I wanted to share with you that came in that box are the two gums from Lotte.

Name: No Time Gum
Brand: Lotte
Place Purchased: Jbox
Price: $1.50
Type: Gum

The first is No Time, which is a little gray, dusty cube of gum. It’s got a light mint flavor and is advertised as a replacement for brushing your teeth when you have no time. Handy, eh?

There are quite a few “whitening” gums on the market in the States, most have baking soda in them, so they end up tasting rather salty and soapy. No Time does not have that burning mint flavor that some freshing gums have and though it says it has some sort of scrubbers in it, it’s quite smooth. The chew is a little tough, the flavor slightly medicinal. I’m not a big gum chewer, and though I found this pleasant, it’s not something I would seek.

Name: Black Black
Brand: Lotte
Place Purchased: Jbox
Price: $1.40
Type: Gum

Many Americans are familiar with Black Black - especially if you frequent truck stops or college campuses. Black Black may be the original caffienated gum. “Hi Technical - Excellent Taste and Flavor.”

They come in the traditional foil wrapped stick. The color is not black, but rather dark. It looks like it should taste like licorice, like a large chewable sen sen. But, it’s actually flavored quite differently. It tastes like cough drops. Hall’s Menthol cough drops. I don’t know if that helps with the caffiene delivery or not.

Though the taste isn’t necessarily enticing, the charge is definitely there. I couldn’t find any info on how much caffiene is in a stick, but I can tell you from experience that I had a terrible headache about two weeks ago. I tried aspirin, then ibuprofen and finally chewed a stick of black black ... whew, sweet relief. Of course I had trouble sleeping later that night (next time, I’ll try the black black first!).

It’s a good thing to keep in your arsenal. Much better than drinking caffienated drinks when driving, if you ask me, because you don’t need as many bathroom breaks.

Ratings - No Time - 5 out of 10
Black Black - 7 out of 10

Name: New Tree Chocolates: Vigor, Forgiveness & Tranquility
Brand: New Tree
Place Purchased: Monsieur Marcel (LA Farmer’s Market)
Price: $3.35 each
Size: .95 oz
Calories per ounce: no nutrition facts listed on box
Type: Chocolate

I reviewed another of these bars, called Renew a few weeks ago and I wanted to try other flavors. I found these little boxes with tasting bars at the Farmer’s Market and picked up an assortment. The one that had me most intrigued was Tranquility which bills itself as soothing. It’s milk chocolate with Lime Blossom and Lavender in it.

The packaging, first of all, is delightful. I put a quarter in the photo so you could see how tiny these bars are. New Tree extols itself as all natural, healthful chocolate what eschews genetically modified organisms (I’m not sure if Monsanto has gotten around to modifying the cocoa plant) and infuses their Belgian made chocolate with sometimes incongruous flavors and extra fiber. Turns out the no GMO part applies to the soya lecithin.

The Tranquility bar was very nice. It’s not terribly smooth, which is often what happens when you put dried stuff in chocolate. For Belgian milk chocolate it’s a bit sweet, but it doesn’t have that milky taste. The lavender notes come through loud and clear and leave a pleasantly fragrant note on the tongue long after the chocolate has dissolved. I wasn’t able to detect the lime blossom, but I’ve never eaten lime blossoms before and they might taste just like lavender for all I know.

I had to try the Vigor bar early in the day, as eating a full ounce of this is the equivalent of one cup of coffee (and I’ve already had a cup of coffee). At 73% cocoa, this bar smells unabashedly like pure chocolate. But upon putting it in my mouth, it melted quickly and I tasted only slight hints of rich coffee flavors. Naked coffee and chocolate are a great combo, as they both are roasted and smoky and contain lots of alkaloids. This is a barely sweetened bar that also boasts that it contains extracts of guarana. I’ve had more mocha tasting bars in the past and to be honest, I don’t want a caffienated chocolate bar, because I’d be tempted to eat it later in the day and then curse it as I couldn’t sleep later in the evening. But if you’re good with caffeine at all hours, maybe this is the bar for you. I don’t recommend pairing it with Red Bull or other energy drinks unless you enjoy heart palpitations.

The last bar, Forgiveness, was in the yellow box and was flavored with lemon and said that it helps metabolism. Again, a very dark bar with 73% cocoa. This bar also smells suspicously like chocolate with a slight lemon essence to it that’s more obvious after eating. It’s not a zesty taste, like a lemon bar or anything, just a hint of it. It’s actually very nice, a big difference from the heavily flavored bars from BruCo (don’t get me wrong, I liked those, too). The “helps metabolism” part got me curious though. There are “natural extracts of cactus” in it. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but there are a lot of cactus out there ... that’s like saying something vague like has “natural nuts” in it. The website says that the cactus is Opuntia ficus-indica. A quick google search reveals that this is a prickly pear, and looks a lot like one I have in my back yard. Further searching reveals that this particular cactus also contains mescaline. I’m sure that my teensy bar that’s less than a third of an ounce does not contain any measurable amounts.

I guess this is where I can get into the topic of candy for snacking and candy for savoring. There are some folks who enjoy wine and drink it for the joy of drinking. Then there are some folks who enjoy wine for all its nuances and savor every sip. I’m somewhere in the middle there when it comes to candy. I love consumer candy, stuff you just eat, that you put in your mouth and you finish and you want more. This New Tree stuff and many of the other gourmet bars are not meant for munching. They’re more complex, like a fine cheese or something. As a reference, I still have a little bit of the Renew bar left and it’s been weeks. This is not candy that calls out to me to be eaten. (Yes, sometimes I hear the candy calling me ... mostly things like maltballs and I can also hear smarties calling from several hundred yards.) Maybe some will accuse me of not being sophisticated enough and I’d be inclined to agree with them. You can dress up my vitamins in gumballs or chewables, but that doesn’t make them candy. Candy is a treat, not a chore.

I feel kind of bad for not liking these bars more, like I’m not sophisticated or stylish. I also feel bad because they’re so hugely expensive. Which I guess goes to prove that good quality candy does not have to be expensive. And expensive candy is not neccesarily great.

I think over the past few months as I’ve been trying more of these bars, my favorite fancy flavored bar has been the Dagoba Milk Chocolate Chai. I ate that, it tasted good and I wanted more. That’s what I want in my candy ... one that gets me addicted.

Ratings:
Vigor - 6 out of 10
Tranquility - 6 out of 10
Forgiveness - 6 out of 10