I’m the wrong person to review the new Gimbal’s Cherry Lovers but I’ll do my best.

I’m not generally keen on cherry flavors, but I do love real cherries and I’m generally a fan of Gimbal’s products. This bag of little heart shaped jelly bean type objects boast nine different cherry flavors plus vitamin C and real cherry juice. Gimbal’s makes their candies in the USA in a factory that’s Kosher, peanut free, tree nut free, dairy free, gluten free, gelatin free and soy free. So for allergic folks these are pretty special. (Sorry vegans, though the colors are artificial they do use beeswax and confectioners glaze.)

They’re drop dead gorgeous. A riot of reds, pinks and purples they seem to go beyond the frilly satin hearts of the season. They’re a little rustic because each heart is unique and not quite perfect.

Wild Cherry - plain red - you know, cherry. Tart, sweet, floral and deep woodsy notes. But not quite that good. The medicine flavors are kept pretty faint here.

Cherry Vanilla - white with red speckles - like a cherry marshmallow, mostly a soft flavor with a strong fake vanilla flavor to it. Pretty much pleasant.

Black Cherry - deep red - tastes mostly like red. The cherry flavor is pretty intense as far as these hearts go, more on the woodsy side compared to the Bing Cherry.

Chocolate Cherry - brown - oh, this is quite a tragic flavor, not quite cherry and mostly empty cocoa flavors. It’s like a very bad Cherry Tootsie Pop.

Cherry Cheesecake - pink with red speckles - a tangier version of the Cherry Vanilla, this one had a yogurty twang to it and but still a marshmallowy flavor.

Cherry Daiquiri - deep pink with red speckles - this one was rather fun, kind of a lime and vanilla with a hint of cherry cough syrup. A little bit like aftershave though.

Bing Cherry - lighter red -  Tangy and sweet, a well rounded cherry flavor. A little chemical aftertaste from the food colorings, but about as good as the Jelly Belly I usually avoid.

Cherry Cola - dark red - at first I liked the cherry cola, because it tasted like cola, even had a weird effervescent quality to it (maybe that was just the tangy part playing with my mind) but then the cherry kicked in and ruined it for me. But that’s just me.

Kiwi Cherry - pink with green speckles - this was just terrible. Maybe it’s because I had a recent run in with fresh Durian, but I just couldn’t get that out of my head when it came to this one. The kiwi flavors were more like melon and onions than kiwi, though the cherry seemed about average.

The didn’t do a thing for me. The colors were pretty, the shapes and distinctiveness of the flavors was actually pretty good. But I wouldn’t consider these a breakthrough candy so I found it odd that the National Confectionery Sales Association awarded Cherry Lovers best new Premium/Gourmet product:

In six categories, the winners were: Chocolate, The Hershey Co.‘s Reese’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups; Licensed/Limited, New England Confectionery Co.‘s Twilight Series; Non-Chocolate, Ferrara Pan Candy Co.‘s Chewy Lemonhead & Friends; Premium/Gourmet, Gimbal’s Fine Candies’ Cherry Lovers; Snacks, Snyder’s of Hanover, Inc.‘s Peanut Butter Pretzel Sandwiches; and Seasonal, Maxim Manufacturing & Marketing’s Easter Gummies.

Robby at Candy Addict had a better opinion of these. I’ll just consider them very pretty Valentine’s decorations in a bowl.

Related Candies

1. See’s Cinnamon (Hearts & Lollypops)
2. Mike and Ike Alex’s Lemonade Stand
3. Gimbal’s Gourmet Jelly Beans
4. 3 Musketeers Cherry & Raspberry
5. Gimbal’s Lavaballs
6. Pop Rocks Cherry Cola

Most candy coated licorice is the same. They’re little snips of licorice laces covered in a hard candy shell. The exception might be Good & Plenty, which uses a thicker and softer licorice nib for coating. Now there’s a new version on the marketing called Wiley Wallaby Outback Beans with Chewy Black Licorice Centers.

Wiley Wallaby is the Australian Style licorice brand from American maker Kenny’s Candy. They’re known for making licorice twists in a rainbow of flavors, from Root Beer to Spearmint to Pina Colada.

I picked these up at the Fancy Food Show and was told they should be hitting the stores via wholesalers sometime later this month. This format is a generous 13 ounce tub, which makes it easy to serve right from the package then seal it back up.

The short little rods are about one half to three quarters of an inch long. They’re matte and bright - a mix of purple, hot pink and a slightly lavender white. The shell is not quite crispy and becomes grainy and cool when chewed. It has a light anise flavor to it, but the real licorice impact comes with the black licorice center. It’s a soft and chewy mix of molasses woodsy notes and clean and sweet licorice. (There’s real licorice extract in there plus anise oil.)

My only hesitation with these is that the pink ones use Red 40, and I just couldn’t stand the bitter aftertaste. (There was a hint of it in the purple ones, but not enough to dissuade me from eating them after I’d gone through the white ones.)

The consistently soft chew and well rounded flavor put these right up there with Good & Plenty. Even after keeping the tub around for several weeks with the seal broken, they were still fresh (try that with a theater box of Good & Plenty). The good news for vegans is that it’s all artificial colors and no glazes in there (and mostly natural every thing else).

The most exciting part of this new product line (and perhaps I’ve buried my lead) is the closest thing I’ve found to the classic Good & Fruity.

Since Hershey’s created their new version of Good & Fruity, which is no more than a crazy neon jelly bean, I’ve mentioned to more than one candy maker that there are still plenty of candy fans who long for a candy coated red licorice.

The Wiley Wallaby Outback Beans with Chewy Red Licorice Centers may fit that hole in the confectionery pantheon quite well.

The short little pieces come in three colors, a festive mix of orange, green and yellow. At the center of each grainy and not quite crunchy candy coating is a piece or red licorice.

I don’t know what flavor this red center is. At times I think it’s strawberry, but other times it’s a mild cherry. Whatever it is, it has a nice soft chew, a pleasant smoothness and a light tangy note of berries. The candy shell is very much like that on Good & Plenty. It’s smooth on the outside but not quite a hard crunchy shell, instead it becomes grainy and sweet. They’re quite satisfying and addictive to keep popping.

I expect these to be well-priced, as the Wiley Wallaby brand is usually less expensive than the true Australian imports. I also expect these to show up in bulk bins and probably stores that already carry the Wiley Wallaby line.

Related Candies

1. Walgreen’s Australian Licorice (Chocolate Covered)
2. Spearmint Licorice
3. Young & Smylie Traditional Licorice
4. Black Licorice Twists & Snaps
5. Good and Fruity
6. Kenny’s Licorice Pastels & Root Beer Twists
7. Good & Plenty (Fresh from the Factory)

Warning: today’s review contains a lot of math.

Whole Foods has been carrying Bissinger’s candies, they even have their own custom display in the bakery area of the Whole Foods I frequent. One of the items that caught my eye was this 100 Calorie Bar of Solid Milk Chocolate 38% Cocoa which sounded intriguing. It was only a dollar, so it’s a very low risk investment, especially at Whole Foods.

I knew going in that 100 calories of chocolate is a very small portion. In this case it’s only .63 ounces (18 grams). What I didn’t expect was how misleading the box would be about the actual size of the contents. The bar inside is in a cellophane sleeve that’s too big for it, so it’s crumpled at the sides - which kind of anchors it inside the box. When I shook it, it felt like the bar was taking up the whole box because it didn’t rattle around.

Here are some facts:

Dimensions of box: 4.25” long - 1.75” wide - .33” high = volume of 2.454375 cubic inches
Dimensions of bar: 3.33” long - 1.25” wide - .2” high = volume of 0.8325 cubic inches

Yes, 2/3 of that box is empty.

Aside from that, it’s an attractive bar. It’s segmented into four pieces, each marked with the 38, which I’m guessing is to represent the cacao content, not the fullness of the box.

The shiny and nicely molded milk chocolate has a soft bite with a powdered milk and sugar scent, maybe a little cheese twang to it. The melt is a little fudgy and sweet with a strong sour yogurt bite. The cocoa flavors are woodsy and rather limited. The sweetness burned my throat. The aftertaste is rather familiar, like Hershey’s Milk Chocolate. So if you love Hershey’s and wish you could pay twice as much for it but at least get all natural ingredients, this might be the stuff for you.

At about $25 a pound, I expect better chocolate.

The box also mentioned it has an ORAC value of 46 per gram (828 for the full bar). If you don’t know about Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, you can read more on Wikipedia. For reference, the ORAC value of 100 calories of red beans is 13,727.

The box says that it’s Gluten Free, but it also says that it’s processed in a facility that uses milk, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, wheat and eggs. (Soy and Milk are present in the milk chocolate, of course.) This package does not say it’s Kosher. (You may recall my run-in with them last year about the Kosher status of their gummis.)

Related Candies

1. Bissinger’s Pink Grapefruit Gummy Pandas
2. Amano Milk Chocolate Ocumare
3. Trader Joe’s 100 Calorie Chocolate
4. Scharffen Berger Milk Nibby Bar
5. Hershey’s Miniatures
6. Rice Milk Chocolate Bars

If the statistics braniacs are correct, you’re less likely to receive chocolate this year than a year when Valentine’s Day falls on a weekday. This is because the major heart-shaped confectionery purchasers are men and when the holiday falls on a weekend the celebrations are more likely to be date-related than object-related.

I picked up this box of Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Hearts with Rich Truffle Filling on a weekend (long before Valentine’s Day though). The box holds 7.05 ounces and 16 Belgian truffles. Well, the package calls them truffles, I’m not convinced as you’ll see in a moment.

The flat and simple box has a stylized cartoonish design on the front though the overall format is similar to the Belgian Fancies I bought before Christmas.

I like the overall design, it’s simple and spare and not so precious or frilly that it couldn’t work for either gender or as a gift between friends or family.  The box does and excellent job of protecting the candies, which were all shiny and flawless.

The hearts are nicely sized for a single bite. They’re about one and a half inches at the widest, about three quarters of an inch high.

The ingredients list for these non-flavored bonbons is extremely long. In my perfect world the definitions of things like ganache and truffle are pretty strict. A truffle is chocolate mixed with extra dairy fats like butter or cream. That’s it. There can be flavorings, inclusions and maybe even nut butters but then it becomes a bonbon with a truffle ganache base filling. The Belgian maker of these has things in here like corn syrup (third ingredient) vegetable oils (fourth ingredient) and some other things like glycerin, crystalline fructose, mono & diglycerides and citric acid.

The result of those ingredients is not so much of a mock ganache but something that I think of as really good chocolate frosting. The thing is, the reason to put all that extra fat into ganache is to make the melting point lower, so that it actually melts in your mouth quicker than chocolate. (Cocoa butter has a higher melting point than dairy butter.) Putting all those different oils in there just isn’t the same and things like corn syrup add moisture, which makes it chewy and gives it an almost-caramel like pull when it’s bitten.

Now, all that aside, they’re not bad to eat. The chocolate shell is rather sweet but very smooth. The flavors are berry and a little bit on the woodsy spice side. The semi-sweet shell plays well with the very sweet center. There’s a slight fudginess to it, I hesitate calling it a graininess but it simply tastes sugary instead of chocolatey. For a store bought box of chocolates, they’re not bad, but at $5 for a box I expect a little better. In fact, I wouldn’t mind paying an extra dollar for fewer ingredients and a more intense chocolate punch.

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Belgian Chocolate Fancies
2. Valerie Confections: Pour Homme and Pour Elle
3. See’s Cinnamon (Hearts & Lollypops)
4. Trader Joe’s French Truffles
5. Choxie 3 Ounce Chocolate Bars
6. BonBonBars: Malt Ganache & Scotch

This isn’t necessarily Valentine’s Day candy, but the shape, goth styled packaging and uncommon flavor might just win over a few hearts.

Marich Confectionery is a California candy maker that specializes in panned items and novelty molded creams and fondants for all holidays. I’ve recently fallen in love with their extra dark chocolate panned items like 72% Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews and Dark Cacao Nib Toffee (which I’ve bought twice with the intention of reviewing but ended up eating).

Their new Black Heart Licorice items are all natural and instead of being wheat-based with molasses, these are more of a gumdrop style dense jelly candy.

I picked up my samples from the Fancy Food Show last month. They were showing off two versions: Black Licorice and Black Cherry Licorice.

The package design is nicely done. The six inch stand up box with the cut out window shows off the candy and is no bigger than it needs to be. The tab on the back folds into a little slot and keeps the candy closed and pretty fresh inside its inner cellophane bag. There’s a little story on it about a candy maker creating the candy to woo a woman, but I skipped right to the candy. (You can see a snapshot of the ad about it here.)

The Black Heart Black Licorice are darling little matte hearts. They feel a little rubbery, like they’re made out of silicone. The scent is only very lightly of anise.

The texture is a smooth and dense chew, a bit firmer than a Dot, but still easy to bite. The flavor is clean and clear - anise with some deeper woodsy licorice. It’s not very sweet, in fact, these have a bit of salt in them (75 mg per serving). Though they are colored, it’s all natural coloring so there are no strange artificial bitter flavors to get in the way of the real stuff.

They do stick in my teeth a little bit, so that’s a distraction. The flavor isn’t too strong to mean that I was constantly munching them without getting that overly full or burnt out feeling.

The surprising item for me was the Black Heart Black Cherry Licorice. I didn’t even want to take the samples, but figured they were red and would photograph well, I should at least try them. When I read the ingredients, it actually sounded pretty good. Again, all natural so no nasty Red #40 to give me a weird aftertaste ... but there’s also licorice root extract in there too. So it’s truly red licorice.

They don’t smell promising to me, like black cherry flavoring. However, the texture is quite dreamy ... it’s silky slick and easy to chew. The flavor is tangy and has a black cherry note to it. It’s woodsy and has an actual cherry pie flavor and then just a hint of the bouncy sweetness of licorice. The whole thin isn’t too sweet either, again, the benefit of the touch of salt in here. Wow, a cherry candy I actually like, because it actually tastes like cherries. For those who don’t like licorice, it’s not a bold anise flavor, just a different kind of sweetness that highlights the woodsy notes of the cherry flavors.

I don’t know if they’re in stores yet, I didn’t see them at Whole Foods, which is usually where I pick up Marich candies (though I also see them at Gelson’s in Southern California as well). I expect the price to be around $3.50 to $4 per package, so a little steep.

Related Candies

1. Marich Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews
2. Marich Easter Select Mix
3. Hot Tamales Black Licorice Jelly Beans
4. Darrell Lea Licorice & Ginger
5. Organic Finnska Soft Licorice
6. Black Ace Licorice

I’ll pretty much eat anything covered in chocolate, so long as it was something I was willing to eat before it was covered in chocolate.

The newest wave is covering savory items in chocolate ... and what a wonderful and imaginative trend it’s become. The inventiveness of chocolatiers and confectioners goes far beyond pretzels and potato chips.

Today I have a new item from Kimmie Candy Company, which makes all sorts of panned items, it’s salty corn nuts, covered in chocolate and then in a colorful candy shell. They’re called Sweet & Salty Corn Bits which really doesn’t do them justice. I don’t know if they’re in stores yet, but the rather mousy looking package isn’t going to help them stand out from other items that look like they belong at a truck stop.

Corn Nuts originated back in the 1930s with Albert Holloway as a bar snack. They’re soaked whole corn kernels that are then deep fried. The big innovation came in the 1960s when Holloway found and hybridized a giant version of corn from Peru. Corn Nuts when national shortly after that when Holloway sold the company to Nabisco. (It’s now owned by Kraft and sold under the brand of Planters.)

A corn nut is a rather hard and crunchy nugget, far denser than popcorn and with a flavor more like a corn chip or Frito. They’re very satisfying but like corn chips but also don’t have that much fat in them for a fried snack (about 40 calories from fat per ounce).

The candies vary quite a bit in size and shape. Some are a small as a half an inch across, most are rather flat but some are almost an inch long ... but the average is actually right there in the middle at 3/4 of an inch.

The color mix of three earthy variations: saffron yellow, orangish-red and maroon-brown. The bag smells a bit like Fritos and chocolate ... I know it sounds a little weird, but I like it.

They’re quite crunchy, so much so that sometimes biting into one, it’s almost like a rock at first. The shells are thin and crispy and the milk chocolate inside is sweet and light. It provides a creamy background and a rather cool sensation on the tongue as it melts. It’s not terribly complex or challenging, but completely addictive. Kimmie Candy sent me two four ounce bags, and within 36 hours of opening either one, they were gone.

These should be sold in movie theater style boxes, because they’re the perfect mix of chocolate, candy and salty crunch. I didn’t feel sick or stuffed from eating them and for something that has a “salty” kick, there’s very little in there - only 75mg.

UPDATE 4.15.2010: Kimmie has changed the name of these to Milk Chocolate Covered Kettle Corn Nuggets with some slight reformulations. They’re now multi-colored (maroon, blue, green, yellow, orange & pink) and have a buttery toffee flavor on the corn bits. I haven’t tried the new version yet.

Related Candies

1. Swiss Army Energy Bar Chocolate
2. Theobroma Chocolate y Maiz
3. Isle of Skye Seeds of Change Milk with Crispies
4. Ritter Sport White Chocolate with Hazelnuts
5. Wheat Chocolate
6. Peeps Monster Mash Ups
7. Jacques Torres

Sunflower Butter Cups ... saying it out loud it doesn’t even make sense, is it a flower or is it a candy? Seth Ellis Chocolatier of Boulder, Colorado has come out with a nut free, peanut free, gluten free, fair trade and organic candy. They simply call them Sun Cups.

Sun Cups come in milk chocolate and dark chocolate. Confusing sounding name aside, they’re sunflower butter (like peanut butter only made with sunflower seeds) in a chocolate cup. Just like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, except, well, not like them.

Each cup is .75 ounces and comes in the industry standard dark brown fluted paper cup. The packages I picked up from the Seth Ellis booth at the Winter Fancy Food Show were flawless and perfect. Even the glossy and bold packaging is made from a compostable film.

The Milk Chocolate Sun Cups smells sweet and milky. There’s a touch of sunflower scent, but mostly it’s a fresh note. The organic milk chocolate is silky smooth and has a strong European dairy note. It’s cool on the tongue as it melts. The sunflower center is creamier than a Reese’s, not exactly moist, but not crumbly and not oily. The center is made with sunflower butter mixed with white chocolate, so it’s a little stiff but has an amazing melt with just a hint of sea salt.

The Dark Chocolate Sun Cups smell like semi-sweet chocolate - a little bit woodsy and fruity. The chocolate is actually rather dark and bitter and though it’s vegan (no milkfat) the cups overall aren’t because of the dairy in the white chocolate & sunflower center. The sunflower butter isn’t very sweet, so the whole cup has a much more savory appeal to it. There’s a grassy note to the sunflower which reminds me a little of jasmine tea and tahini.

I thought I was going to love the dark chocolate more than the milk chocolate, but I found both compelling for different reasons. In the milk chocolate version the milk flavors and silky textures blend together well for a decadent and rather fatty feeling treat. The dark chocolate version is deep and complex and kind of requires a little bit of attention while eating to appreciate how it all fits together.

The fact that they’re gluten free and nut free (both tree & peanut) will set these cups apart from most others right away. The milk chocolate version will be easily gobbled up by kids with allergies and sensitivities without any feeling of them getting a compromise candy. Grown ups without allergies will still appreciate the social responsibility (organic & fair trade) behind them along with the tasty ingredients. I still prefer peanut butter, as it’s a more rounded flavor, but I can’t ignore how great these are.

They might be a little hard to find, though most Whole Foods will order if they’re in the system and not on the shelves. They should be in Whole Foods (Rocky Mountain, Northwest and Bay Area) chain-wide at Pharmaca, Sunflower Markets, Cost Plus World Markets, Jimbo’s in So Cal. I still haven’t found them in stores yet, but they should retail for less than $2.00 a package. Hopefully they’ll have individually wrapped ones around for Halloween later this year.

Related Candies

1. Sunbursts Natural Mix
2. Short & Sweet: Bites & Bites
3. Super Sour Worms
4. Colt’s Bolts
5. Sjaak’s Vegan Chocolate Assortment
6. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Line
7. Chocolate Sunflower Seed Drops

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