I’ve been on a kick to find summer-friendly chocolate. M&Ms certainly fit the bill but of course that doesn’t help Candy Blog readers who are already well aware of them.

While wandering around Mel & Rose’s wide selection of imported mass-produced candies I finally found Galaxy Minstrels in single sized packs.

The package seemed light and didn’t seem to have a lot of candy in it, but I’m always game for something new to me.

Galaxy is a chocolate brand made by Mars and sold in the UK and selected parts of Europe (if the languages on the back of the package were any evidence, I’d say Greece/Cyprus and Spain). Though many folks consider Dove to be the American equivalent of Galaxy, there are a few subtle differences. (My previous Galaxy review.)

Minstrels are big, about .75 inches in diameter. They’re like giant M&Ms but the proportions are more like Nestle Smarties - a bit flatter.

All of the candies are dark brown ... no color varieties here. These are serious candies, somber and easy to pick up.

The flavor is like chocolate milk, slightly weak but sweet & rich chocolate milk. It’s not strongly chocolate ... it doesn’t even have a distinct cocoa flavor, it’s more about milk. The crunch of the shell is good - crispy and without any additional flavors (like I experience with Smarties, which have a bit of a Cheerios flavor).

They’re completely different from M&Ms as far as I’m concerned, they’re more like white chocolate than milk chocolate. Looking at the ingredients list I can see that they’re not even qualified to be called chocolate in the United States, which has more stringent standards than the UK, which allows vegetable fat and whey - though it still has a strong proportion of cocoa butter as it is the second ingredient. (I’m lumping this in both the mockolate and chocolate categories.)

They’re really nice, I had two packages and ate both. There’s a slight malty tone to it, it’s milky without being sticky sweet like Cadbury and of course the bold disks make them fun to play with. If these were widely available, I’d certainly pick them up regularly, especially to pair with pretzels, Sugar Babies and almonds for a summer trail snack.

I mentioned last week that Cadbury in the UK is going Fair Trade; Galaxy in the UK is moving towards certification with the Rainforest Alliance for sustainable cocoa growing.

Related Candies

1. M&Ms Premiums
2. Head to Head: M&Ms vs Koppers Milkies
3. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
4. M&Ms Line
5. Revels
6. Mars Maltesers

The Werther’s Original line has really expanded over the past few years. Known best for their classic toffee/hard caramel candies they’ve expanded into caramels and chocolate. Their newest product, Caramel Dreams combines the two.

The package says: Rich Creamy Caramel Covered in Smooth European Chocolate.

The bag is an interesting soft matte mylar. My bag was puffed up from a lot of air, which I assumed was to like the air in a bag of potato chips - meant to protect the contents from getting smashed. And it did its job well. Each little piece I picked out looked pretty close to perfect.

Each little molded chocolate is wrapped in the classic golden folk/cellophane wrapper that Werther’s is known for.

They smell a little milky, a bit like Cadbury chocolate. The caramel center is quite liquid and gooey, so I don’t recommend biting into them expecting a chewy caramel. They’re best enjoyed popping the whole thing in the mouth.

The caramel center is smooth, a bit thick & sticky with a slight salty note to it. It’s more on the milky side of caramel than toasted sugar flavors.

They’re very pretty, well crafted and decently priced. If you’re a fan of Rolos, Cadbury Caramello or Dove Promises Caramels you might also find these to your liking. I think I’ll stick to See’s or perhaps something a little more nutty like Snickers for my caramel needs or just some Sugar Babies.

The other varieties in this line are CaraMelts and Caramel Mousse. (Candy For Dinner has photos of CaraMelts & Caramel Mousse.)

Related Candies

1. Caramilk Deluxe
2. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels
3. Big Mo’ Bars: Peanut Butter & Creamy Caramel
4. Dove Promises (Caramel & Almonds)
5. Werther’s Original Chewy Caramels
6. Sugar Babies
7. Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels
8. Head to Head: Rolo vs Caramel Kisses

When I reviewed the upcoming Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces, I didn’t realize how crowded the field of dark chocolate lentils was getting.

Mars has expanded their line of M&Ms Premiums (which is barely a year old) with a new variety: M&Ms Premium Dark Chocolate.

The package calls them deeply decadent, rich and intense dark chocolate. They do look deep and dark, the package is a stirring red and brown affair that really jumped off the shelf at me at Target last week.

Like many mass-marketed dark chocolates these days the semi-sweet chocolate is more than cocoa beans, sugar, emulsifiers and vanilla. Inside these little morsels are three different kinds of dairy: milkfat, skim milk and lactose.

The deep maroon/purple metallic coating looks like food (the blue almond ones don’t actually look like something you’re supposed to eat, they look like fingernail polish).

As a solid chocolate piece, they’re not terribly large like some of the other layered versions, most are about the same size as the Peanut Butter M&Ms.

The scent is a soft cocoa, sweet and woodsy. It’s a mellow chocolate with a decent soft melt, but a not-quite-smooth texture. It’s a little chalky and has a bit of a dry aftertaste. They’re pleasant and certainly attractive but don’t quite hit me with a strong premium taste or texture. (This is the hazard of eating stuff like this after an Amano bar and an Askinosie.)

They don’t taste that different from the Dark Chocolate M&Ms either, they just lack that crunchy shell, so they’re a bit less sweet. (There’s also salt in there.)

They’re a great candy to chose for aesthetics over taste, but I admit that the field of good chocolate in lentil form is pretty narrow. (If you’re really looking for great little morsels, go for the Valrhona, they’re not little tiny pieces but they are awesome.)

Related Candies

1. Limited Edition M&Ms Coconut
2. M&Ms Memorable Moments (Disney)
3. Head to Head: M&Ms vs Koppers Milkies
4. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
5. Peruvian Candies
6. M&Ms Line

The trend for small batch chocolate with single origin beans is well established now. The newest twist is the creation of milk chocolate. While I’ve found myself particularly attracted to Ocumare sourced beans no matter who makes the bar, I was curious how it would rank once Amano made their Ocumare Handcrafted Milk Chocolate.

Dark chocolate has fewer ingredients which means it’s more about the beans, but with milk chocolate there that whole milk factor to take into account - is it fatty, is it tangy, is it malty?

The ingredients here show that the Ocumare Milk is 30% minimum cacao content. The list goes like this: cocoa beans, pure cane sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk powder and whole vanilla beans.

The milk is pretty low on the list and looking at the bar it’s pretty easy to see that, it’s a rather dark bar, darker looking than some actual dark chocolates.

The scent is woodsy, a bit tangy with a whiff of malt and grasses.

The snap is bright and distinct, but the bite is soft. The chocolate melts quickly into a slick & creamy puddle on my tongue. There’s a cooling texture to it, it’s sweet but not sticky or cloying like many milk chocolates can be.

There’s a dark note to it and that same sort of cashew nuttiness that I’ve noticed in other Ocumare chocolate bars.

It’s a very satisfying milk chocolate, so smooth and silky that I ate this much quicker than I’m able to do with regular dark bars.

It’s an expensive proposition, the bars are only 2 ounces and I picked this one up at Mel & Rose’s for $6.50 ... a bit more than I’m willing to pay for a regular snack.

(Allergen notes: though there’s no soy lecithin in the chocolate, it was made on equipment that process soy, peanuts and tree nuts.)

Related Candies

1. Amano Jembrana
2. Askinosie Chocolate
3. Amadei
4. Domori Cru
5. MarieBelle Mayan Chocolate Bar (no sugar added)
6. Amano Single Origin Bars: Madagascar & Ocumare
7. CocoaBella - The Night of the Chocolate Hangover

I’m really digging Wonka’s new look and commercials. They take advantage of candy’s inventiveness and imaginative ways that kids (and adults) look at it.

One of their new candies is Puckerooms Sour Gummy Candy. They’re sour gummies (unlike the Sluggles, which are sweet gummies) in mushroom shapes and three different flavors.

The new Wonka’s Edible Garden are made with natural ingredients, including fruit juice and no artificial colorings or flavorings. (But of course they’re gummis and are not vegetarian since they use gelatin ... and in this case cochineal color, too.)

There are three flavors and three different shapes (though the shapes are applied to all the flavors):

Cherry - as you can see from the photo, I found a grape & cherry combo, but for the most part the cherry ones were single flavored. It’s a tart cherry with a black cherry darkness beneath but a lingering sour. It got my glands a’tinglin’.

Grape - it’s just so fun for me to have grape gummis, I have a hard time focusing on these for the review. The grape flavor is much like concord grape jam with Pixy Stix poured over it. (Come on, if you’d thought of it as a kid, you would have loved it!)

Lemon/Orange - I loved the look of these, the orange was always on the top, making the stem lemon. The flavors were a good blend of citrus zest and of course a sour punch that lasted beyond the grainy coating and permeated the soft gummi. The lemon and orange were distinct but blended well.

The sourness isn’t blisteringly strong, in fact, I found them barely more tart than the Sluggles, just more consistently tangy from start to finish.

I like the option of really potent gummis made without artificial flavors & colors, so these are real winners. I saw them at Target over the weekend for $1.59 for a 6.5 ounce bag, so it’s not like parents need to compromise here - the kids get a mainstream treat without going to a special store. (Of course that doesn’t mean adults can’t enjoy them.)

UPDATE 11/2/2010: It appears that many folks shared their phallic views with Nestle and they updated both the package and the shapes of the actual candy.

The package is mostly green instead of purple. The Wonka name is minimized and the name of the candy is more focused on Sour Puckerooms Gummies where it was originally just called Puckerooms with a descriptive logline of sour gummy candy below that. I do like the typography on the word Puckerooms better on the new version.

The new shapes are such a compromise from the earlier, well defined mushrooms that they’re mere shadows of the shapes they once were. There are really only two shapes, the pointier one is now gone. There are two slightly different rounded ones with wide round caps and wide bases and then the narrower stemmed one with a wide cap. On the package they look distinctive. In real life they’re

So, there you go. Wonka is receptive to your ideas.

Related Candies

1. Wonka Kazoozles: Cherry Punch & Pink Lemonade
2. New Flavors: Skittles Sour & Wonka Runts
3. Trader Joe’s Gummy Tummies
4. Wonka Tinglerz & Nestle Buncha Crunch
5. Organic Zootons
6. Super Sour Worms
7. Organic Surf Sweets

Cadbury is a dominant chocolate brand around the world. (See this article from Business Week that shows it as the #2 chocolate on the planet.)

What’s especially fun about Cadbury chocolate is the little variations depending on the country. One of those is the Australian set of candy bars. I picked up this single serve bar of Dairy Milk Snack after seeing it in Sera’s photo stream last year (I didn’t really want the big size bar).

It’s a simple concept - a segmented bar with different flavored fillings in each piece. (Note that the large bar has only five segments.)

The first thing that sets this little bar apart is that each piece is coded with the contents. Though the package didn’t say what the fillings are (and please, why?) I did figure out the pineapple one immediately and took a good guess at the strawberry and orange.

The flavors in all are: caramel, pineapple, coconut ice (I have no idea what that is), strawberry, Turkish delight and orange.

My bar was fresh, unmarred and in great condition.

Caramel - I thought it’d be like the Caramello, but it’s a little firmer, a little thicker. The chocolate outside is rather strange - it has a good snap, but not a very good melt. It’s a bit stiff, a little chalky. The flavor is recognizably Cadbury with a strong powdered milk flavor and a gentle malty cocoa taste.

Pineapple - has a light tangy pineapple scent. The fondant is thick, it has a good sheen to it, but it doesn’t flow. The flavor is sweet and has a tangy pineapple bite. It’s an odd combination with the musky chocolate, but I enjoyed the change of pace.

Coconut Ice - honestly I don’t know what this is. It’s pink and it’s crumbly and has a slight sweet flavor that I can’t quite place. If it’s supposed to be coconut, it’s missing that completely.

Strawberry - the fondant is smooth, but a little more crumbly than the pineapple. Fragrant and floral, there’s not tart component. Rather authentic tasting and pleasant.

Turkish Delight - wow, they went all out for the rose here. The texture is quite soft, more like a jelly than a firm paste. The floral notes are pungent with a slight tangy middle note that dissipates quickly. I rather liked it, but I can tell that this would be quite off-putting for many Americans and other cultures not accustomed to floral flavors.

Orange - I had hoped this would be the winner piece, but I found it rather bland. The fondant was too firm and lacking a distinctive zest.

Just as a little touchstone, I picked up an American Cadbury Dairy Milk bar to compare the flavors, and I do find that I prefer the stickier, fudgier texture of the Hershey-made version, but that may just be what I’m accustomed to.

It’s a fun bar and honestly I’d probably enjoy a whole bar of the pineapple or Turkish delight, the rest of the flavors just didn’t feel like they were the best that Cadbury could muster. (I know they can do better with the caramel & chocolate combination.) For the money, especially since I’m paying import prices, if I felt like boxed chocolate candy, I’d be better off getting some Russell Stover or finding a See’s or I’d probably even choose a Whitman’s Sampler of this.

One of the best things I can say about Cadbury right now is that they’re making a huge effort to go Fair Trade with their chocolate though it’s going to be a long process.

Some other reviews: Jim’s Chocolate Mission, Chocolate Reviews,  Sera at The Candy Enthusiast.

Related Candies

1. Cadbury Crunchie
2. KitKat Temptations: Hazelnut & Coconut
3. Cadbury Eggs: Creme & Caramel
4. Necco Sky Bar
5. Cadbury Twirl and Snow Flake
6. Violet Crumble

Hershey’s has an expansive line of individually wrapped chocolate pieces: Kisses, Miniatures and the Nuggets line.

This new product for the Nuggets line is called Double Chocolate Nuggets:

Hershey’s gives you the best of both worlds with Double Chocolate Nuggets. It’s the perfect combination of Hershey’s Extra Creamy Milk Chocolate and Special Dark Mildly Sweet Chocolate, giving you a delicious taste experience.

I’ve mentioned before that I actually like the nugget format. I like a deep bite, especially for a layered product or one that has inclusions (which is why I thought those Cookies ‘n’ Mint Nuggets were so great).

These little blocks have a distinct scent - it’s both the sweet cocoa smell of the Special Dark and the tangy milk chocolate that made Hershey’s famous.

Biting into it right side up I got the slightly chalky taste of the Special Dark first, which has a dry and mellow chocolate bite to it but a thin & watery melt. Then the “extra creamy” milky chocolate, which has a yogurty dairy flavor that give it more of a fudge taste than a deep milk chocolate note. (I really don’t get how this can be considered extra creamy.)

The effect of it all isn’t good nor bad, it just is. I can’t say that I’ve longed for a combination product before, so it’s not like I was anticipating this.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces
2. Hershey’s Kisses: Chocolate Meltaway
3. Ghirardelli Luxe Milk
4. Scharffen Berger Dark Milk (68%)
5. Choceur Coffee & Cream
6. M&Ms Premiums
7. Kisses Chocolate Truffles

There are scents that I regard as pleasant and summery and strawberry-banana is pretty high up there. It’s light, fruity & floral but has a sweet kick to it that I can almost taste when I smell it.

Yogen Fruz is a high-concept frozen yogurt & smoothie chain that began in Toronto and now has over 1,000 stores in 20 countries. In this case it’s the smoothies that have been turned into a line of little candies.

The little tin I picked up of the Yogen Fruz Smoothies Strawberry Banana smelled very strong. Even before I took off the plastic overwrap, I had to keep it in a ziploc bag.

Aside from the blastingly strong scent, the ingredients are pretty positive: pure cane sugar, yogurt, tartaric acid, malic acid, natural strawberry and banana flavors, ascorbic acid and natural color.

Though they’re made with nice ingredients, they’re basically a “tablet candy”, much like a SweeTart though not dextrose-based. They come in a tin, the same one, as far as I can tell, that Godiva uses for their Chocoiste Pearls but in this case I had no trouble with opening & closing it.

The little tablets have the umlauted U on them (that conveniently looks like a very big smile) with a light pink speckling. They’re immediately tangy on the tongue and dissolve a little unevenly. It’s both lightly sour and has that yogurt twang.

I thought the taste was vibrant and even a bit unique. If you’re looking for an all-natural SweeTart-like product then this is a nice idea though certainly quite expensive.

These are made in Canada by Big Sky Brands, who also make the Jones Soda candies.