One of the great new products I picked up in San Francisco last weekend was the new Akoma Extra Semisweet Chocolate Chips from Guittard. They’re Fair Trade certified from beans sourced from West Africa (one of the hotspots of poor working and wage conditions for plantation workers).

Unlike the standard Guittard semisweet chips, these are 55% cacao ... just a smidge darker than the usual chips. They come in a sassy metallic pink package instead of the also-easy-to-spot gold package for regular Guittard Dark Chocolate Chips.

The chips have a nice rounded chocolate flavor. Some strong berry notes, a little light smokiness and a good creamy melt. They maintain their shape when baked, as all good chips do. The ingredients are pretty simple as well: cacao beans (fair trade certified), sugar, soy lecithin and real vanilla.

I haven’t seen them in stores in Southern California yet, but you can definitely buy them at Chocosphere for the same price as their regular chips. So good fuzzy feelings for Fair Trade and still a decent price.

My choice to make something with these for Thanksgiving was a Cardamom, Orange & Chocolate Bread Pudding.

Dice the peel of the orange and place in a microwave safe cup with 1 cup of milk with five crushed cardamom pods. Microwave until warm, stir and let sit for 30 minutes, then stir again and heat again. This can be done a day ahead of time and refrigerated (this will make the orange peel especially soft).

In a sauce pan put the 1 cup of pre-made milk mix (dig out the cardamom pods) along with the other 3 cups of milk, sugar and the loosely beaten eggs. Clean and crush the cardamom in a mortar & pestle. Add to the mix, warm over low heat.

Put half of the bread into the bottom of the baking pan. Add half of the milk/egg mixture to the pan. Stir to combine and get the bread soaked. Take half of the chips and cover the egg/bread mixture. Then put the rest of the bread into the saucepan to get it completely wet. Add that to the top of the baking pan. Sprinkle more chips on top.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 40 minutes. The pudding will pull away from the sides when done and the center won’t move. It’s a pretty dry bread pudding, so try it warm with a little milk or perhaps some ice cream or whipped cream.

Related Candies

1. Mary Jane’s Bread Pudding
2. Elvis Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Cup
3. Chocolate Hellfire Chip Cookies
4. Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews
5. Panda Bars

On my recent trip to San Francisco I was excited to check out the licorice assortments at both Miette Patissiere and The Candy Store, as both were known for their large variety for sale. I wasn’t disappointed at all! (The only sad part was that they were $12 a pound.)

Fruit Filled Rockies - these are gorgeous little nibbles. The dark licorice tube is filled with a firm fondant-style fruit creme. Not quite sweet, they do have a salty bite through and through. There are two different pinks there, one raspberry and the lighter one is, as far as I can tell, orange. The brown one is more smoky, with a strong salty component. 6 out of 10

Schoolkrijt by Venco (Netherlands) is a very common licorice in Europe, kind of like our Good & Plenty but much milder. It’s much like the Rockies, in that it’s a tube of licorice filled with a creme. Then the whole thing is panned with a crunchy mint shell.

The flavor combo is kind of medicinal, like a cough drop, but I rather like that. Peppermint, licorice and some molasses. I’ve had these a couple of times before, but this particular sampling was very fresh. The outside was crisp and the inside was soft and chewy.

UPDATE: Seems I couldn’t get these out of my mind and have bought at least two pounds (not at once) since this review for personal consumption. So the rating gets updated to a 9 out of 10

Griotten by Venco (Netherlands) were completely new to me. If I’ve seen these before I’ve completely blocked them out. They look like little raw sugar cubes, but pick one up and it’s too light for that. Why, it’s a little spongy too!

It’s like a cross between a marshmallow and a gummi. Soft and chewy, but not too dense or tacky.

The flavor is mild, with only a delicate hit of licorice and anise and not terribly sweet either with a mix of the grainy sugar coating and a little salt. 7 out of 10

Heksehyl Zoete are also something that I’ve never tried before. Kind of a baby step in the licorice world, they’re more of a molasses candy than a licorice one.

The smoky molasses is a good background for the light licorice flavor. No salt here, just a light coating of sugar to pull it all together. Very soft, very chewy. Kind of chocolatey. 7 out of 10

Kokindjes (Netherlands) were one of the few salty licorices I picked up.

The cute little buttons are nice and soft. While I like a hard glycerine-style licorice sometimes (Katjes), I really enjoy the chew of licorice as a feature. As a lightly salted licorice, it was very mild, but I was disappointed that it didn’t have a huge licorice kick.

There was a slight metallic tinge for me and a fleeting glimpse of damp cat-inhabited basements. 5 out of 10

Honey Tops (Netherlands) were the one piece that I thought was one that I’d had before, it didn’t look quite the same, not quite as amber and there is no bee on this hive. The flavor is a round with only the slightest honey tint, some mild licorice (no anise). They’re pretty firm. These and the Kokindjes were the last ones I finished. 5 out of 10

(I was guessing at the brands here based on who sells what. There could be other companies that make these same varieties.)

For at least a year I’ve been reading about Hotel Chocolat on Chocablog. The products seemed inventive, if a little over the top. But the company story, the fact that they’re bean to bar and pride themselves on sourcing their chocolate ethically is pretty compelling. While I love many of the fair trade chocolates that I try, I really want some chocolate candy sometimes.

Hotel Chocolat contacted me a couple of months ago with the news that they were opening a webstore in the US. So I could get my own taste of their product line. At first they offered to send me a sample package with their Peepsters, which were little slabs of chocolate with items mixed in. For some reason that wasn’t possible and they up and sent me the Crostini Fruit & Nut Slab and a bag of Macadamia Turtles. (Neither of these items are available on their website.)

The American website focuses on images of folks with great skin using chocolate as seduction (probably successfully since by the time you get to the Christmas chocolate there’s one image that shows the “couple” with a small child). Their products seem designed to entice with sensuality and abundance. Instead of teensy pieces with cute little images molded into them or imprinted on the top, Hotel Chocolat goes whole hog with clear plastic packages that show off vast real estate of chocolate. Images on the website reinforce this with couples sharing bites of bars of chocolate larger than their head.

While the marketing of their products doesn’t quite mesh with my demographic, I am certainly interested in quality and flavor/texture combinations. I also enjoy innovative styling and packaging.

The Slab of Chocolate comes in a black paper package with a clear plastic front and a carrying handle (though be aware that the package opens on the bottom ... so reseal it completely before swinging it around). A little longer than a size of A4 paper, this is a substantial piece of chocolate. Clocking in at 500 grams (17.5 ounces) the abundance is a selling point.

This beefy slab had some uneven distribution of the mix-ins. It includes: cranberries, sultanas, crunchy crostini, almonds and hazelnuts. (You can see in the photo that the corners are sadly lacking in inclusions. While this gives it an artisan quality, it also meant that sometimes I had to break off more pieces in order to get to the ones with the “stuff.”

At first I was disappointed that they sent me milk chocolate products, but this is pretty dark milk. According to the package it’s 50% cocoa solids and 20% milk. It has an authentic milkiness to it (none of that powdered dairy tastes). It’s middle of the road as chocolate flavors go, not terribly complex, just good chocolatey-chocolate. My candy dream! A nice melt, not too sweet and a good complement to the tangy sultanas & cranberries. The hazelnuts were great, the almond slivers were few and far between but the crostini were fun when I encountered them.

The retail on this product is $25 plus shipping. Not too bad for an upscale chocolate bar.

The other product they included was a bag of these cute little Macadamia Turtles. I love turtles! Caramel and nuts are a fantastic combination.

But wait a second ... these aren’t American-style turtles. There’s no caramel in there. Just a macadamia nut at the center and some crisps in the milk chocolate. The whole thing does look rather like a turtle though.

After I got over my resistance to them because of the name, they were fun. The same high cacao milk chocolate, a good bit of crunch and then the fresh macadamias. (I would probably opt for another nut in the future though.)

I’m certainly curious to give some of the other Hotel Chocolat items a try, their gift packages look especially interesting. (They’ve timed their launch for the winter Holidays.) I don’t know if I’d buy the slab though, it’s an awful lot of one thing and I gravitate more towards variety when trying a new brand. It’s certainly an impressive looking gift though! The shipping box was great, nicely packaged for the warmish weather, I have to mention that because some companies just don’t “get” how to ship chocolate products to Los Angeles.

The package says that the product is suitable for vegetarians and is alcohol free.

More on the Hotel Chocolat expansion into the US market here.

Related Candies

1. Charles Chocolates Bars
2. Chuao Chocolatier
3. Jacques Torres
4. MarieBelle Chocolates
5. Scharffen Berger - Cacao Nibs

As a kid I loved Ice Cubes. They’re little squares of hazelnut mockolate. Their unique selling proposition included the fact that they were individual pieces that sold for 10 cents a piece and had a wild, cool feeling on the tongue when they melted instantly.

I remember buying them at the student union on the Kent State University campus when I was a kid waiting for my mother to be done with classes or my father to be done with work. (I usually panhandled to get the money to buy them, I was pretty shameless in the lengths I would go to get my fix.) Later when I was in college on my own I would use my meal points at the Jolly Giant Commons to buy these by the tub.

The little candies have been around since the mid-thirties, made in Germany by a small company called Nappo and sold by Albert’s in the States. They’re similar to the Caffarel Gianduia, except for the fact that they’re made with partially hydrogenated coconut oil instead of nut paste and chocolate.

I was really excited to find these looking so smart and crisp at The Candy Store in San Francisco on Friday. I see them every once in a while, but they always look sad and melted. The Candy Store had a whole jar of pristine looking Ice Cubes in both wrappers (they’re switching to a gold wrapper from the traditional blue and white so there’s a crossover right now).

They don’t smell like much, a little sweet, a little nutty, but nothing like chocolate. They have a soft bite and an immediate hit of cool on the tongue. They melt quickly (as partially hydrogenated coconut oil has a melting point of 76 degrees F) and have a decent mix of nutty flavors, a little milkiness and a little hit of cocoa. A little grainy, they’re not quite as good as I remember.

Now, for the sobering part. Read the ingredients: partially hydrogenated coconut oil, sugar, low fat cocoa, dried sweet whey, soy flour, hazelnut paste, soy lecithin, artificial vanilla flavor.

There is no nutritional info included with these, but this page tells me that just one of them is 22% of my daily value of saturated fat (65 calories).

So while I enjoyed this little trip back in time to taste those little cubes of obsession and trans fats, now that I’m all grown up and have found good sources of candy, I don’t think I’ll ever eat these again now that I’ve found Caffarel Gianduias. (The traditional ones are perfect, the novelty shaped ones are fun & make a cute stocking stuffer.) In fact, at The Candy Store the price for Caffarel and Ice Cubes was identical ... 75 cents each. I bought a handful of Fig and Chestnut ones ... something I’ll feel a little less guilty about eating.

Related Candies

1. Milka Alpenmilch
2. Nutpatch Nougats
3. Ferrero Mon Cheri
4. Lake Champlain Hazelnut Eggs
5. Scharffen Berger Gianduja

There’s rarely anything “new” in hard candy, so I was pleased to see Brach’s has a new assortment of hard candies called Soda Poppers.

They boast real fruit juice and come in four licensed soda flavors (from Cadbury Schweppes): A&W Root Beer, Doctor Pepper, Orange Crush & 7-Up.

Rather than just being a mix of hard candies in soda flavors, the twist on these is that they’re shaped like little cans and feature a firm goo center. (There’s no carbonation, though.)

I’m a hard candy cruncher, so I liked that I could crunch these pretty quickly and get a whole new texture. They were kind of sticky once crunched, but I don’t mind digging piece of hard candy off my teeth as an afternoon diversion.

Like the assortment that Jelly Belly has called Soda Pop Shoppe, there’s no cola in this mix. Strange, as that’s one of the flavors that’s unique to the carbonated drink arena (besides Dr. Pepper).

Would I buy these again? Probably not. I prefer the simple root beer barrel, lemon drop or orange slice. If they managed to get a cola flavor in the mix, well, now then we’d have something! As a flavor mix and the fact that they added the chewy jelly filling, well, it certainly changes the ordinary hard candy idea on its head. These are being sold in bulk in Pick a Mix and in small bags (I think 7 ounces).

Of note: Brach’s was recently sold by French chocolate company Barry Callebaut to Farley’s & Sathers (which itself is made up of a bunch of other candy companies rolled into one: Heide, Trolli, Farley’s, Sathers, Bob’s, Now & Laters and RainBlo gum). These candies were made in Argentina.

Related Candies

1. Kenny’s Licorice Pastels & Root Beer Twists
2. Soda Can Fizzy Candy
3. Ramune & Cola Bubble Ball
4. Bottlecaps

Earlier this summer I reviewed one of the classic movie candies, Jujyfruits. While I’ve always been fond of the idea of them, and think that when they’re fresh they’re quite fun, they never had quite enough flavor for me.

Enter Heide’s newest addition to the Jujyfruit family (which as far as I know is an only child), the Sour Jujyfruits. (I’m not sure how long these have been on the market.)

The most significant difference between these and the regular Jujyfruit is the flavor set: Lime, Grape, Lemon, Raspberry and Orange. The licorice has been replaced with grape (and for obvious reasons, while some may enjoy a salty licorice, I don’t know of any sour licorice candies).

The shapes are the same though, with each color coming in all the vegetable and fruits.

And like Jujyfruits which sport a rather out-of-step package design (what’s with that font?) this package also has some cartoon kids sporting sour pusses. I’m not sure who they’re trying to appeal to.

Out of the package, they’re not quite as pretty as their original mellow counterparts. They have a sanding of sour & sugar. It’s not unattractive, by any means, but not quite the same as the soft translucence of the originals.

They’re also a lot moister. Granted, these come in a plastic pack instead of a box which I imagine allows for some drying. These are quite soft, though not as soft as Sour Patch Kids (and also just a denser shape).

The flavors are good.

The raspberry is strong and tart with a good floral counterpart.

The lemon has a great zesty essence along with the sour burst.

The grape is okay, it reminds me a lot of concord grape juice, which is a really nice change from the SweeTart grape that usually tastes like blue pen ink.

Orange is sassy with similar zest components as the lemon.

The lime is probably the weakest of the set of flavors, but still holds its own.

Overall, I like them. I like the variety of the shapes, I like the colors and the flavors and would really enjoy these as a movie snack. The production on them wasn’t quite as top notch as Jujyfruits. There were a few that were not quite the right shape or conjoined. But of course Jujyfruits are pretty inexpensive, so I can forgive that for a bag that I’m paying about a buck fifty for.

Has anyone seen them in stores?

Related Candies

1. Jujyfruits & Jujubes
2. Sour Patch Kids
3. Giant Pixy Stix
4. Airheads Xtreme Sour Belts

Peeps have become a large brand unto themselves. A huge line of products that includes the familiar marshmallow and has even branched out into lollipops.

Marshmallow purists probably don’t think much of flavored marshmallows, in fact I don’t usually care much for them beyond the kiss of honey or toasted sugar notes.

But Peeps Peppermint Marshmallow Stars have changed that. They’re light, peppermint flavored marshmallows, just in time for Christmas.

The stars are very puffy and fluffy. The outer sugar coating seems to be well adhered, I’m guessing the flat surfaces have a lot to do with this. The whole marshmallow is peppermint flavored, rather strongly and the pink peppermint sparkle-flakes are also strong peppermint.

If I had any complaints at all about these it’s that they didn’t get stale very easily. I opened a package last week and left it open, but the marshmallow is still rather soft and only slightly tacky. It gives it a nice chew, but I was hoping for something a little drier.

I actually ate a whole tray of these.

And then read the ingredients to see that they contain Sucralose and AceK. Sigh ... artificial sweeteners. (It said less than .5% of the candy was composed of these, but when sucralose is 600 times sweeter than sugar, they don’t need to put much in and it did shave 20 calories off the total for a serving compared to a regular Peep.) I felt really betrayed, though I can only blame myself for not reading the ingredients completely before eating them. (I did have a stomach ache for the rest of the morning, but that could have been caused by, well, eating a tray of marshmallows for breakfast or the ibuprofen I’ve been popping lately.) I thought they were really tasty and I would actually buy these and eat these again if they didn’t have those artificial sweeteners. I just have to ask ... why?

I can’t figure out how to rate them now. I was all set to give them an 8 out of 10. For now I’m going to give them a 6 out of 10.

Here’s X-Entertainment’s review and Candy Addict’s.

Related Candies

1. Peeps Monster Mash Ups
2. Peeps Spooky Friends
3. Peeps Mash Ups
4. Peeps Lollipop Rings
5. Frankford Marshmallow Hearts
6. Peeps

I’ve talked a lot over the years about Candy Season and the accompanying seasonal candies that go with each. Slowly the candy companies are seeing that those seasonal favorites can be re-purposed into other seasons. Just like M&Ms are found in color combos for every time of the year and Russell Stover is making a marshmallow-filled pumpkin, Santa and egg, it seems that Cadbury doesn’t want anyone to miss out on incorporating their egg-shaped candies into the major holidays.

This is where the Cadbury Ornament Creme Egg comes in. It’s just a Cadbury Creme Egg with a red foil wrapper.

It seems silly, but I’m going to re-review these, even though they’re no different than the Easter version. However, the last time I ate one was back in ‘06 when they were 1.38 ounces. This made for a very large reservoir of fondant ... which is not my favorite part of the Cadbury Creme Egg. (My favorite part of the Cadbury Creme Egg, for the record, was the clucking bunny commercial.) The more recent version is 1.2 ounces.

The egg has a wonderful sweet dairy chocolate smell to it that reminded me of powdered milk. Both of mine had a small sticky problem around the seam (and I tried to hard to pick good ones).

The nose cone of both seemed extremely thick, which gave a good dose of chocolate to the otherwise too-sweet fondant density.

The fondant creme center is sweet, it’s nice and smooth indicating its freshness (an old Creme Egg will have a slight grain to the fondant). But really, it’s just a big hunk of sugar, and while I often enjoy big hunks of sugar (rock candy anyone?), I still felt a little too much of a sugar rush aftewards.

I think I prefer the smaller one. I’d love it if they made a mint one (and I did find the orange one a bit better). That said, it’s still not a favorite of mine. But I’m sure fans of the Creme Egg will be happy to see it now as their stockpiles from Easter are probably long gone.

While I can fault them for doing nothing more than slapping a different color wrapper on it and the word “ornament” to make it a Christmas product, I did find that making the Mini Eggs into little spheres for their new Christmas thingies  did actually muck with perfection.

Related Candies

1. Cadbury Ornament Creme Egg
2. Cadbury Canadian Creme Eggs
3. Cadbury Christmas Candy Thingies
4. Cadbury Eggs: Creme & Caramel