Limited Edition Coconut M&Ms

Lynnafred's been keeping an eye open for Coconut M&Ms ever since she first found out that this new limited-edition flavor was being released. Last week, she finally found them for sale in a CVS in Salem MA. We gave them a try.

Dave says:

The picture on the front of the bag fooled me - I thought there would be chocolate inside, with a coconut around it, and then the famous M&M candy shell around that. But instead, we found otherwise-standard M&Ms loaded with artificial coconut flavor. No actual coconut at all.

Although artificial, they're not bad. The coconut flavor is strong and also rather delicious paired with the chocolate. I laughed when we poured out a handful of the candies, though. Unlike standard M&Ms, which are so uniformly sized you could base a system of measurment upon them, coconut M&Ms are all sort of random sizes, from the small lentil-shaped traditional size and shape up to big blobby-looking ones. They all have the "m" on them. Some of them have other decorations, too, like little palm trees and such.

Strange sizing aside, though, I'd buy them again. They're good and they deliver coconut flavor without filling my mouth with annoying shredded-coconut "hairs." I hate the texture of shredded coconut. It gets all over my tongue.

Lynnafred says:

When I finally found my delicious coconut M&Ms, I was pretty pleased. I've never seen them around here, and still haven't, but keep an active lookout for them.

Like Dave said above, there was no actual coconut in the M&Ms, and artificial flavor was actually the last ingredient on the list. (It was even behind the seemingly never-ending list of dyes that are used to color the candy shells!) That surprised me because the coconut flavor in them was pretty strong, and actually stronger than I expected.

But unlike Dave, I noticed two distinct layers of chocolate when I bit my first few M&Ms in half - a harder, more standard chocolate outer layer, and a softer, inner layer where I'm guessing the coconut flavor was hidden. (I noticed this because I always bite my M&Ms in half. Dave doesn't. He just pops the damn things in his mouth and OM NOM NOMs. When you do that, you miss the carefully constructed subtlety of the layers.)

All in all, though, these were pretty decent, and a refreshing addition to the M&Ms line. It's unfortunate that these are a limited time deal: if they were permanent and more widely distributed, I'd pick them up whenever I really wanted a chocolate fix.

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