The Mystery of Smarties

So, Halloween has come and gone, and once again I'm left with a gigantic bowl of leftover candy. There are a lot of kids in my neighborhood and the weather was fairly decent, so I thought there'd be a good trickertreat turnout, but alas, only a dozen or so groups of kids.

Most of the leftover stuff will get piled in the breakroom at work for the ravenous jackals there, but not the Smarties. Everyone in the family poked through the leftovers, and almost universally said, "Oh, good! you didn't give away all the Smarties!" 

Smarties are billed by their manufacturer as 'America's Favorite Candy Roll," which could be true I guess, although Tootsie Roll might dispute that. Actually, I hope they do dispute it, Smarties were invented in 1949, making them 65 years old; Tootsie came around in 1896. I say we give them each a sword and let them slash it out at the neighborhood Senior Center. 

This would bring in a fortune on Pay Per View.

Anyway, I mentioned "The Mystery of Smarties." Lynnafred was the one who first pointed it out to me. She was sorting a roll of Smarties by color so she could eat the white ones - her favorites - last.  I have to admit, I do the exact same thing (could Smarties preference be genetic??) Mindful of Kellogg's fessing up that all Froot Loops cereal colors were actually the same flavor, I said that the white ones were my faves, too, but I've never been able to really tell them apart other than the fact that the white Smarties seemed to be more citrusy and "brightly" flavored than the others.

And so I made up my mind to really concentrate on the flavor of different colored Smarties, to see if I could discern something more than "the white ones are pretty damn good and I'm not too crazy about the green ones." With little piles of the different colors in front of me, I started to deliberately taste each color.

Nope. Sorry. I got a vaguely citrusy/vanilla taste from the whites and a whiff of pineapple from the yellows, and a warbly, indistinct "fruity" flavor from all the rest except orange. Orange tasted like a fainter version of the St. Joseph Children's Aspirin my mom used to give us when we were kids.

Luckily, the Smarties web site has a FAQ wherein the true flavor intentions of Smarties are revealed! According to Mr. Smartie Pants, the flavors are as follows:

White - Orange/Cream
Yellow - Pineapple
Pink - Cherry
Green - Strawberry
Purple - Grape
Orange - Orange

So...What's your favorite color Smarties?

Twilzzlers Caramel Apple Filled Twists

Candied nastiness has taken a new form and is now available as Caramel Apple flavored Filled Twizzlers, a confectionery abomination that Lynnafred came home with a few days ago.

She's long been a big fan of Twizzlers, so she was kind of excited when she presented them. "Check it out! A new kind of Twizzlers! And look, they have skin inside!" (referring to the human-flesh-colored stuff which was supposed to represent the "caramel.") Okay, so "excited" might be the wrong word.

There were four pieces in the package, one for each of us, and we all helped ourselves to one and took tentative bites.

This is, we unanimously decided, not the candy to choose if you are looking for the flavor of caramel apple.

The Twizzler part - that is, the surrounding green twisty bit - is fine as far as it goes. If you're a fan of "red licorice" you know what to expect from it, only it will be green instead of red and have a vaguely apple-ish flavor that bears little resemblance to actual apples.

But the filling is astonishing in its utter worthlessness. How hard could it have been to put something more like actual caramel inside? Caramel is cheap and common, and the technology needed to fill Twizzlers has already, obviously, been perfected. But no, Twizzlers had to go with some kind of sweetened plasticine psuedofood with a flavor eerily similar to caramel and an aftertaste strongly similar to Play-Doh.

Twizzlers should change their label for this candy. I suggest this:

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Candy Corn M&Ms

So finally, two seasons after they were introduced, I finally managed to find a bag of White Chocolate Candy Corn M&Ms. And they SUCK.

1. The only reason they're called "Candy Corn" M&Ms is because they're coated in white, yellow, or orange shells. They have no actual candy corn flavor. And they're certainly not shaped like candy corn. They're still round.
2. I doubt they're made of white chocolate. White chocolate is made with cocoa butter, which imparts a faint aroma and flavor of chocolate. There's nothing like that here. Just a cheap-ass artificial vanilla flavor that overpowers everything. It's like eating chunks of hard vanilla cake frosting.

Very disappointing, not worth the time I spent looking for them, and not worth the three bucks I paid for them.

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Terror Treats

This is exactly what I would want my kid to find in an Easter basket: brightly-colored marshmallow things screaming in horror. Thank you, Dollar Tree. You always come through for me.

Hershey's Air Delight Chocolate

If I wanted to write a three-word review of Hershey's new Air Delight chocolate, I would just type "Feh. Skip it." But as it turns out, I actually have something to say about this stuff, so here goes.

1. It's a shitty trick designed to get consumers to buy air at chocolate prices. Hershey could have done this years ago if they really wanted to - Nestle has been selling the Aero Bar in Europe for years - but with the lousy economy putting the squeeze on profits, I guess a bigger-looking bar that actually contains less chocolate was irresistible to the cocoa bean counters.

2. The texture is weird. Air Delight chocolate shatters into a grainy lattice when it is bitten and chewed (although I admit it soon melts down to regular Hershey chocolate consistency.  It's just that initial chomp that kinda skeeves me out.)

3.  When all is said and done, it's still made of Hershey chocolate. When I was a kid and the only kind of chocolate I'd ever tasted came from Hershey, I liked it well enough. But since then, I've tasted chocolate made all over the world, and there is really no comparison between a Hershey bar and chocolate made in Germany, Belgium, Italy, or Switzerland. Not only does the higher cocoa butter content in good chocolate make it melt in the mouth more smoothly than Hershey, but Hershey has a decidedly "sour" back taste that is almost cheesy.  Try a side-by-side comparison with a Hershey bar and some inexpensive German-made chocolate from ALDI. You'll be amazed.

Candy Corn M&Ms

Candy Corn M&Ms were an M&Ms "special edition" - a Walmart exclusive made up of white chocolate with white, yellow, and orange candy shells.   This isn't really a post about them, though. Call it an "anti-post," I guess, because I was never able to find the damn things during the Halloween season when they were supposed to be on the shelf.

I visited every Walmart in the area through the Halloween season and beyond,  but they were never in stock, so even though I'd love to tell you how awesome they were, it ain't gonna happen.

Now, I know that Walmart has enormous clout with manufacturers and distributors because of the huge share of the market they command, but I still hate this kind of "limited distribution" because it inevitably leaves other chunks of the market out.  I suppose I could have sent an email to Mars to request some samples, but it's not my policy to request stuff from manufacturers (though they are free to send me products unsolicited and at their own risk for review, I don't like putting my hand out.)

So I guess that's it: I don't like retailer-specific special edition items and now you know about it; rant over, the end.

Ed Hardy Rocks: Highly Caffeinated Chocolates

Have you ever had chocolate-covered coffee beans?  Starbucks sells them, and so do a lot of other, smaller coffee shops.  Pop one in your mouth and you get delicious smooth chocolate, ability-enhancing caffeine, and a mouthful of nasty-assed coffee grinds, homemade by your very own teeth, which find their way to every nook and cranny of your mouth, providing you with endless opportunities to spit out cruddy black granules all day.  It's a great idea - directly-ingestible chocolate-flavored coffee nuggets - but a horrible execution.  (But feel free to tell me in the comments how much you love them and what an asshole I am.)

But there is a BETTER WAY:  Ed Hardy Highly Caffeinated Chocolates.  

Not too long ago, I got an email from Eat Hardy LLC, asking if I'd like a sample of their Ed Hardy Rocks caffeinated candy to try.  Soon, there were small boxes of little round nuggets in my mailbox.  Lynnafred, who is able to detect chocolate the way a bloodhound can detect a chain gang escapee, had placed the package on the dining room table and was still circling it when I got home from work.

"What are THESE?" she demanded in her Chocolate Voice.

"Chocolate Rocks and Coffee Rocks, caffeinated chocolates," I said. "Wanna try 'em?" Well, of course she wanted to try them, and so did I.

The Chocolate Rocks are smooth delicious chocolate, covered with a dark brown candy coating, and spiked with caffeine. Although firm enough to crunch when bitten, there's no graininess to the chocolate, which melts deliciously in the mouth with a rich flavor somewhere between milk and dark chocolate.  Coffee Rocks are similar, but with a flavor more like mocha-tinged espresso, deep and slightly bitter.  Lynnafred chose the Chocolate as her favorite; I was more partial to the coffee. Either way, they're high-quality confectionary, and you can enjoy them without filling your mouth with coffee grounds like some old percolator basket.

And what about the caffeine, you ask?  Well, five Rocks carry the gentle eye-opening properties of a single cup of Joe, but there are more than five Rocks in a box.  I forget just how many, unfortunately, but let's just say it's a good-sized handful.  And the people at Eat Hardy LLC are refreshingly up-front with their nutritional information.  They know that most people aren't going to stop at five candies, especially when using them as a delicious way to pull an all-nighter, so they come right out and say that the serving size is "1 box."  Good for them, it's about time there was some common sense out there.

Yes, these are totally eye-opening and awesome. You can find them, I presume, at any of the Ed Hardy stores sprinkled around the country, or you can order them online (click here.)

Assorted Mexican Candy

Left to right: Duvalin, Pica Fresa, Mangopers lollipops

So, the other day I made this huge mistake and bought an assortment of Mexican candy from T J Maxx.  It didn't seem like it would be such a bad idea - didn't look all that bad, and the ingredients promised spicy chile peppers!  (Yes, I have a weakness for hot spice, and the spice/sweet combo was just very appealing.)

Unfortunately, the three candies I brought home became the Trifecta of Disappointment.

Duvalin Bi Sabor Strawberry-Vanilla is advertised as a "cream candy." It comes in little tubs, with little plastic sticks to aid consumption.  The closest I can come to describing it is "cheap frosting."  It was exactly as if I had bought little sample containers of pre-made cake frosting.  This, of course, is not unheard of in North American supermarkets (Betty Crocker makes Dunkaroos, which are nothing but a small serving of cookies and a tiny tub of frosting to dunk them in. But at least there are cookies there to somewhat cut the frosting jolt.)  Knowing that Duvalin Bi Sabor is so frostingesque should tell you just about all you need to know about it.  I can't really condemn it - there are plenty of people who would just love the stuff - but I kind of expected something more along the lines of a taffy, so there ya go.

Pica Fresa are little balls of individually wrapped starch gum rolled in "hot" chili powder. They taste kind of like what you'd get if you coated Twizzlers in cayenne pepper (but took away much of the heat.)  They would have been better if they were hotter. And a little chewier.

Mangopers mango flavored lollipops were the absolute worst of the bunch, by a huge margin, given their utter horridness. They appeared to be made of mango-flavored hard candy coated in ground chile pepper, but honestly, I'll never know. The coating was so nasty - the stalest possible chile powder seemingly blended with a heavy dose of salt - that I never even made it to the candy within.  Truly bad stuff.

Never again.

Jojo Jelly Beans

If you saw the movie Tropic Thunder, you might remember a scene with Jack Black doping himself up with white powdery drugs he keeps in a Jojo Jelly Bean box. Apparently, someone thought there would be a huge demand for Jojo Jelly Beans thanks to the riotous comedy stylings of Jack Black and so Dreamworks brought out actual Jojo Jelly Beans as a movie tie-in candy.

By the time I found Jojos in job lot store in Maine, I had completely forgotten about Tropic Thunder (movies with either Ben Stiller or Jack Black tend to do that to me anyway; it seems that with both of them in the same flick, the effect is magnified.)  What attracted me was the packaging featuring a nightmare clown vomiting jelly beans down his tongue and into the mouths of two dead-eyed children.  "Multi-Flavor Colorings!" also cracked me up.  Only after I got them home and really looked the package over did I realize that it was a tie-in, thanks to a Tropic Thunder logo, complete with the MPAA's R-rating.

Still...jelly beans!  Insane murder clown!  Win, right?  Right??

No.  Wrong.  These jelly beans totally suck.  Inside the package, there are green, pink, yellow, red, and orange jelly beans, and the flavors of each are nearly indistinguishable from one another. They have a strange floral quality (and not good floral, like orange-blossom honey or rose petal tea, but bad floral like your ancient maiden aunt's eau de toilette that she splashes on in lieu of a bath.)  And although they're soft and pliable inside, the coating is like sugarbrick.  I was going to give them a pass on the brickness, seeing as Tropic Thunder came out in 2008 and who knows how long these things might have been sitting around in a warehouse, but I notice that several places are still selling them online so I'm just going to be a douche and assume that they were shipped stale from day one.  Unless you simply can't live without the graphics on that box, you really are better off skipping this purchase if you find them.

Photo by Boston American

Jojo Jelly Beans are made in China and distributed by Boston America Corp., a company which specializes in making kind of mediocre products in extremely clever packaging which make you want the hell out of them.  Seriously, I could devote an entire blog post just to their stuff, from generic energy drinks with awesome videogame labeling, to kind of mediocre candy packaged in the most bitchin' tins ever, to theme-printed bandages.

Photo by Boston American

Many are the times I've come home with candy in tins the shape of Nintendo's Super Mario mushrooms made by Boston America - there is no denying the packaging is cool even when the product inside isn't, strictly speaking, the best stuff you can buy.

Rob's Really Good Chocolate With Brown Rice

It's called "Rob's Really Good Life Changing Milk Chocolate with Crisped Brown Rice," and I would say the product name is probably about 50% bullshit. 

The "Rob's" part is likely to be true.  And the "Milk Chocolate" part  is certainly a fact.  And the rather nasty crunchy things embedded in the back of the bar do resemble rice.  So that just leaves the "Really Good" and "Life Changing" parts.  Okay, so it might be more like 40% bullshit.

The thing is, while the "Italian" milk chocolate in the bar is smooth and dreamy, the attempt at making a crunchy chocolate bar is rather spoiled by the brown rice.  Because brown rice doesn't get all nicely light and airy and crispy when it's "crisped."  No, it apparently turns into small, brittle nubbins that do nothing to add to the chocolate eating  experience.

And as far as "life-changing" goes...well, that's just plain stupid.  Marriage is life-changing.  So is the birth of a child.  Or winning the lottery.  Or having a tornado crush a path through your town.  But a chocolate bar?  Sorry, Rob, but you're an asshole for even suggesting it.

Coronado Goat's Milk Lollipops

Goat's milk, I'm told, is an acquired taste. One of my esteemed culinary fellow travelers tells me that he can "taste the goat" with every sip. While I acknowledge that goat's milk does taste different from that of the cow, I don't find the flavor unpleasant.

And so it was that when I saw a long cellophane strip of these goat's milk lollipops at the local Price/Rite, I dropped them into my shopping cart. They were too interesting to leave behind.

And they are DELICIOUS. Beautiful smooth and creamy dulce de leche without any goatiness at all. They're totally awesome.

If you see them, buy them. You will not be disappointed.

A Basket Full of Chocolate

Easter Sunday for many children will be a time of celebratory gluttony centered around candy and chocolate treats ostensibly hidden around their houses by a sentient rabbit.  And gentlemen, if you are clever, you can use this custom to offer the Important Women in your life a fun  and delicious token of your affection that won't kick the hell out of your wallet.

I'm talking about chocolate, of course.  Everyone loves chocolate. If you were to take a small Easter basket and tastefully arrange in it an assortment of delicious choccies for your sweetie, it would be an enormously appreciated gesture.

And now I'm going to let you in on a little secret that will help you get awesome European chocolates at an amazingly low price:  Go to ALDI.  I'm not kidding.  No matter what you think of the rest of their offerings, you should know that their specialty jelly beans (available right now as a seasonal Easter item) are made by Jelly Belly but will cost you half the price, and their chocolate is made in Germany, Belgium, and sometimes Italy and it is the equal of any European chocolate I've had at any price. Seriously.

There are several styles of milk chocolate bunnies to choose from, wrapped in colorfully lithoed foil, as well as foil wrapped chocolate chicks, and eggs of various kinds.  ALDI also has Easter-themed gummi bears, and they're made in Germany as well.  (By the way, there really is a difference between the flavor and texture of gummies made in Germany and those made anywhere else in the world.  The German ones are better.)

Most of the foil-wrapped chocolates are delightfully retro in design and will remind you of the stuff you used to get back when you were a kid. Some of them might remind your grandparents of stuff they enjoyed when they were little.  And, of course, the selection isn't limited to kid-targeted chocolate novelties - as fun as they might be to fill out a basket with.

Look for ALDI's Grandessa line of chocolates made with adults in mind - like these miniature egg-shaped truffles.  And keep an eye open for ALDI's Moser-Roth brand of awesome specialty chocolate bars.

So there you have it.  Today is Friday.  You have two days to put something together for your sweetheart and impress her with your thoughtfulness on Sunday morning. Get to it, guys.

Confectionary "Cigarettes"

American-made candy cigarettes are pretty much a disgrace. Not only are they thin, gnarly lines of extruded white sugar that look nothing whatsoever like a cigarette, but the packaging is horrible - crudely printed cardboard boxes, bare of foil insert and without cellophane wrapper or any other semblance of the "real thing."

Our domestic candy cig packaging is an embarassment when compared to these varieties from Holland.  To protect the confection inside, the inner core of the package is made of corrugated paper, but from there out they're quite authentic, and the build quality is awesome. Nicely printed paper labels around foil paper inside, complete with a seal at the top and cellophane wrapper.  These are believable mockups.

Okay, I'll grant you that "Aerobica" - with its illustration of an 80's-era Exercise Chick on the front - is pretty laughable, but YO! LOOK AT THAT PACKAGING! And check out the chocolate cigarettes you can shake out of the pack just like granddad.  They're wrapped in white paper!

I was within wheezing distance of saying that these candy ciggiebutts are something you can be proud to give your kids to show them how cool and badass they can look while pretending to smoke. But then I actually tasted the chocolate and regretted not having read the label more closely.  It's not real chocolate at all - it's mockolate, made with "hardened vegetable oil" and cocoa powder, and it leaves a greasy film on the roof of my mouth. Eww. These things should come with warning labels.

Belly Flops

Did you know that Jelly Belly saves up their gourmet-jelly-bean rejects, packages them up under the name "Belly Flops," and then sells them at a steep discount from the usual price?

They have the same awesome Jelly Belly flavors, but instead of being the perfect little beans one expects from Jelly Belly, they are imperfect in one of many ways. Some of them are "compound beans," made up of a lot of beans that came off the line fused together. Some are too small, or have a shape that deviates too much from the Jelly Belly standard. Others have serious gaps in their coating. Like Quasimodo, abandoned to the bell tower of Notre Dame because of his hideous face and hump, these beans have been cast from the gourmet shops solely because of their looks.

But regardless of how ugly they look, they're still genuine Jelly Belly jelly beans, with their well-deserved reputation for creative and delicious flavors.  Also, the "fun factor" of having weird and unusual shapes should not be overlooked. When we were kids, my sibs and I would seek out "doubles" and other deformed pieces in a bag of jelly beans - the unique, nonbean shapes were highly prized because they so rarely slipped past the factory's quality control measures.  We imagined that they tasted even better than their conformist cousins in the bag. We would have had a great time with a bag of Belly Flops.

Candy Corn for Easter?

Spotted at Big Lots!

Every year in October, the stores are filled with bags of candy corn. It's become the iconic candy of Halloween.  And every November, the stores are filled with marked-down bags of candy corn as retailers struggle to dump the huge numbers of bags which go unsold every year.  As late as February, I was finding tables filled with bags of leftover candy corn selling for as little as 25 cents each.

So the last thing I'd expect to see in March is more candy corn.  At least they're marketing it in carrot-shaped plastic bags to make it somewhat seasonable.

Vintage Sunday: Bonomo Turkish Taffy IS BACK

Of all the candies that were available when I was a kid. I remember Bonomo Turkish Taffy most fondly.  I don't know why - maybe because of their intense and ubiquitous advertising which ran well into the 1970's, or because Turkish Taffy was a standard feature of so many childhood Christmas stockings and Easter baskets, or maybe simply because it became unavailable for so long when it was discontinued years ago.  Whatever the reason, memories of Bonomo caused me to keep an eye open for it at every specialty candy store I visited for many years, without success.  Eventually I found out that the company had at one point been bought out by Tootsie and production had ceased in the late 1980's.  I had no idea that Bonomo had been resurrected as an independent company until a casual browse through my local Five Below store.  

THEY HAD BONOMO ON T3H SHELF!!  I was there with my big sister Fran and my wife Maryanne, digging Five Below's cool and fun pop cultural swag when I spotted it, and all three of us pretty much had the same reaction : OMG BONOMO TURKISH TAFFY GET SOME!!!!!1!  I picked up a pack of chocolate and a pack of vanilla and would have gotten the banana and strawberry flavors too, if they had any.

I'm happy to report that it's just like it was back in the day.  It still "tastes like ice cream," as the old ads used to say.  (Tastes like really cheap ice cream, but the ads never did specify the grade of ice cream, so I give them a pass.)  And it's still got that "brittle-chewy" makeup, so slapping the package sharply onto a tabletop still breaks the taffy into pieces which then soften in your mouth to a chewy-but-not-very-sticky consistency.

So, why was Turkish Taffy gone so long from the collective sweet tooth?  The original company, founded in 1897 by Turkish immigrant Albert Bonomo, was a candy manufacturer on Coney Island making saltwater taffy for sale to tourists.  In 1945, the founder's son Victor came up with "Turkish Taffy," made from a batter of corn syrup and egg whites that was boiled and then baked.  Turkish Taffy quickly became the company's star product. 

In 1980, the Tootsie Co. bought Bonomo, and within a few years discontinued Turkish Taffy, saying that "tastes had changed" and demand had fallen off.  

Today, Classic Caramel LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of candymaker Warrell Corporation, is making and distributing Bonomo Turkish Taffy using the original recipes, manufacturing process, and flavors.  Track some down - there's nothing like it.

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Sweet Candy Co. Orange & Raspberry Sticks

Sweet Candy Company, based in Salt Lake City UT, is one of the country's oldest family-owned candymakers.  When we saw that their Orange Sticks and Raspberry Sticks - fruit jellies covered in milk or dark chocolate - were available as a "special purchase" at ALDI, we picked up some of each of the varieties ALDI had available.

I can't even begin to tell you how gorgeous these simple jelly candies are.  The jelly is fruity and flavorful and the milk chocolate coatings are silky and rich; the dark chocolate (while a bit waxy) is of equally high quality.  No "mocolate" here.  Sweet's can give lessons to Hershey and M&M/Mars, both of whom have recently changed some of their candy bar recipes.

Anyway, the whole fam damily enjoyed these, and I'd pick 'em up again if ever I see them.  Check your local ALDI to see if they've got 'em near you.

Also:  Check out this review of  Sweet's Port Wine Gels over at Foodette Reviews if you're looking for a Sweet's candy what is more sophisticated and stuff.

Link:

Sweet Candy Company website.  They give free factory tours.
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Malted Milk Ball Cage Match: Whoppers vs Mighty Malts

Malted milk balls are a pretty basic treat:  Crunchy malted milk candy coated with chocolate.  So it should come as no surprise that there really isn't that much difference between New England's regionally-available Mighty Malts, produced by NECCO, and nationally-famous Whoppers, made by Hershey Foods.

Mighty Malts on the left, Whoppers on the right.

Mighty Malts are slightly larger than Whoppers. The malted milk interior is a bit darker in color and stronger in flavor, with a slightly "cultured" yogurtish taste.  There are tflavor differences with the outside "chocolatey" layer as well.  Whoppers taste like mild milk chocolate, while Mighty Malts have a heartier "cocoa" flavor. Also, because they are coated with confectioner's glaze, Mighty Malts are shiny and resist melting when held in the hand.

Regardless of their individual flavors, though, don't be calling either of these candies "chocolate coated" because they really aren't.  The outside candy on both is a slightly weird and waxy "mockolate" that contains no cocoa butter.

Anyway, when it comes right down to it, they're so similar (in make up as well as in price) that it really doesn't matter which one you choose in the local store.  Personally, I prefer the Mighty Malts for the richer cocoa taste, but I bet most kids wouldn't really care about such a subtle difference.  Mighty Malts are somewhat harder to find, while Whoppers are just about everywhere (NECCO is, after all, a much smaller company than Hershey.)

Special thanks to Foodette Reviews - Jess' review of Whoppers inspired this post.

Oh, by the way:  When I was writing this post, I wanted to check out an old version of the Whopper's label, back when the candy was still made by Leaf.  So I went over to Google's Image Search and typed in vintage whoppers.  Don't do that, especially with SafeSearch off.  Seriously.  Don't.

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An Assortment of Pocky

Anyone who's ever been to any kind of anime convention is familiar with the name Pocky. The delicious little biscuit sticks dipped in chocolate are many a congoer's breakfasts. But many people only know of chocolate Pocky, which in my opinion is a damn shame. Glico's line of Pocky is a vast empire covering all sorts of flavors, from fruit-based, to foreign treats quite alien to American palates, to mimicking luxurious desserts. And after my most recent trip to Dong's - an Asian supermarket - I've come home with five new flavors of Pocky.

The first up is Strawberry Cream Pocky, vanilla biscuit sticks with a strawberry cream flavored coating. The coating has bits of dehydrated strawberry in it, and it tastes a lot like strawberry shortcake when it's eaten. It's a pleasant, refreshing flavor that I found to be incredibly enjoyable. The addition of the dehydrated fruit made it distinctly different from the artificially flavored Strawberry Pocky.

Next was by far the most interesting Pocky flavor I've ever tasted, Chocolat Fromage. It's in the more luxurious Dessert line, and features a richer chocolate blend and fuller, better flavors than its other counterparts. This flavor took a regular biscuit stick and dipped it in a layer of white cheese-flavored coating before drizzling it with a layer of milk chocolate. This one surprised me. I was expecting something akin to a chocolate cheesecake, but instead was greeted to the smooth sweetness of chocolate paired with a semi-sharp cheese flavor akin to cream cheese before it's been mixed into a cheesecake. It's also got a slight orange flavor thanks to some orange juice in the cheese mixture. To date, this ranks in my Top Five of Pocky.

After the Chocolat Fromage flavor, we tried the "tsubutsubu misuku beri" flavor, or "Chunky Mixed Berries" in English. This was a vanilla biscuit dipped in a mixed berry coating. According to the green banner on the package, it consisted of cranberries, strawberries, and blueberries, but it tasted mostly like blueberries and strawberries. Funny, because cranberry juice comes before anything else on the list. These were also really good; they tasted like a fruit parfait, which I'm definitely all over.

The Milk Pocky is extremely boring in comparison to the other Pockys I've tried tonight. It was a regular biscuit dipped in a sweetened milk flavored coating. Don't get it confused with vanilla; there was a distinct difference between them. This coating tasted a lot like sweetened condensed milk: a concentrated, almost malted-milk-like flavor. It was nice in its own right, but compared to the other flavors is a tad dull. This was my least favorite of the bunch.

And last, but certainly not least, was Choco-Banana flavor. This was another variety that had two layers of flavorings. The first was a bright yellow artificially flavored banana coating, which was drizzled over with thin stripes of milk chocolate. The result is an obviously artificial but still really tasty chocolate-covered banana sensation. This is another flavor that has made my Top Five of Pocky list.

All of these flavors of Pocky are definite keepers, though I'm sure that the next time I head down to the Asian supermarket, I won't be able to find them.

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Win a Box o' Pocky!

To help spread my love of Pocky, I'm giving away a couple boxes my favorite flavor from this post: the chocolat fromage. To enter my Pocky Giveaway, just send an email to daves [dot] cupboard [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject "Pocky."  With the help of random number generator website random.org, two winners will be selected and each will receive a free 70g box of Pocky Chocolat Fromage Chocolate Dessert! Entries must be received by Monday, June 21, 2010 - one entry per person, please.  Winners will be notified by email and will receive their delicious Pocky via US Mail.
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New Pretzel M&Ms

Okay, so I picked up a couple packages of new Pretzel M&Ms the other day, and they are totally underwhelming. Little round pretzel balls, coated with chocolate and the trademark M'ed candy coating. The texture is almost identical to malted milk balls, but the flavor is just incredibly boring.  Chocolate, crunch, hint of salt.  Well, "hint" might be too strong a word.  More like "vague innuendo" of salt.

Honestly, I don't really understand the current popularity of this variety. It took me forever to find them - they seem to be sold out everywhere I go - and when I did find them, there were only two little bags left.  But they're so thoroughly "meh" that I'm not sure it was worth the effort it took to get them.

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