Happy Halloween! Today is the candy lover’s holiday! Even though I’m no longer of age to go trick-or-treating, it’s still my favorite holiday. I think the fact that I can still satisfy my need for a sugar high tonight plays a big part of it.

One of my favorite candies is Halloween specific, and I’m referring not only to Brach’s candy corn, but more specifically their Mellowcreme Pumpkins. To even out my craving, I love buying bags of the Autumn Mix as it has a little bit of everything.

The mix has the traditional candy corn, along with indian corn and my beloved pumpkins. I sometimes find myself hesitating to eat them up right away as they’re so cute to look at. Then I gather my wits and remember how good they taste.

Candy Corn: Nicely shaped little kernels of corn with a yellow base, orange center and a white tip. The flavor is very sweet and sugary with a hint of honey, which makes Brach’s candy corn stand out to me from the other brands. The texture has a slight sugary graininess to it which I enjoy.

Indian Corn: Same shape as the candy corn, but with a brown cap that’s flavored with real cocoa. You can taste the difference, as the flavor is subtly chocolatey and it comes across as more complex as the regular kind.

Mellowcreme Pumpkins: They taste like the candy corn, but there’s just more to it as these are much larger.  The shape is very tall for pumpkins, as they’re not as round and squat as the real things. I prefer this, as it makes it easy to eat these in two bites. I adore how they make the effort to color the stem part green. So cute! I can’t get enough of these…

I’ve already got my bags of these hoarded away safely in my kitchen cupboards (shhh! Don’t tell anyone!) and I try to get enough to last me until next Halloween. Candy corn at other holidays just isn’t the same (looking at you Reindeer Corn!) along with the fact that the mixes lack pumpkins. I just hope I bought enough.

Rating: HOARD

Links:
Brach’s Website

As soon as I lamented in the Hershey’s Caramel Apple Kisses review that I couldn’t find the Pumpkin Spice flavor, and lo and behold, I find them by the checkouts during an emergency Target run. Luck was surely smiling upon me then. After squealing with glee and making myself look like an utter idiot to the other shoppers, I nabbed a few packages and rushed home with my sweet, pumpkin flavored candy treasure.

I’m in love with these already and I’m just looking at the package. Beautiful hues of orange in a spider web pattern and a grinning jack ‘o lantern decorate the package. The wrappers are pretty too with deep oranges and brown stripes on them and the little flags are brown with white lettering. Beautifully festive, it just screams fall and Halloween!

It gets better too, if you can believe it! The kiss itself it is orange, which I discovered when I undressed one for the photo shoot. The kisses smell of pumpkin pie with accents of cinnamon. Biting into my photography sample, I found that there’s a creamy beige center to these. I’m curious as to how this impacts the flavor. Such anticipation!

The flavor is very pumpkin-y I’m ecstatic to report. Words cannot express my love for pumpkin. There’s also a good mild spice to compliment it too, as I taste cinnamon, clove and a little ginger. It’s very creamy and sweet. What I find amusing is that I was expecting pumpkin pie sort of flavor, but this is more like pumpkin cheesecake. Delicious!

Sometimes things are too good to be true though, and I do have a few complaints with these. The first is that there isn’t real cocoa butter in these, and instead it’s more of those nasty tropical oils. Why Hershey’s, why? The second is by the time I ate last my last kiss (nine pieces, I was good!) I did have a bit of throat burn from the sweetness. Nothing that can’t be solved from a glass of water though.

Verdict? Delicious. I’m going to by more right now.

Rating: Hoard

Links:
Hershey’s Kisses Website

There’s some chocolatiers that can do no wrong in my mind and Christopher Norman Chocolates is one of them. I originally discovered them last year at the New York City Chocolate Show where I was graciously given some of their signature bonbons to try. Aside from the fact that I was blown away by the incredible quality and flavor, I was also drawn to the acute artistic sense that was applied to the bonbons. Christopher Norman was a painter before becoming a chocolatier and he now combines his two passions to create chocolates with his modern sense of painterly design. The result? Well, for my taste buds at least, everything is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Dark Chocolate and Blood Orange: These bars are beautifully wrapped and neatly folded in gold foil. I was surprised to find the bar was not a singular slab, but made of six filled connected squared sections. It smells mainly of the dark chocolate and hardly any scent of orange at all. It you concentrated enough you can detect a little, but it’s very, very faint. The inside is a chocolate filling that has a unique texture: think of it as a cooled, soft, not very dense ganache. The blood orange flavor is pronounced with a lovely fresh and very real orange flavor that’s not to sweet and delivers the perfect amount of tartness. It balances beautifully with the rich, complex dark chocolate and it really a masterpiece to taste. This is a great sophisticated bar if you’re looking for a chocolate orange comibination, but don’t want to restort to something cheap and artificial like Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

White Chocolate Lemon Crisp: This bar also follows the same format with six squared sections as opposed to one large bar. It’s a wonderfully creamy white color and just beautiful to look at. The white chocolate is the most delicate I’ve ever tasted, and by that I mean that’s it’s not overly sweet or bursting with vanilla like most of the other white chocolates I’ve had. This is subtly sweet, very creamy, and you can taste the creaminess of the cocoa butter.

Of course, this is all lightly accentuated by a hint of lemon. It’s amazing how the flavor is incorporated since I think “white chocolate” when I eat this, not “oohh, this is lemon flavored”. The flavor is mixed in and balanced so well, that it just makes the white chocolate stronger and more natural tasting. It reminds me of how just a hint of lemon can really brighten a cheesecake, and this is a similar thing. The crisps are like bits of corn flakes and provide a nice texture to the bar and thankfully they do not compete with the chocolate. The amount is perfect too: not too little not too many and it isn’t like a Nestle crunch at all, thankfully.

I just love this bar, because it managed to find elements that compliment the white chocolate rather than hide it, which is what I find most companies do. Christopher Norman managed to find a way to add ingredients that allowed the white chocolate to shine and really show how good it can be when done right.

Words fail me in describing how much I loved these. I cannot wait to make it back to the Christopher Norman store so I can buy more of these and sample some of their other flavors. Do yourself a favor and get your hands on these chocolate bars.

Rating: Hoard

Links:
Christopher Norman Chocolate

This is latest and greatest in the Snickers bar limited edition line. The wrapper describes it as: “Almonds, caramel and marshmallow-flavored nougat wrapped in dark chocolate”. Oh, wow! Is it just me, or does that sound simply amazing? Pinch me please, I surely must have gone to heaven.

Once unwrapped, the bar looks like a normal Snickers except for the darker brown color. It smells of the deep dark chocolate and a bit of a roasted flavor, I think from the almonds. It’s also smells very sweet with a milky vanilla essence. I cut the bar it in half to see the cross section. The marshmallow nougat is a pale white like snow, with the layer of almonds and caramel

The first bite is awesome. It’s thick, chewy and substantial and oh so tasty! You get a nice nuttiness from the almonds, a good sweetness from the caramel and a nice chocolate hit from the coating. The marshmallow nougat doesn’t deliver much in flavor but the texture is so nice. It’s a little thicker and stickier than the standard Snickers nougat, but it makes the chew so much more fulfilling. It’s really, really good. It’s a really stellar bar, and I like it way more than the original.

I’m hoarding these. Mars better make these a regular addition to the Snickers family.

Rating: Hoard

Links:
Snickers Website

I found this gem in a very neglected dollar store in the middle of upstate New York. Sometimes, the places you find the candy is as interesting as the candy itself. These Haviland Wintergreen Patties sat on the shelf next to several candies that shouldn’t technically be sold anymore. We’re talking the likes of Marshmallow Take 5 and other candies from 2006. I was relieved to find a date, and a fresh one, on the back of this mysterious Wintergreen Patty. I decided to give it a home.

Another tidbit about my personal tastes: I’ve never been big on mint, peppermint, and spearmint. Especially when it’s mixed with other things, like chocolate. But wintergreen? I’m all over that stuff, I can’t get enough of it. So all the rules from my taste buds about minty things are out the window when wintergreen shows up. I love it that much!

I was perplexed why I hadn’t heard of this candy before, considering that I do make an effort to seek out wintergreen flavored things. Part of the answer is that Haviland is a subcategory of NECCO, which have a very interesting niche of products for the candy market. It immediately made sense in my mind; why it was so rare to find and of course in a place where people who’d remember it from childhood would possibly shop. I’d almost liken it to a regional candy in that respect.

When you open the package, you immediately you smell the wintergreen. The patty is large, 2 inches in diameter and about 1/3 inch thick. The chocolate is glossy and a nice rippled effect on top, like patterns on windblown sand. Breaking it in half, you can tell it’s dense as it has that thick “give” to it like a Mounds or Almond Joy. The center is an incredibly bright pink and it looks very striking against the dark chocolate.

Surprisingly the wintergreen smell doesn’t overpower the aroma of the chocolate, which is nice and sweet with notes of caramel. They blend beautifully together.

The wintetrgreen hits you right off in the first bite. It’s strong yet it’s not too much, and delivers that great minty, fresh, slightly spicy flavor. The taste does mellow and allows the chocolate to show the tastebuds some attention, and it comes across as nicely sweet and smooth with good notes of cocoa and a hint of coconut. I didn’t find this as off putting in terms of minty “fresh” intensity like a York Peppermint Patty, but this has a good level of freshness, sweetness, and then the chocolate to balance it all out. The texture is awesome as it’s thick and smooth with a slight graininess to it. It lasts a good time in the mouth if you just savor it slowly, which really adds to the satisfaction level.

So in conclusion: wintergreen+chocolate=YUM! Why isn’t there more of this out there?

Rating: Hoard

Links:
Haviland Wintergreen Patties on the NECCO Website