Tag: Candy

REVIEW: White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M’s

Margaret 23 Comments

White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M's

Back in the good ol’ medieval days, when the world used catapults and ate turkey legs the size of canoe paddles, some hungry, conquering genius gathered a bunch of leftovers and root vegetables, shoved them in the oven, and called it a recipe. Thus, the lumpy, bumpy carrot cake was born.

Now, for those yet to be familiarized, a carrot cake is a spice cake that had dashed dreams of being a fruit cake: it’s fluffy cake crammed with all sorts of this-n-that’s (raisins, carrots, maybe some pineapple) and topped with a honking slather of buttercream or cream cheese frosting. Its warm spices have been known to carve a soft spot in the calloused hearts of one-eyed sailors and, when placed before me, it disappears.

Unfortunately, I’m no baker, so when I heard the folks at Mars were serving up that experience in a lentil-shaped white chocolate confection, I sped, tight-knuckled, pedal-to-the-floor, to the nearest Walmart to dig them from their hiding spot in the dusty display case.

White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M's Bushel

These are pudgy ovoids, notably bigger than a regular M&M. If you’ve had the white chocolate limited edition, you have a feel of what we’re dealing with here: they’re a smidge wider in diameter than milk chocolate M&M’s and have a rounder belly.

White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M's Are Big

See? They’re huge.

The colors come in a trio of light orange, green, and beige, which not only stays with the theme of “carrot colors” but also reinforces my inner belief that all good things come in threes, and it’s always nice to have my inner beliefs spontaneously reinforced.

Like its white chocolate cousin, these sweet bits have a thicker shell, adding a crunch before the white chocolate filling, which is soft, sweet, milky, and melts as fast as the memories of those poems I had to recite back in high school (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” [she shudders])

One of the biggest problems I’ve faced in white chocolate M&Ms of the past is that, due to all that sweetness, it’s hard to eat more than a handful without passing out cold on the floor from a belligerent sugar rush to my frontal lobe. I celebrate with such gluttonous joy to find that these are far easier to eat. These start off sweet and, while there are no visible spices, there is a certain cinnamon/nutmeg-ish vibe that comes in the middle to contrast with the white chocolate, encouraging a higher ratio of consumption. They may give me a root canal, but I don’t care. That yoga teacher I took classes from three years ago told me to stay in the present, so I shall enjoy these right now…

And now…

And now…

White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M's Chomp

In the end, eating these makes me want to do something good for the world. Like adopt a rescued guinea pig. Or educate elementary school kids about the importance of their credit score. Or pay those library fees I’ve neglected for four years. These are a solid rendition of a seasonal offering: creative enough to be pushing the boundaries, but familiar enough to inspire mouth-shoving tendencies. What’s even more exciting is that Mars took a risk and it paid off. The only downside is that I’m running out of them…and fast.

(Nutrition Facts – 1.5 oz. (about 1/4 cup) – 220 calories, 100 calories from fat, 11 grams of fat, 7 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 40 milligrams of sodium, 0 milligrams of potassium, 29 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 28 grams of sugars, and 2 grams of protein.)

Item: White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M’s
Purchased Price: $2.88
Size: 9.9 oz. bag
Purchased at: Walmart*
Rating: 9 out of 10
Pros: Bigger than the average M&M. Smooth melt. Crunchy shell. Spice taste balances white chocolate. Spontaneous reinforcement of inner beliefs. Rescued guinea pigs.
Cons: Never enough in the bag. Limited time. Only available at Walmart. Poobahs. Poems memorized in high school. Disco-ball-related accidents.

*If there’s a miff I have with these, it’s how hard they are to find. They’re available at “select” Walmarts only, which may or may not involve a fill up of your gas tank (a tragedy within itself)

REVIEW: White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s

Marvo 10 Comments

White Chocolate Peppermint M&M's

When I bite into a White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s, I get the sensation that I’ve just stepped out of the shower and into a freezer.

My nipples perk out and other body parts perk in. Every hair on my body stands up and every muscle in my body twitches uncontrollably in response to the cold environment. Then, when I can feel my organs failing, I think to myself, “So this is what it’s like to die on Mount Everest.”

But then I realize, just like in the York Peppermint Patty commercials, what I’m feeling is a complete exaggeration in my head and is no where close to what it actually feels like to take a bite into any peppermint chocolate candy. And it turns out all I’m really doing is standing naked in front of a window on a breezy day.

However, when I bite into a White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s a second time, I get the sensation of sadness because I realize this tasty seasonal candy won’t be available come January or February, unless I’m willing to pay anywhere from $9.99 to $15.99 for a bag from an avaricious eBay or Amazon Marketplace seller.

These new minty M&M’s are great, but not $9.99 great.

Although that sadness could taste significantly less bitter if I became an avaricious eBay or Amazon Marketplace seller who gouged desperate souls wanting hard-to-find candy.

White Chocolate Peppermint M&M's Closeup

After opening the bag of White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s, my olfaction was greeted with a blast of mint. It was as if someone stuck the hook end of two candy canes up my nostrils in order to drag me away. The minty M&M’s were coated with either red or white candy shells and are noticeably larger than regular M&M’s, but slightly smaller than Peanut M&M’s.

So how pepperminty are these M&M’s? Well, let’s just say that, in a pinch, I would pop a couple in my mouth to freshen my breath so I can invade someone’s personal space. They’re also minty enough that a cooling sensation lingered in my mouth for a while after eating them. The White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s tasted slightly more minty than sweet and I found them to be much more satisfying than the other minty M&M’s — mint milk chocolate and mint dark chocolate.

However, all is not perfect with this candy.

First, I don’t like how these white chocolate M&M’s tend to “sweat” when in slightly warm temperatures, making their candy shells a little greasy. Although that might be my fault for living on a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Also, while these White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s are really wonderful, I find them to be like dense cheesecake in that it’s hard to eat a lot of them. I want to eat more, but I can’t.

If you’re a fan of peppermint, I’d highly suggest heading down to your local Target to pick up a bag (It’s a Target exclusive). Or if you want to be an eBay or Amazon Marketplace seller who charges unreasonable prices for hard-to-find candy, head to every Target within driving distance to pick up every single bag you can find.

(Nutrition Facts – 1.5 ounces – 220 calories, 100 calories from fat, 11 grams of fat, 7 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 40 milligrams of sodium, 28 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 27 grams of sugar, 2 grams of protein, and 4% calcium.)

Other White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s reviews:
Candyblog
Spoil Your Dinner
Fatguy Food Blog

Item: White Chocolate Peppermint M&M’s
Purchased Price: $2.99
Size: 9.90 ounce bag
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Wonderful. Best mint M&M’s ever. More minty than sweet. Works as a mint in a pinch. Making money by selling bags of M&M’s for $15.99 on eBay and Amazon Marketplace.
Cons: Candy shell gets greasy in warm temperatures. Target exclusive. Hard to chain eat them. Seasonal item. eBay and Amazon Marketplace sellers who charge $15.99 for a bag of M&M’s.

REVIEW: 3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis

Margaret 6 Comments

3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis

Lethargy and laze with a high chance of napping.

These are the symptoms of the post-Thanksgiving coma.

Despite my foreknowledge of said tryptophan comatose, I remained surprised when I awoke last Friday with enough mental fog to cause a Los Angeles brownout. In a moment of clarity, I thumped down to the forgiving lights of the local Kmart in search of a cure.

Thankfully, the shelves were stocked to the brim with an abundance of seasonal sucrose offerings promising the sugar rush needed to counteract my case of the Thanksgiving Sleepies. Seeing as this is the time of year I find new ways to sneak a mug of hot chocolate into my daily schedule, it seemed fitting to initiate my cure with a shiny new bag of 3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa Minis.

3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis Bag

Nothing like a bag of sugary polyhedra to snap me wide awake.

Each mini comes in the form of a little 25-calorie cube, which, in my mind, makes them multi-taskers. They’re just the right size for snacking, sharing, or plopping between graham crackers. They would also make perfect checker/chess pieces. That way, when you whoop your opponent, you can also eat his/her pieces.

I could also see them serving as excellent Lincoln Logs.

3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis Lincoln Logs

3 Musketeers: fueling the minds for a new generation of architects.

The outer shell of milk chocolate here seems a bit thinner than the ol’ regular bar, but it adds the appropriate sweet snap before arriving at the nougat core.

3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis Nougat

Oh, nougat, what a legacy you have in the world of chocolate bars.

The poof of nougat within a 3 Musketeers is stuck in an existential void between goo and fluff, and, by gum, it’s a tasty existential void. The nougat here is chocolate and seems quite similar to the original…almost too similar. However, if you close your eyes and use your imagination, you may detect a certain toasty-powdery-ness, which I suspect is meant to mimic powdered hot chocolate. Peculiar for my taste, but I admired it for what it hoped to achieve.

The one biggie that left me broken-hearted was the absence of the marshmallow. Perhaps the nougat itself was meant to represent said fluff? Or perhaps the marshmallow melted in the cooking process? I was unsure and semi-suspicious.

Nonetheless, I wanted to make sure I followed through with the “hot” part of the “hot cocoa” theme, so I crammed seven of the cubes in a mug and zapped them in the microwave for 5 seconds. Oh buddy, was that worth it. At first glance it looked like nothing had changed, but, upon whipping out a spoon and digging in, the cubes smooshed together to form a gooey, cake batter-like substance [fair warning: if you microwave, it gets a little messy, so consider microwaving in something you’d be willing to throw away].

Lots of beautiful things are small. Paperclips. Tangerines. Travel shampoo bottles. While it’s hard to beat travel shampoo bottles, I’d give these 3 Musketeers the thumbs-up to join the group. They’re convenient little packages of chocolate-y joy that taste at least 15 times better than a jungle of tropical poinsettias. At the same time, they feel dangerously close to the original, giving them broad possibilities to grow. Keep growing, 3 Musketeers, keep growing.

(Nutrition Facts – 7 pieces – 180 calories, 45 calories from fat, 4 grams of fat, 3.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 70 milligrams of sodium, 31 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 27 grams of sugars, and 1 gram of protein.)

Item: 3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis
Purchased Price: $3.49
Size: 10 oz. bag
Purchased at: Kmart
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Snappy milk chocolate coating. Nice size. Nougat legacy. Lincoln Logs. Gooey cake batter. Travel shampoo bottles.
Cons: Peculiar toasty-powdery taste. A bit too close to the original. Absence of marshmallows. Nougat in an existential void. Thanksgiving comas. Eating tropical poinsettias.

REVIEW: Limited Edition Milky Way French Vanilla and Caramel

Margaret 6 Comments

Limited Edition Milky Way French Vanilla and Caramel

“Limited Edition.”

The mere phrase has the power to transform, taking common fare and turning it into a full-on, hands-down life experience so that, 50-or-so years from now, you can sit on your porch and bang a cane on the ground as you tell some young band of whipper-snappers, “I remember, when I was your age, we used to have good ol’ fashioned Limited Edition French Vanilla Milky Ways!” Oh, the fulfillment that will come from such a pronouncement.

And, indeed, this was the thought that graced my mind as I perused the aisles of my friendly 24-hour pharmacy, searching in vain for those Halloween white chocolate M&M’s only to find the shelves empty as the Arizona duck ponds in the middle of July. As I felt myself drowning in a candy-induced crisis, a single wrapper reached out its hand. It was my rock. My salvation. And it came in the form of a 1.72-ounce bar.

Limited Edition Milky Way French Vanilla and Caramel Pre-Consumption

(Cue the angelic chorus from above!)

The wrapper is nothing short of mind-controlling genius. Did you see that caramel curl? The swirly background? The thick design of chocolate enveloped by vanilla flora? That’s how you do mind control, people.

The Milky Way and I have had a fond affair over the past years, spending many-a-summer’s day in its various deliciously sweet forms (half-melted, frozen, in ice cream, in cookies, and so forth), thus made it the perfect companion for my pillow-fort-and-mid-90s-movie marathon this past weekend.

In many ways, this Milky Way harkens back to the classic. The milk chocolate coating is still the thick shell it’s always been and caramel is still that welcoming stretchy goo of sweetness. The marked difference in this limited fare is in the vanilla nougat.

Just upon opening the bar, the smell of vanilla poofs into the air. After taking a bite, I wouldn’t describe it so much as a “French Vanilla” as I would a “Vanilla Flavoring” (think along the lines of vanilla pudding or Vanilla Coffee-mate Creamer), and is it just me or is the texture fluffier than usual? Yes, yes indeed. Pleasantly reminiscent of a marshmallow, too.

This sweet-on-sweet-on-sweet is something I happen to enjoy. However, I have a certain resilience that transcends the average sweet tooth, so this may be too sweet for some. If you need a little bitter to accompany your sweet, I could see this making for a stellar coffee stirrer (or, in honor of its francophone title, perhaps dip it in a little espresso cup while dining at a petite café). Of course, you could also whip out some graham crackers, toss the bar in the microwave for a few seconds, and boom! You have insta-s’more.

Glancing over the ingredients, I would recommend suppressing the whole “hydrogenated oils” and “30 percent of your recommended intake of saturated fat” jibber jabber. What really matters is hidden…

Limited Edition Milky Way French Vanilla and Caramel Ingredients

Do you see it?

Indeed! That’s skim milk! And egg whites! And more skim milk! These are the essential ingredients in a balanced breakfast! Watch out Wheaties. Milky Way is on your tail.

Limited Edition Milky Way French Vanilla and Caramel Goo

(The perfect way to start the day)

This Milky Way may not have sparks and whistles and buzzes. Heck, it doesn’t even have sea salt, but it does have yumminess, and maybe that’s why this Limited Edition Milky Way was put on this Earth: to remind us that it’s okay to not be revolutionary. Yummy is just fine.

(Nutrition Facts – 220 calories, 80 calories from fat, 8 grams of fat, 6 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 65 milligrams of sodium, 35 grams of carbohydrates, 0 gram of dietary fiber, 30 grams of sugars, and 2 grams of protein.)

Item: Limited Edition Milky Way French Vanilla and Caramel
Purchased Price: $1.49
Size: 1.72 ounces
Purchased at: Walgreens
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Marshmallow-like nougat. Sweet. Mixing of old and new. Milky Way for breakfast. Pillow forts. S’more-related experiments.
Cons: Sweetness may be too much for some. Not very good for you. The unknown origins of “Vanilla Flavoring.” Mind control. Dried up duck ponds.

REVIEW: Limited Edition Milky Way Caramel Apple Minis

Marvo 8 Comments

Limited Edition Milky Way Caramel Apple Minis

I don’t give out candy to children on Halloween.

Call me a Halloween Scrooge, a recluse, or someone who doesn’t watch enough Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network to know what kids are dressing up as today, but I don’t do it because I’m a hermit, cheap, or getting tired of kids pretending they’re Harry Potter.

I don’t pass out candy on Halloween because I eat it all before I have a chance to give it away.

I can’t help it. I buy the good stuff, like M&M’s, Twix, Nestle Crunch, Milky Way, Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Nerds, and I intend to pass them out to ensure local dentists will have work, but by the time Halloween rolls around I’m out of candy and I no longer fit into my sexy pirate outfit.

To prevent me from eating the candy, I could pass out frown-inducing sweets, like candy corn (blech!), chocolate coins (more worthless than pennies), Smarties (there’s nothing smart about them), Good & Plenty (not good and, unfortunately, there are plenty of people passing them out), Now and Later (there’s never a good time for this candy), cheap gum (gum from 1980s baseball card packs have better flavor), or Sixlets (more like Sixlet’s Not). However, I don’t want to be known as the Asian guy dressed up as a sexy pirate who gives away junk candy that’ll end up on my lawn the next morning. Instead, I want to be the Asian guy dressed up as a sexy pirate who passes out candy so awesome that children will think the stomachache they woke up with was sooo totally worth it.

However, it looks like I might be giving away some candy this year because I’m having a slightly hard time getting through a bag of these new Caramel Apple Milky Way Minis.

Limited Edition Milky Way Caramel Apple Minis Closeup

The new seasonal candy combines caramel and flavored nougat coated with milk chocolate. Each piece smells like the fruity and sweet aroma that wafts out of a Whitman’s Sampler after opening it. If you’re one of those douchebags who tries to appear cool by throwing food in the air and catching it with your mouth, these mini Milky Way are mouth-catchable and I hope a bird poops in your mouth when you open it to try and catch a piece.

If you’re expecting this candy to taste like a caramel apple, let me crush your hopes and dreams by telling you they don’t. Even if you used your front teeth to completely scrape off the thin layer of milk chocolate, the small morsel of nougat and caramel you’re left with also doesn’t taste like a caramel apple.

The nougat contains the apple flavor (along with a bit of nutmeginess), although at first it’s hard to determine it has an apple flavor. The apple is a bit more noticeable in the aftertaste, which is when it also become a bit more artificial tasting. The caramel tastes, unsurprisingly, like the caramel in regular Milky Way bars and does an equally awesome job of sticking to my teeth.

Although the artificial apple flavor is faint, my tongue gets sick of it before it reaches the five piece serving size. And that’s why it’s taking me so long to finish this bag. Now you might be thinking if I don’t complete enjoy them, then Trick or Treaters will feel the same. That’s true, but they’re much better than candy corn, chocolate coins, Smarties, Good & Plenty, Now and Later, cheap gum, and Sixlets.

(Nutrition Facts – 5 pieces – 190 calories, 60 calories from fat, 7 grams of fat, 5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 60 milligrams of sodium, 31 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 26 grams of sugar, and 1 gram of protein.)

Item: Limited Edition Milky Way Caramel Apple Minis
Purchased Price: $3.29
Size: 11.50 ounces
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: It’s not bad at first. Better than candy corn, chocolate coins, Smarties, Good & Plenty, Now and Later, cheap gum, and Sixlets. Pleasantly chewy.
Cons: Doesn’t taste like caramel apples. Apple flavor is weak and artificial. Candy corn, chocolate coins, Smarties, Good & Plenty, Now and Later, cheap gum, and Sixlets. Not being able to fit into my sexy pirate costume.