Dove Bananas Foster Milk Chocolate and Tiramisu Dark Chocolate
Dove wasn't fucking around at the All Candy Expo: They had a little circular enclosure that looked like a VIP area at a club, with cushy curved couches surrounded by a heavy floor-to-ceiling drape (and those convention-center ceilings are really damn high, too) and a Dove chocolate fountain in the middle. We indulged in some dipped fruit, then made off with samples of new Dove products. Rather than the expected solid piece of banana-flavored chocolate, the Bananas Foster miniature was a chocolate coating with goopy banana caramel inside. It wasn't insanely good, but we wouldn't kick it out of bed, either. The Tiramisu miniature (also chocolate around a flavored caramel filling) was weirder: Since it's trying to reference a dessert that's actually a swirl of flavors, it doesn't quite hit the mark. There's a lot of espresso flavor, and the dark chocolate is a bit overwhelming, but it's interesting. In bar form, we also tried Cranberry Almond dark chocolate and the "silky smooth milk chocolate almond" mini-bar, which were both much more traditional.
Dove also had an entirely separate booth at the opposite end of the Expo, where a trio of friendly ladies were touting various wine pairings, and offering wine samplings. Sparkling red wine and Dove Dark Chocolate Miniatures? Insanely good together. We mentioned Lindt's 85 percent cacao Excellence bar, which was so dry and bitter that it begs for a wine pairing, and the Dove representative airily informed us, "Well, we would never go above 77 percent cacao ourselves. Dove products are known for their silky-smooth texture, and past 77 percent, you just can't lose that unpleasant grainy feeling." In other words, if you're going to eat the competition's crappy candy, you're gonna need a whole lot more wine to wash it down.
Lindt Excellence 85% Cocoa
Lindt Creation 70% Cherry & Chili
In spite of the dire warnings, the Lindt Excellence line is still terrific. The 85% Cocoa bar is startlingly dry. (Note: some high-end chocolate products advertise the "cocoa" percentages on their packaging, some cite "cacao," and some cite both, but everyone we talked to about chocolate all day at Candy Expo pronounced it as the hoitier, toitier "cacao.") It sucks all the moisture out of your mouth, as if to say "Now add wine, quick." According to the Lindt website, the company also makes an incomprehensible 99 percent cacao bar, which may have been present at the Expo, but if so, we missed it—possibly they had to keep it under lock and key to prevent all of the convention center's light from falling into its darkness.
Lindt also had smiling hirees offering bowls of their signature truffles to passersby, but we bypassed those and went straight for the product we hadn't seen in stores yet: the "Creation 70% Cherry & Chili" bar, an awesomely complicated, thick dark chocolate bar containing chocolate mousse and chili-infused cherry filling. While it isn't particularly spicy—the chili taste hits late and mildly, compared to, say, Frey's mouth-biting Hot Chilli Pepper bar—the texture blends of dark chocolate, mousse, and cherry filling are terrific. Also, the bar is rich enough to feed a family of chocoholics for a week.
Splendid Chocolates Dark Chocolate Wasabi Peas & Spicy Crackers
Okay, seriously, Splendid Chocolates has a good, solid company name. It doesn't quite roll mellifluously off the tongue, but it works nicely to defuse any attempt at putting the company down. "I had a really crappy Splendid Chocolate the other day." See? The Canadian company is lining up to introduce a line of gourmet choco-products, two of which particularly stood out: dark-chocolate-covered wasabi peas and spicy rice crackers. Both packed a notable kick, and both were surprising taste combinations that turned out to be really good. Pity they're still a ways from market and didn't have packaged product yet, or we might have tried to sneak off with some.
Jelly Belly Cold Stone Creamery Ice Cream Parlor Mix
The giant Jelly Belly area didn't offer any new "gross" flavors this year, though one of the company's current big product pushes is the "BeanBoozled" packages, which put the scary flavors (pencil shavings, baby wipes, dirt, etc.) in containers alongside look-alike "good" flavors, so you don't know what you're getting out of any bean until you taste it. (The guy dispensing BeanBoozled samples, dipping jellybeans out of plastic drawers with a tiny, single-bean-grabbing scoop, took obvious sadistic pleasure in only giving us the punishment flavors, and following each new grimace with an "Oops! You got the rotten-egg flavor, huh?") The company's other, more palatable new product is a line of Cold Stone Creamery-inspired flavors. The pricey ice-cream chain has plenty of weird mixes to pick from, but none of them translates very well to bean form. Birthday Cake Remix tastes the most like what it intends to—cake batter—while Chocolate Devotion tastes like nothing, Our Strawberry Blonde is okay, and Mint Mint Chocolate Chocolate Chip is pretty standard.
Also at the Jelly Belly booth this year: Dark Chocolate Jelly Bellys and "Sport Beans," which contain "carbs • electrolytes • vitamins B & C" and should be consumed with water. They packaging says they're "clinically proven to improve sports performance." Oh, to work in the Jelly Belly sports clinic.
Pepperoni Pizza and Zesty Salsa Tortilla Combos
A reader e-mailed to tell us about two new flavors of Combos—the thoroughly disgusting sounding Cheeseburger, plus Bacon, Egg, And Cheese—so we were excited to approach the Combos area and inquire. Alas, they only had Pepperoni Pizza and Zesty Salsa. Perhaps our local 7-Eleven will have to help us find the others. Anyway, these sound pretty bad, look even worse, but aren't really notably disgusting. Pepperoni Pizza, which has been around a while, just tastes like tomato-sauce-flavored Combos. The twist on Zesty Salsa is that the outside isn't really a cracker, but rather a "tortilla," because it's made from corn. They actually taste remarkably like salsa, at least until the aftertaste makes you gag.
Starburst GummiBursts, Giant Chewy Nerds, Mix'd Berry Chewy Spree
In another couple instances of brands stepping outside their normal area, Starburst is introducing GummiBursts—liquid-filled gummies that vaguely recall the flavor of Starburst chews. They're your basic gummi, but they shoot out a liquid center of concentrated flavor. Not bad! Nerds have transformed from tiny rocks in a box into "giant, chewy" varieties—with a Nerd shell and a "chewy jelly bean center." Although Josh found them to be salty, harsh, and horrible, Kyle liked them quite a bit. Spree—those chalky sweet things—now come in Mix'd Berry flavors in a chewy form. These are so sweet that we couldn't taste anything else after them, and left our teeth feeling like they were coated in sugar. Insulin and a toothbrush, now!
Ghirardelli Squares: Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter Filling
Along with Godiva—conspicuously absent at the All Candy Expo— Ghirardelli is the classy chain restaurant—Benihana?—of the chocolate world. It's far better than the stuff you find in checkout lines at grocery stores, but it's pretty easy to find, and not outrageously priced. Last year, Ghirardelli's spacious setup was abuzz with activity, from dispensing mini cupcakes to lining the walls with its then newly rebooted line of filled chocolate bars. This year, the mood was much more restrained, with the dignified air of an upscale chocolatier keeping things professional at a convention—in other words, kinda boring. Company representatives were far stingier with sample squares of the newly unveiled Milk Chocolate With Peanut Butter Filling bar. They had little reason to worry; we weren't scheming to get more of these. Ghirardelli's chocolate is reliably good, and the peanut butter is far creamier than you'll find in a Reese's, but the combination somehow tastes underwhelming. Maybe it's the crunchy bits of peanuts in the filling. Maybe it's the drymouth left by the chocolate-peanut butter combo. Maybe it was chocolate fatigue. But we weren't blown away.
The company's new Evening Dream bar, part of its Intense Dark series, fared a little better. While other chocolatiers focus on the space race of making a nearly 100 percent cacao bar palatable, Ghirardelli scales back to 60 percent here and adds a "hint" of Madagascan vanilla. (At last, our angry demands for vanilla from Madagascar have been answered!) The result is a tasty bar that balances dark chocolate's boldness with milk chocolate's smooth mouthfeel.
Incidentally, we asked a friendly Ghirardelli's rep if the company had any reaction to the nearby Barton's display, where those pomegranate-bar-hogging mofos seemed to be biting Ghirardelli's packaging style. The response? A couple of blinks, then a firm "Oh, them. We don't really consider them our competition, so it doesn't matter." Way to carry the flag, quick-thinking Ghirardelli rep!
M&M's Premiums: Chocolate Almond, Mint Chocolate, Mocha, Raspberry Almond, Triple Chocolate
The new millennium has seen unprecedented activity in the world of M&M's. Seriously, for the longest time, you had Plain or Peanut, and maybe some cancer with the coloring, and that was it. Mars didn't seem terribly interested in screwing with a classic. These days, Mars only seems to be interested in screwing with said classic. To wit, the new Premiums line, the biggest departure yet for M&M's. The flavors aren't bizarre—Chocolate Almond sounds similar to regular almond M&M's—but the chocolate is altogether different. It's richer and more crumbly (almost chalky in texture—though not taste), not the firm stuff in its cheaper siblings. (These retail for $3.99 for a 6-ounce box.) They also have a little more character: oblong, non-uniform shapes, and fancy marbled exteriors.
Once you get over the texture shock, M&M's Premiums are generally pretty tasty. We scored a couple boxes of Raspberry Almond (far better than the limited-edition raspberry M&M's) and Chocolate Almond, but were able to try all of them at the sampling counter. Triple Chocolate mixes dark, milk, and white chocolate; Mocha approximates a coffee taste, and Mint Chocolate plays just like a higher-end version of its limited-edition sibling. While versions of these flavors have appeared in regular M&M's, they're more refined and palatable here. They should be, for $4 per box.
Mars is also taking My M&M's—personalized, consumer-generated messages printed on M&M's—up a notch by introducing My M&M's Faces. Now you can have the creepy satisfaction of eating the images of yourself or a loved one in M&M form.
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