One of the Christmas presets I got this year, standing proud amongst collection boxes and sweetie tins, was a Cybercandy mystery box. This snazzy little box contained a load of sweets from all over the world, picked at random and sent my way.
I’ve been making my way through them, with my considerable sweet tooth. If you made a New Years resolution to eat less chocolate, this may not be the post for you.
Here’s what I thought of five of them…
Sky Bar
An American candybar produced by the NECCO company, made up of four sections all covered in milk chocolate. The four sections are fudge, peanut butter, vanilla and caramel. It was the first US candybar to have four different flavoured sections.
At first I wasn’t too impressed – the chocolate is cheap-tasting – thin and very sugary, and the peanut butter filling is too salty to taste right. The other three flavours made me change my mind – the caramel was smooth without being overly sweet, the fudge was chocolate-y, and the vanilla flavour was a nice surprise. Liquid vanilla fillings aren’t very common in UK sweets, which generally prefer vanilla fondant centers, and it was a fun change.
Whatchamacallit
Not only does this chocolate bar have a great product name, but it tastes fantastic as well! The chocolate coating is fine, but the thick layer of peanut-flavour crispies and caramel give it a crunchy texture and lots of nuttiness without too much salt. This is another American candy bar.
Peppermint Crisp
This strange little chocolate bar is only sold in Australia and South Africa. It’s wonderfully quirky, with layers of thin mint inside the chocolate creating a brittle mint center that brings to mind the inside of Crunchies or Aero bars. The only downside is that it gets stuck to your teeth and tends to crumble all over the place.
The taste is a lot like mint Matchmakers, which are also produced by Nestle.
Tootsie Pop
A Tootsie pop is an American hard candy lollipop sold in various flavours (mine was grape) with a ‘Tootsie roll’ in the center (in the same place UK lollipops usually sometimes bubblegum). A Tootsie roll is a chocolate-flavoured, chewy sweet.
I was expecting this to be a nice combination, working a lot like a UK bubblegum lollipop. The lollipop candy is nice and strongly-flavoured, and the tootsie roll is a nice enough candy – but together, bleeeeuuurrrgh. The combination of fruit candy and strong chocolate flavours don’t work at all for me.
Airhead
700 million of these candy chews from Kentucky are eaten worldwide every year, and after tasting one I can get the attracting. From the glossy packet I was expected something like a Wham! bar, but the strawberry Airhead isn’t sour at all… it looks like a Wham! bar but tastes like a (slightly sweeter) Fruit Winder, and breaks apart with surprising ease. More of a gritty texture to it than a chewy one, but not unpleasantly.
Out of the five, I think I’d definitely pick up an Airhead and a Whatchamacallit again.