Coconut M&M’s

okay, so right off the bat, i’m gonna say that i like this better than the pretzel m&m’s. those things were dumb. these… eh i wouldn’t say dumb. i think the concept has potential, but the execution was off by a little bit. that little bit is that there’s no actual coconut in these things at all. wtf?? why? i don’t know. those jerks.

so they are pretty standard for m&m’s… they are a bit fatter than the normal milk chocolate m&m’s, but not too big. the outsides feature delightful additions to the m on some of the candies, including flowers, umbrellas, and palm trees. FUN. you bite into it, and you get a lot of milk chocolate flavor, with a hint of coconut. and there is… something strange going on with the texture. it’s almost like there are little pieces of coconut in it, as there is a bit of almost salty resistance as there might be with shreds of coconut, but knowing there is no real coconut in there, that is just… unsettling to me. but it mostly fails in that the coconut taste is just not real coconut.

i’m not disgusted… i made it through the whole bag, but i don’t think i’ll buy them again. WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST USE REAL COCONUT, M&M? YOU TOO GOOD FOR REAL COCONUT?! YOU DON’T THINK WE WANT REAL COCONUT?!?!
 

DAMN YOU, M&M!!!!!

ps. buy these instead.

Life Savers Butter Rum

ahh life savers. i guess maybe they could be considered a boring candy, but i enjoy them. they are like the classic hard candy! COME ON PEOPLE! classic. now, i enjoy whatever kind of lifesavers you throw at me, but i have a special place in my heart for butter rum.

when i was a kid, we would go on many a family road trip. usually it ended in upstate new york, but our winding and ever-changing route would take us through many other states, often stopping in different cities along the way. there’s not much to do in the back seat of a van for hours on end, so we would look forward to each and every stop we made, including the gas station stops. we would each get our own drinks and candies, but my dad would almost always pick up a roll of life savers. he would usually get one of each the five flavor pack, and the butter rum pack (and sometimes the tropical too). as we made our way up the interstate, he would reach the pack back to us, and ask if any of us wanted a ‘smoke’. and the roll would get smaller and smaller until it was all gone.

i associate the butter rum with this more than the five flavor packs because i would have regular lifesaver whenever, but i would never go out of my way to get butter rum. butter rum is NOT a fun flavor. it’s… well it seems adult to me. and just one flavor per pack?! what a waste! but i picked these up last week, remembering how they actually were a pretty good candy. and eating them now they are every bit as good as they were all those years ago that i last had them.

the butter rum flavor is a warm, sweet buttery melty-type flavor. it’s similar to a caramel in the way it’s sweet, but the butter is the prominent taste here. there is just a light hint of a rum taste to it, and that really goes a long way. typically, i hate candy flavored like liquor. in fact, anything flavored like liquor is pretty gross to me usually. but it’s such a tiny flavor in these life savers that it just serves as a special, unique bite.

these candies are delightful, and even if my nostalgia glasses make them seem ten times better than they actually are, they’re still a really solid treat.

Big League Chew

when you’re a kid, there’s nothing cooler than a big wad of chewing tobacco. no wait… that’s not right. i am sure that even then i thought chewing tobacco was disgusting. so selling candy masked as tobacco was never a really big selling point for me (candy cigarettes? no… thanks. now candy bongs…). in fact, thinking back, there were a lot of wacky gimmicks that candy companies used (and still use) to market shit to kids. and, honestly, i guess it worked pretty well on me. but i feel like baseball and gum share more of a history than, say, rings and lollipops do. gum has been packaged with baseball cards for a long time, and i guess chewing gum resembles chewing tobacco, which has been a longtime staple of baseball players. SO i suppose this step was inevitable.

it is gum, shredded. in a pouch. and that’s it! nothing really special. maybe some kids like to look like they’re chewing tobacco. i don’t quite know how i got into big league chew, but i am guessing my father had a hand in it. regardless of how it worked out, i love the stuff. it’s the ultimate in gum delivery.

the gum itself is shredded into little strips, and i’m guessing floured so it doesn’t stick together (which it still does). the flavor is alright, nothing special (i like a good grape gum, and this satisfies that need). and it doesn’t last for a really long time or anything. it is a thick, strong gum that produces a very nice pop. but what’s really so great about it is that it’s just a bag of gum. take what you need. grab some, stuff it in your mouth, and when the flavor runs out, grab more. when it hurts to chew, you’re done. and by then end, you’ve got yourself a big gob of flavorless sludge… awesome.

it’s good road trip gum. i wouldn’t eat it all the time, but it’s nice for some nostalgia every now and then.

Kazoozles

many years ago (maybe three or four) i stumbled upon a strange and delicious new candy creation from wonka called “sweet tart rope”. i was already a fan of nerds rope, so i knew that candy in rope form could be successful, and i liked sweet tarts well enough, so i decided to pick up a pack.

it was a miraculous, wacky candy concoction that had a red licorice outside, and a gooey blue paste inside, filled with nerds. NO SWEET TARTS IN SIGHT. but that was okay, because this shit rocked. it was such a strange combination of flavors and textures, the cherry chew and the sour slime and the tart crunch. all at once! i picked this candy up whenever i saw it… which lasted for only a few months…

and then it was gone.

the candy had disappeared! THIS WAS A DISASTER! i had fallen in love with that candy, to the point that i fantasized about buying it in bulk (which i did not, regrettably) and designing my very own in-car dispenser a la wayne’s world. alas, these dreams died the day they discontinued sweet tarts rope.

OR DID THEY??

enter: wonka cherry punch kazoozles! much to my delight, they had revamped the sweet tarts rope, sadly losing the crunchy nerds, and replacing the name with one that makes just about as much sense as the original. but all that mattered to me was that they brought it back! thank you, candy gods! thank you for your kindness!!

the candy remains much the same, though i recall the chewy licorice exterior being a brighter, more vibrant red. but it still has the same cherry flavor, and still offers a nice chew that doesn’t really stick to your teeth (too badly). the insides are the same strange, slightly sour paste that they originally had. it is still a neat combination of sensations brought by the textures, so i’m pretty happy with it. but i will always miss the original sweet tart rope of yesteryear.

they also offer a pink lemonade variety, which has a sour sugared outside and pink paste center, but it’s not nearly as good (in my opinion). these cherry punch kazoozles are one of my top favorite candies of all time.

Sour Patch Extreme

i’m a pretty big fan of sour patch kids. i’ve been eating these things for as long as i can remember. they are, as far as i’m concerned, the base line by which to judge sour candy. that’s not to say that i find them to be the most sour of sour candies, just that they are my favorite. now, i am something of a purist when it comes to a lot of things, so when i hear that a candy i like has come out with a variation on the traditional form, i am usually pretty skeptical. but actually, i’ve had a few different types of sour patch candy that i’ve quite enjoyed (the sour patch peach, and sour patch watermelon). so i feel that whatever new things they come out with are generally worth a try.

when i saw the “sour patch extremes”, i was a bit turned off by the name (X-TREME marketing is always a negative, even if it’s just in name alone), but i thought why not give them a try. it wasn’t really easy to tell what i was getting into judging by the art on the bag, but i figured that it was probably just an extra sour version of the originals, in different double flavors.

as you can see, they are fairly similar to the regular sour patch kids, with the same sour sugar coating, but in different shapes, and multi-colored. these shapes are supposed to be x-treme headz^TM of some sort. they come in three varieties: watermelon grape, orange blue raspberry, and sour apple strawberry. one of my chief concerns was that they would have a more gummy chew to them than the waxy chew the original sour patch kids have, and that was mostly unfounded. they are made from largely the same ingredients as the originals, and have a similar chew, though (as a result of their flatness?) they do have a little more give. but it’s not so much that i don’t know i’m eating a sour patch product.

the flavors are pretty good. biting them in half, you can taste that each colored side has a distinct flavor of its own, which is nice to know. the orange blue raspberry features a similar orange flavor to the original sour patch kid orange, and the blue raspberry flavor is about what you’d expect from a blue candy. the sour apply strawberry is pretty overwhelmingly apple in flavor, which is good if you like sour apple. and the grape watermelon (my favorite) has a similar watermelon flavor to the sour patch watermelons, with a nice light grapey flavor present as well. the latter works best as a combination of both flavors.

sadly, i didn’t find these to be any more sour than regular sour patch kids, which was my only real hope in buying them. the flavors aren’t interesting enough on their own to warrant the purchase, and having to eat them in their predetermined combinations is kind of annoying. overall, nice to try, but i’ll stick to the old school sour patch dudes. they taste like childhood.