Taza to Go is a ready-to-drink chocolate extravagance from Valor, the renowned Spanish chocolatier founded in 1881. The name comes from getting chocolate “a la taza” in Spain, which means in a small white ceramic cup. It’s an amazing, thick, rich dark chocolate drink served hot. I would call it hot chocolate, but that’s like calling the Casa Milà in Barcelona an apartment. It’s only hot chocolate in the sense that it’s chocolate, which is hot. It’s more like a melted dark chocolate bar with just enough milk added to make it into a thick, drinkable liquid. It’s especially popular at breakfast, but also as a dessert treat.

Okay, great, but what will it taste like when it comes, not from a freshly melted chocolate bar and milk from your master chocolate barista, but from a premixed, imported pouch? Extremely delicious, if properly prepared.

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You’ll see Swiss conglomerate Nestle’s Milkybars in England just about everywhere. In the U.S., they’re much harder to find – even the Nestle USA website doesn’t list them anywhere. So when I saw one in World Market the other day, I snagged it. Even though I’m not a huge white chocolate fan, I’m curious to try this candy that’s so popular across the pond.

In keeping with recent trends to make foods with fewer suspect ingredients, Nestle makes a big fuss about the “all natural ingredients” in this candy, even explaining the ingredients in little parenthetical remarks. “Whole cow’s milk (that’s been dried).” Okay… thanks. Skeptics will reply that “milk” and “sugar” don’t reveal the whole story, since cows injected with antibiotics or sugar cane plants sprayed with pesticides lead to measurably unnatural byproducts (this is why organic foods can be safer and better tasting), but at least the artificial flavorings and colors are absent from the Milkybar, right?

Yeah, fine, but how about the taste?

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Remember when Godzilla first stomps his way into Tokyo? Picking up buses, throwing them down, weaving through the buildings toward the center of town? Well, that’s what we have today: the giant monster of the gummy bear forest. Your average gummy bear would be stunned in wide wonder to behold this thing, then run far, far away. The Big Bite Gummy Bear is 12 oz (most entire bags with dozens of gummy bears don’t weigh that much), and stands a mammoth three inches high.

And doesn’t this huge gummy bear kinda look monstrous? Glowing orange from some molten undersea origin, perhaps? Well… time to bite its face off.

After removing a band of plastic wrap, you need to pry away the two halves of a form-fitting, hard plastic mold that encase the beast. (Oddly, the mold has a lanyard loop; you could actually wear this thing as a necklace, I guess. Wow, that would hurt.)

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Chews Better has the following motto appearing on its packages and website: “The candy healthy people chews!” What? Aside from the hopeful claim about which candy healthy people chew, it sure looks like a grammatical boner. But have I misread the motto? Perhaps the motto’s last word isn’t a mis-conjugated verb, but a plural noun? If that’s so, then we’d have to read “candy healthy people” as an adjectival phrase to modify those “chews.” Does that work? What kind of chews would “candy healthy people” chews be? Beats the hell out of me. Thus I return to grammar police hypothesis number one: Chews Better has a screwed up motto. If they can’t edit, can they make candy?

Chews Better sent me two flavors: Pomegranate Blueberry Acai, and Strawberry Lemonade. And as the motto tried to communicate, these candies are meant to be healthy for you. They’re described as “All-Natural Chewy Candies with Vitamins and Fiber.” Surely this is making you nervous about the taste, right? Well, keep your beanie on straight.

Chews Better Pomegranate Blueberry Acai is a small, 26g (.9 oz) package. Each has five individually wrapped candies, and this flavor has 100% Vitamin C, 50% Vitamins B3, B5, B6, and B12, 3g of Fiber, and only 100 calories. Each chew is wrapped in silver and looks from the outside like a beef bullion cube. But it smells like a strong fruit medley upon unwrapping, and my nose finds this promising. Time for a bite.

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What do you eat when you’ve just returned from the dentist? Me, I eat chocolate-covered sunflower seeds in a rainbow of colors. (My mouth is still numb, if you must know the truth. I don’t know why you must, but you Candy Addict readers are relentlessly curious. At least, I like to think so.)

So now you’re thinking three things. 1) He must have had cavities filled. 2) He won’t be able to fully experience the candy I’ve entrusted him to review for me. 3) He’s insane. Two of those three are correct, but I’m not saying which.

Okay, so I like sunflower seeds. And I like chocolate. Let’s put them together and see what we get.

Hey these are pretty tasty. The sunflower seeds are un-roasted, and have no salt. They’re good. And the coating is the right amount of chocolate, such that you get a good balance of seed and cocoa sweetness. The chocolate has cocoa butter, yum. And the coating has Titanium Dioxide, hmm. And various artificial colors. Less yum. (The Sunflower Food and Spice Co. also makes an all-natural version of these candies; I didn’t see those at World Market but I would have preferred to buy them.)

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