Tired of drinking your morning coffee? Why not eat it, surrounded by chocolate? That’s one idea for enjoying DeFranco’s Espresso Secrets, anyway. And wouldn’t that be faster, tastier, and reduce your chance of getting burned? Of course it would. And if you put a crazy amount of sugar in your coffee (like, 14g), then it’d be about the same calories, too (160). Okay, enough numbers.

Almost. This 1.3 oz/36g package contains three good-bite-sized pieces of 55% dark chocolate, with a coffee center. If you want a caffeine kick, you better eat all three. But how’s this candy taste?

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I had the distinct pleasure of sampling Amella’s Artisan Cocoa Butter Caramels and OMG they are decadent and scrumptious. These caramels have an incredible texture - just a bit chewy and so creamy and buttery that they just melt in your mouth.

Passion Fruit: Out of the three flavors I tried, the passion fruit was my least favorite and it was still excellent. The caramels include real passion fruit, cocoa butter, and Tahitian vanilla and are hand dipped in milk chocolate. The passion fruit flavor is really strong and tangy - if you’re into passion fruit these will make you do the happy dance. Since I think passion fruit is just ok, I’d have preferred more caramel flavor. But even so, yum!

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I’ve had some good peanut brittle in my time with Candy Addict, but I’ve never seen these nifty flavor twists: Coco Nutty and Yippee Cayenne. I wonder how they’ll work with the brittle.

Jer’s Handmade Chocolates is a relatively new company in San Diego. I was not happy with their Toffee Break Gourmet Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars, but I’m still ready to like these Brittle Bites - especially given the quality ingredients.

Let’s try the Coco Nutty bites first. These come in a small 1.6 oz box, with four individual, small bite-sized pieces. I pop one in my mouth. The coconut flavor hits first, and strongly. Then the crispy brittle, which is hard to discern because of the strong coconut flakes. Lastly I notice the dark chocolate, quite far in the flavor background. I can see how some people would like these, but to me the coconut flavor’s too strong, masking the brittle and chocolate elements. Oh, and these are peanut brittle, but I couldn’t even taste the peanuts. Let’s try the Yippee Cayenne.

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Jer’s all natural Toffee Break Gourmet Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars have very promising ingredients: organic peanut butter (unhomogenized, using Valencia peanuts), dark chocolate, sugar, sweet cream, salt and butter. (Notice: no trans fat or hydrogenated oils, and no artificial ingredients.) Sounds good, right? Well, you haven’t read his PR.

In the Jer’s Handmade Chocolates press release FAQ that accompanied my sample, founder Jerry Swain asks himself, “Now that you own your own chocolate business, why do you think people enjoy your story?” I won’t bore you with the answer - it’s as banal and self-congratulatory as the rest of the document’s fatuous verbiage. But hey, even hot air balloons sometimes carry good candy, right? So let’s check these out.

The Toffee Break package contains two small-to-average-sized, individually wrapped candy bars (50g, 1.75 oz each). Unless you live in San Diego, you’d have to buy these online. On Amazon, when you include shipping, they cost $35 for 4 packages (for a total of 8 bars). That works out to $8.75 per 3.5 oz package of two bars. Geez, these better be good.

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I swear, I try not to be the Candy Curmudgeon, so this is not going to be a rant about the packaging of the Sweetriot UnBar, or its silly name. You know if you are the kind of person who is annoyed by puns and wants to poke someone in the eye when you hear the word “yummy.” If you are, you might want to just grab one of these and rip it open without looking too closely.

But you might indeed want to grab one of these, either way. Sweetriot’s sense of humor might be annoying but this chocolate definitely was not. If there isn’t an old cliche that says that you should not judge a candy by its cover, there should be.

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