Candy Review: Nestle Turtles Eggs

Monday, May 4, 2009 - by Laurie

Every year, on beaches throughout the world, female green sea turtles haul themselves up out of the sea and perform the laborious task of laying their eggs and burying them in the sand. After about 60 days, the eggs will hatch and the young turtles must scramble across the dangerous beaches in an attempt to reach the sea.

These are not those turtle eggs.

Instead, Nestle Turtles Eggs are based on the pecan and caramel-filled chocolate candies popular at dinner parties everywhere. Now, caramel eggs are a dime a dozen around Easter time (almost literally if you wait for the after-Easter sales to do your candy shopping). But add one of my most favorite nuts, pecans, to the mix, and you have yourself a winning combination. Turtles are one of the few mainstream candies that contain pecans, but their relative expense means I don’t buy them that often, so I was pleased to be able to score one of these puppies at post-Easter sale prices.

The egg itself is in the same style as Cadbury Creme Eggs and the like – a foil-wrapped egg a couple of inches long and relatively hefty for its size. When eaten alone, the outer chocolate shell has a toasty cereal sort of taste. The filling contains big chunks of crunchy pecans suspended in an unusual caramel – it’s got sort of a thick, custardy texture rather than being gooey or stringy. Its color and texture remind me of pecan pie filling, which is A-OK with me.

Unfortunately, though, the caramel doesn’t add very much to the mix – it doesn’t have any of that saltiness or burnt sugar intensity that makes a really good caramel, and its softness doesn’t match the denser texture of the caramel inside a regular Turtles candy. The softer-textured filling doesn’t go badly with the crunchy pecans and melty chocolate, but it’s definitely not the same effect as the original.

Unlike most filled-chocolate eggs and a lot of caramel candies, it’s not overwhelmingly sweet – most of the sweetness comes from the chocolate shell rather than the filling. The pecan crunch is great, but the lack of caramel flavor, not so much. The pecan flavor predominates, but that mellow harmony of caramel, chocolate and pecan from a regular Turtle is missing. It’s certainly not a bad candy (it definitely gets bonus points for not skimping on the pecans), but don’t expect it to taste too much like the original.

So sit back and enjoy a Turtle egg in this post-Easter candy season – and imagine how awesome it would be if turtles really did lay chocolate eggs. (Hey, it makes way more sense than egg-laying rabbits.)

• Nestle Turtles Website

Buy Nestle Turtles Online:

• at Amazon.com