Here we go again – another artisan-style caramel product made with high falootin’, responsibly-cultivated ingredients. You’re probably thinking, “Wake me up when this review is over!”, right? Sounds likes a good idea. While you go ahead and take a snooze, I’ll just pop a few more of these squishy-delish, dairy delicacies in my mouth.
With a name like Heavenly Bites, you automatically expect that the sweet little sensation you’re about to dive into is chock full of divine inspiration. Given the fact that this 100% natural confection, produced by Boulder, Colorado’s Oh Yes You Candy!, is made with carob rather than chocolate, I immediately knew that an absolute miracle would have to occur for me to like it.
It seems like your basic caramel has become a thing of the past. Everywhere I look there are all kinds of fancy caramels topped with special salt from Hawaii or the Himalayas. I’ve also seen flavored caramels like pumpkin or even varieties made with tea. I’ve actually never really wanted to try any of these new fangled caramels but after trying these sea salt caramels from Sweet Pete’s, I’ve developed a new point of view.
World Market is a store that sells a variety of imported goodies, from home decor to gifts and snacks. They also have a great candy section that includes imported candy as well as their own line of chocolate. A while back, we reviewed World Market house chocolate bars. Today, I picked up two of their house line of filled chocolate bars to try out: Coconut Milk Chocolate and Caramel and Sea Salt Milk Chocolate. Both of them sound good to me!
But how do they taste?
I grabbed this box without looking too closely when I saw it at my local Japanese market. As you might gather from my last Crunky review, I was hoping to use it as part of my continuing quest to convince English-speakers to love Crunky instead of just making fun of its name.
However, I wasn’t sure this plan would work, because I assumed that what I had was white chocolate. Now, I love almost everything Japanese and I love white chocolate. But with the exception of Crunky, I usually find Japanese chocolate to be not of the highest quality. And white chocolate, with such a mild flavor, has nothing to hide behind – if it’s not of the best quality, it’s horrid.
But when I got home and looked more closely, the plot began to thicken. I wondered why the box had an illustration of a bowl of ice cream on it. The text next to the picture was something that I could only interpret as “Kanji Kanji Kanji Vanilla” (kanji being the Japanese version of Chinese characters, of which I can only read a couple dozen, none of which were included here).
On the back, the pasted-on English label only deepened the mystery at first: “Okinawa Shiovanil.” And this time the problem was not one of language, exactly. I know that “shio” means “salt.” But salt-vanilla? Salt-vanilla ice cream?
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