Why Not All Chocolate Candy?

Wouldn't you expect just chocolate candy in an item labeled "Assorted Chocolate Candy Variety Pack"? Given that this is supposed to be a five pound bag, that is a lot of chocolate. Let's see what actually came in this from Yummy Chew that I was sent as part of the Amazon Vine program. While I got the bag for free, no other compensation was given with an expectation that I would change the report of my experiences with the product or that I would write this blog article.

The first thing I want to say is that I weighed it and there was 5 pounds of candy in the bag, possibly a bit more or less depending on the weight of the bag. However, the candy inside was not all chocolate; about 10% of it by weight was non-chocolate items like the ones you'll see in the side by side photo below.

We don't care about the non-chocolate candy here, so forget those and let's look at the chocolatey items inside. There are three brands represented – Reese's, Kit Kat, and Hershey's – I'll look at all the candy brand by brand.

We'll start with a fan favorite here on The Chocolate Cult: Reese's Cups! These are the miniature size which I have never seen individually wrapped like this before. It actually annoyed me because of the unnecessary extra material that will just go into trash dumps. Remember! Earth is the only place with chocolate (as far as we know) and with climate changing, who knows if chocolate will get rarer or more common.

Two types of Kit Kit were included. One is clearly a mini single stick version but the only is a small two-stick version in "Pink Lemonade" flavor which apparently didn't do very well since there are included. Since I've covered the basic Kit Kat several times on this blog, I'm focused on the limited edition flavor. There was a strong strawberry scent when I just opened up one of the wrappers. It is quite pink as you can see. I can't get my camera to focus well enough but inside it looks like the filling between wafers is milk chocolate but if so, the flavor isn't strong. It really reminds me of Strawberry Cream Pocky that is more of what I think of as an artificial strawberry flavor that is also very milky and sweet, almost overwhelmingly so.

There are three flavors of Hershey's but four sizes of their candy bars. Two of the original Milk Chocolate, Cookies 'n' Creme, and Special Dark; all are small individual or even smaller sized wrapped bars. The Cookies 'n' Creme bar is only allowed on The Chocolate Cult because of the cookies in them do use chocolate; that's white candy, not white chocolate, that is the bulk of the bar. I opened four of these; one to give a co-tester and three others because one clearly had damage that appeared to be sugar bloom of a substantial part of one of the four sections of the bar. I wanted to show you the front and back so you can see the cookie pieces inside. As many of you may know if you've been reading this blog for a while, Your Chocolate Priestess is not a fan of white chocolate or candy; I think it just tastes too sweet and creamy. These little bars have a good crunch from the cookies pieces but every one that I opened also had a few spots of sugar bloom on them so the texture was off (I think the flavor is also off contrary to many claims). This makes me cautious about the other candy we're about to look at.

Fun Fact: Sugar bloom happens more easily in white chocolate while fat bloom happens more easily in dark chocolate. Given that this happened at all, I was careful to look at the other Hershey's products. I also went back and looked at a couple of regular Kit Kats to check them out: They were fine.

I opened both the smaller and the slightly larger Hershey's Milk Chocolate bars to compare them beyond the size of their wrappers. I did notice that these had a bit of wear on the edges but nothing like bloom of any type. The Dark Chocolate Hershey's also had some wear but no sign of bloom on them. I wanted to highlight that they are darker than the original not just in flavor but in looks with the below photo.

It may not seem like much, but 10% of the candy in a Chocolate Variety Pack is really 10% too much, don't you think?