Candy Bar Lab

I’ve had traditional Turkish Delight before and I liked it’s soft consistency and light flavor. So, when I saw Fry’s Turkish Delight, I imagined the candy I had tried covered in chocolate and that seemed like a good thing. It turns out that Fry’s version is very different from what I had imagined.

Structure
Each bar is a thin, rectangle slab of flavored jelly enrobed in milk chocolate.

Texture
Unlike some other chocolate covered jelly products, with Fry’s Turkish Delight, the chocolate shell doesn’t crumble apart. Instead, it sticks to the tightly to the product. The jelly center disintegrates quickly and is not chewy nor sticks to your teeth. Though I’m not usually a fan of jelly filled confections, I liked the overall consistency of this candy bar.

Flavor
There’s something immediately odd about the taste. I couldn’t find anything on the packaging that said what flavor the jelly was, but since it appeared to be dark red/purple, I was expecting raspberry or some other fruit to be the main flavor. That guess was way off. Instead, it tasted like clove and mint mixed with grape jelly. It really had me confused at first, so I Googled it. I couldn’t find an official answer, but over at ChocaBlog, they mention it’s flavored with the essence of rose. Not sure what that’s supposed to taste like, but sounds like a reasonable answer from what I experienced. Anyway, overall, Fry’s Turkish Delight jelly tastes pretty weird. It’s palatable with the chocolate coating, but I didn’t really love it.

Verdict
I’m just not a big fan. It’s unique though and I could see some people being enthusiasts. Maybe if I had grown up with these, I would have learned to love them.

In the US, the only Cadbury candy bars I ever see are the solid, molded variety with nuts and dried fruits mixed in. These bars are actually produced by Hershey’s under a license agreement. In the rest of the world though, there’s a big variety of Cadbury enrobed products like the Cadbury Boost. I suppose the Hershey’s licensing agreement might prohibit Cadbury from exporting these candy bars to the US.

Structure
The inner core is a chocolate ganache-like filling, where the bottom half has small, round bits of biscuits (cookies) mixed in. This is surrounded by a thin layer of caramel. The whole bar is enrobed in milk chocolate.

Texture
The chocolate filling isn’t as soft as I was expecting or would have liked. It’s slightly softer than the pure chocolate coating, but not much. The biscuit pieces are perfectly crunchy, but there aren’t enough of them. I would have liked the whole center, not just the bottom half, to include biscuits pieces. The way the caramel is layered so thin, it’s not noticeable at first. But since it’s so chewy, it lasts longer than the other components, so you end up with some caramel in your mouth after everything else is gone.

Taste
The milk chocolate, both the coating and the filling, taste good. The caramel is slightly salty, which complements the overall sweetness of the product.

Verdict
The Cadbury Boost is a reconstructed Twix bar, though it’s not quite as good. Twix has a higher proportion of caramel and it’s solid cookie bar provides more crunch than Boost’s small, round bits of cookie. That said, it’s still pretty darn good and Cadbury chocolate is tasty.

A few months ago, while preparing for a big Oktoberfest party, my mom picked this candy bar up at a local German grocery store along with some beer and brats. Immediately, I remembered the last German candy bar I tried - the Storz Nougat Praliné. Both have gold packaging, are made of a chocolate and hazelnut nougat, and hail from Deutschland. Two things jumped out at me about this Wendler product though. First, the packaging design is superior to the Storz version. It’s crisply folded and has a cool metallic, textured feel to it. Second, I could see from the picture on the front that this product has two distinct layers, one darker (and presumably more chocolately) than the other.

Structure
Two layers of German nougat. The bottom layer is a darker shade of brown than the top.

Texture
The Wendler Nougat bar is soft and dense. It coats your whole mouth as you try to chew it. There isn’t a huge difference in consistency between the two layers, but the top layer is slightly smoother, while the bottom layer is a bit drier.

Flavor
Very surprisingly, there is almost no chocolate flavor. It didn’t taste at all like I was expecting, which was something similar to Nutella. Instead, there’s a distinct roasted hazelnut flavor. Overall, this product is very sweet and unfortunately, without the chocolate present, there’s not much going on to cut into that sweetness. There’s really no discernible difference between the two layers, except the top was maybe a little sweeter.

Verdict
Maybe I’m being overly critical because I was so sure that this bar was going to taste like chocolate and I was horribly let down. It’s very one-dimensional and way too sweet.