Friday, April 2, 2010

Easter Caramel

I love caramel!!! And there is plenty of it at Easter! Yahoo!!

I love the colors of these Sugar Babies:

How festive are these?

And the taste?

Well, they are pretty hard, not as soft and chewy as I would like. The taste is okay, but there are soooo many better options as you are going to see. But I do love those festive colors!!

These turned out to be one of my favorite of all the Easter candies:

They are by Harry and David and come in festive colors and are shaped like eggs. I actually thought they were almonds when I first saw the package:

But no - they are caramel, wrapped in a layer of dark chocolate and coated in a candy shell:

And they are completely delicious and addictive. I wish I had 12 more packages. They are one of my top Easter candies. At least so far.

These assorted eggs by Neuhaus were expensive as hell - over a dollar per egg!


Gorgeous colors in a wide variety of flavors - as you will see:


This is caramel (there was only one):



This is a rich, chocolately caramel. It was delicious - a smooth, creamy caramel. It's a chocolate lovers caramel, not a caramel lovers chocolate. And I'm all about the caramel.

Here are the cheaper competitors -all clothed:


One of each clothed and naked:

From our friends at Palmer - look at that - $1.oo for the whole bag!




Not the flowing caramel we see elsewhere, but a good size. And I hate to say it, but sometimes you get what you pay for. These are not so good. Too sweet chocolate, and compared to the others, not so great caramel.

From Williams-Sonoma:

This was the smallest of the little eggs:

And I have to tell you, these were really, really delicious. A+++ A little more chocolate than the Cadbury Mini's, but the caramel is just as good. These are fantastic. I mean, just look at them! Yay!! (And there are 50 of them in the bag! Wheee!!!!)

From Nestle, slightly larger than Williams-Sonoma:

See all the chocolate? Not so much caramel:

These were in the same category as Palmer, maybe a tiny bit better. Both have that waxy chocolate and only average caramel. Why bother with them when you can have the Williams-Sonoma eggs or (drum roll please) these:

This one was the second largest, slightly smaller than Palmer:

And look at all that delicious, gorgeous caramel. Cadbury has it going on when it comes to caramel eggs. They are so very, very, very good!!

And the gold standard:





Isn't that a beautiful, beautiful thing? Cadbury is a winner because both the chocolate and the caramel are great. It is the most oooey, gooey amazing stuff on the planet!!

Another lame egg by Lammes:

Just like their crappy peanut butter egg, this one was hard to cut. Hello - hard caramel? BOO!!!

This was a dog. I hate Lammes now.

This is another treat from The Chocolate Bear. Doesn't that bunny look familiar?

Look at the little green bow on her ear and her eyelashes! Cute!

See the caramel and nuts? WOW!! This was terrific!! Nuts, chocolate and caramel is one of my favorite combos. And this was really good because there are soooo many nuts!!! YUM!

I loved this - The Chocolate Bear is making a good comeback!!

You know if we're going to talk nuts and caramel, we gotta talk Snickers. I love all the different colors of the eggs:



I'm a Snickers fan, BUT this wasn't as good as The Chocolate Bear's rabbit "lollipop." Don't get me wrong, it's good, but compared to that there are too few nuts and too sweet nougat.

But, of course, the Snickers was better than this:

As usual, Russell Stover sucks. I mean - can you even see a nut? Oh wait - there's one. And does that caramel look even a little gooey?

If you're going to play in the big leagues, you gottta step up. Sorry, RS - you just don't cut it. Again.

This is weird - it says it's a dark chocolate covered pecan melt-a-way:





I see the dark chocolate and some pecans, but I thought caramel would be involved. I dunno - maybe that's why they call it a brick egg. By Elmer Candy Corp. Unique in that it has dark chocolate, but overall - crappy.

The lesson? The find the best caramel you gotta break a lot of eggs.

2 comments:

Kris, in New England said...

Caramel is always a fave - Caramelo by Cadbury is my favorite.

However...caramel does not belong in a Cadbury Cream Egg. Those are supposed to be ooey, gooey sugary centers that look like an egg white and an egg yolk.

Anything else is just a poseur! :-)

Denise Ryan said...

We're getting to those babies - those are a big time Easter fav!! I wished you lived closer so I could share some of my chocolate with you!! Those Harry and David eggs were awesome!!! : )