I’ve been late to the Dubai chocolate craze. Indeed, my first encounter with Dubai chocolates didn’t come until last week, when my husband gave me one of the Nutty Fruitty Dubai chocolate bars he had bought at Costco ($17 at Costco).
The bag came with 15 individually packaged square chocolates, approximately 1 1/2″ x 1 1/2″). The chocolates basically consist of pistachio butter in a milk chocolate coating. They are pretty good, quite tasty but I found them too sweet. As I’ve found pretty much every confectionary I’ve tasted in the last few weeks “too sweet,” I have to conclude that’s a me problem.
My husband liked them as well, but he was a little annoyed at the fact that they are not really chocolate, the chocolate covering is there as a wrapper, rather than to contribute much to the flavor. I’m not sure if that’s true with other Dubai chocolates, I’ll probably give another one a try at some point.
I love international snack boxes, but they are usually a bit too expensive for my pocketbook. Alas, I found this box of Universal Yums Germany snacks at World Market on clearance for $9, or 55% off its regular price, as they were near expiration, and decided to give them a go. Most of the snacks expired in December, so the box wasn’t really appropriate as a gift, but there is nothing wrong with gifting yourself.
The box comes with a little booklet describing the snacks, that includes some trivia about German food and even a recipe. There is also a sheet for rating your snacks.
The first snack I tried was this package of Waffelz cheesecake flavored wafers ($3.10 at Universal Yums). This seems to be a relatively new brand of wafers of an old German baking company, and I was somewhat surprised the whole packaging was in English – which suggests it’s manufactured for export. The wafers were just OK. They weren’t as crispy as we prefer – whether this was because they were near expiration or their style, it’s hard to stay – but the main issue was the flavor. It basically tasted like a sour version of a regular vanilla wafer. It didn’t taste of cheesecake, however. I wouldn’t buy them.
Second, I tried the Lorenz Pomsticks, in sour cream (geschmack) flavor. These are very crispy, thin and short potato sticks seasoned with onion powder, parsley and yeast extract, as well as buttermilk powder and sour cream. They don’t have the very strong sour flavor of American sour cream and onion chips; rather, it’s more subtle. They are also less salty than their American equivalent. They are just as addictive, however, and I had eaten half the 2.5 oz package before I realized what I was doing. All in all, I preferred it to American chips, both because of just how crispy they were and how mild the flavor was.
While the chips are made in Germany, this particular bag seems to have been imported to either the Philippines, Malaysia or Singapore before making its way to the US. They were sold out at Universal Yum (previously $3.70), but they are available from other German food stores in the US.
The third and fourth treat I tried was this yum bag which came with five Kuhbonbon salted caramel candies (I ate one before the photo) and four or five unbranded candies. I felt that Universal Yums was rather deceitful about counting this bag of small candies as two treats, particularly as even put together they don’t amount to a full size bag of candy! This con would make me reluctant to buy a box at full price.
Fortunately, both candies were pretty good. The Kuhbonbon candies had a very strong caramel flavor, which was almost too intense. They were a bit crumbly, perhaps because they weren’t very fresh. The unbranded little candies – which came in green apple, grapefruit and passion fruit flavors – provided intense bursts of delicious flavor. Sure, they had only a passing relationship with the flavor of the actual fruits, but they were delicious anyway. Unfortunately, they are very small.
The fifth treat were Halloren O’s fudge in “Brownie” flavor ($5.50 at Universal Yums). The package came with a dozen bite size bombons with a soft center and a chocolate cover.
I was very disappointed in these brownies. They had no chocolate flavor whatsoever and instead they were just super sweet. It was also a weird sweetness, probably because, in addition to sugar, they are sweetened with “wheat glucose syrup,” which I’m going to guess is even sweeter than sugar. I struggled to finish one, and I’m going to leave the rest for low-sugar episodes, where flavor doesn’t matter. Update: they worked exceptionally well for that.
The sixth treat was a nice-sized bar of Böhme Pfefferminz Creme-Schokolade ($3.60 at Universal yums). This was one of two treats that actually had German-language packaging. This is a chocolate bar with a creamy mint filling. I’m not a huge fan of mint chocolates, and I particularly disliked this one (you guessed it, too sweet), but my husband liked it very much.
The last treat was a full size bar of Porta amarena kirsche ($5.50 at Universal Yums), chocolate with cherry flavored filling. None of us in the house are fans of cherries, so I think it will take a while before anyone tries it.
Sometimes, it’s hard to decide which snack we liked the most, while other times it’s a contest of which we liked the least. The latter was the case on our latest snack testing.
Eti pizza crackers were a pretty big disappointment. The crackers – similar in size to oyster crackers – were dry and had a very mild flavor. Maybe there was some oregano there, but we definitely could not taste pizza. Most of the pack went uneaten (though granted, we had just had dinner so we were pretty full).
Still, if we went to Turkey, we wouldn’t be buying this.
While this tiny candies were new to me, my kids recall buying little fizzy candies that came in soda can lookalikes when they were little. These Orien Mini Sour candies reminded them of them.
It seems that these are supposed to be effervescent as well, but we couldn’t notice any fizzy effect. Still, they had a non-unpleasant sour flavor.
Today’s challenge put a white chocolate cookie bar against whistling candies. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize the whistling candies were that, and as just candies they were failures, so the victory went to Turkey
Ulker Alpella 3D White Chocolate is a small pyramidal bar of multiple wafers covered with white chocolate. It was very tasty, though very sweet and pretty one dimensional. Still, it will satisfy your cravings for white chocolate.
According to Wikipedia, “Ülker is a Turkish multinational food and beverage manufacturer based in Istanbul, Turkey. Its products are exported internationally, to 110 countries. Ülker’s core products are biscuits, cookies, crackers, and chocolates, although it has expanded to other categories.” Alpella is one of their chocolate snack brands.
The Coris Whistle Soda Candy consisted of a small package with all Japanese writing and three flat candies with a whole in the middle. Unfortunately, we didn’t look at the packaging carefully or we might have noticed that the singing birds had a candy in their mouths – but even then I’m not sure we would have realized we were supposed to do the same.
Apparently the point of these candies is to put them in your mouth, blow on them and they produce a whistling sound. I’m sure it would have been fun to try that. As it is, we just ate them and they were OK. They’re chalky, with a sour but otherwise hard to identify flavor.
Candy Club: Up to 3 lbs old-fashioned candies, $34/month Promo: fbtreatyourself20 for $20 off your first box
I paid: $14 with promo, box value: $
To unsubscribe: call 888-598-5995, quick & easy
The Candy Club is a monthly subscription that sends you 2 to 3 pounds of old fashioned candies every month. Boxes come with 3 plastic jars of lose candy and individually wrapped candies filling up the rest of the box. The box is also supposed to include a “surprise confection”, generally a wrapped cookie or candy bar, but it was missing from my box. I didn’t notice until now, which makes me sad as it would probably have been my favorite item in the box. The candy containers look pretty cool, but they are actually made of thin, flexible plastic – so they are not really reusable.
This boxed is supposed to have a retail value of $60. To me, that seems impossible. I came up with a $16 value for this box, using online prices. Now, those values are calculated based on the purchase of much larger quantities, but even at regular candy stores, lose candy goes for $8-$12 a lb. I got 2 1/2 lbs of candy so, at the most, this box is worth $30. It was a deal at the $14 price I paid, but not much of one at the $34 cost of subsequent boxes. Fortunately, cancelling was easy. I just called the number and was unsubscribed without
I also found these to be incredibly sour, though quite tasty after you were done with that. Nobody else in my family found them sour, however, showing their taste buds are gone. Enjoyable but not better than regular Jelly Belly’s.
I didn’t realize these were made of licorice until I just checked what they were call to write about them. You would have fooled me, they don’t taste at all like licorice. That’s a good thing as I hate licorice. That said, these didn’t taste of much anything. Everyone at my house agreed these were not worth the calories.
in Wild Cherry, 9 oz, $2.5
, 14 oz, $8.5
, ~7 oz, $2.5
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