British Candy Tasting

My housemates and I have been wanting to try all the British sweets that are novel to our American palettes so we staged a Candy Tasting last night. After a trip to Sainsbury's we came up with 11 candies we had never seen before.

Jelly Babies: a soft confectionery shaped to look like babies, similar to sour patch kids, but these gummy candies are not sour. About an inch tall, the babies have a soft texture and an unsavory powdery substance (corn starch I suspect) dusted on the surface.

• Rachel - "The texture is disgusting. Tastes like raw squid in my mouth."
• Katherine - "Sick, kinda like these weird rice candies from Japan."

Fun Fact: Each Bassett's Jelly Baby has an individual name, colour and flavour: Brilliant (red - strawberry), Bubbles (yellow - lemon), Baby Bonny (pink - raspberry), Boofuls (green - lime), Bigheart (purple - blackcurrant) and Bumper (orange - orange).

Milky Bar Buttons: These little white chocolate rounds weren't very special. Turns out, Milky Bars are just a white chocolate candy bar produced by Nestle so it tasted exactly like the white chocolate crunch bars (sans the crunch) we have in the States. Smooth and sweet though.

• Katherine - "Tastes like an Easter bunny."
• Brie - "I would put the whole bag in my mouth."

Fun Fact: The Milkybar Kid has been used in television advertising promoting Nestlé Milkybar in the countries where it is sold. The Milkybar Kid is a blond, spectacle-wearing young boy, usually dressed as a cowboy, whose catch phrase is "The Milkybars are on me!".

Turkish Delight: The package of these chocolate covered squares of Turkish Delight reads "Full of Eastern Promise" - the promise of nausea. None of us had eaten Turkish delight before. It's a mixture of sugar and corn starch, often pinkish in color. This particular version looked like red jello wrapped in chocolate. No one in the group took more than one bite. Rather tasteless but revolting at the same time.

• Rachel - "Like Jello mixed with gummy bears." (about the consistency)
• Brie - "That was like poison."

Revels: We thought this bag of chocolate covered spherical things would be like bridge mix. I think it evolved out of the same concept but the components are different. The bag read "milk chocolate with assorted centers." The centers included: malt balls, raisins, peanuts, hard caramel, and a powdery orange substance similar to pixie stix. We weren't overwhelmed by the good factor but it saved our taste buds from the Turkish Disgusting.

Happy Hippo: made by the Ferrero company, Happy Hippo's are a thin crispy wafer cookie shaped like a hippo filled with two creams. We had the original which has milk flavored cream and hazelnut cream. The cocoa flavor replaces the hazelnut with chocolate cream. It tasted like white chocolate Nutella - a good thing in my book. The bottoms are dipped in a crumbly frosting/meringue mixture.

• My Opinion - Super sweet. Good balance of textures with the crispy cookie and smooth center. Overall a pleasing treat.

Fun Fact: Happy Hippo were made famous by a smash-hit commercial where an animated Hippo sang "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" while a dog tried to distract it/catch its attention by dancing to the music in increasingly funny and bizarre ways. It has an unusual name for a biscuit, stemming from the character "Happy Hippo" (a cartoon hippopotamus) created by the french designer Andre Roche for the Ferrero chocolate hit "Kinder Surprise Eggs".

Poppets: Katherine grabbed this small purple box of chocolate covered raisins on a whim while we were checking out at Sainsbury's. My mom thinks (and I agree sometimes) that cigarette cartons smell like raisins. Well, these raisins tasted like how cigarette cartons smell - dirty with a burnt raisin undertone.

Fox Echo (mint crisp): I guess the mint Echo is a relatively new Echo flavor (2004). I haven't had the original but I would say stick that. Our individually wrapped sticks consisted of a chocolate biscuit topped with bubbly mint crisp covered in milk chocolate. The biscuit and chocolate were good, but the mint was so overpowering it tasted like you were eating toothpaste. I would recommend a Double Take (chocolate mint kit kat) if you want chocolate mint flavor.

Magic Stars:

• Rachel - "Dirt cheap chocolate" in small star shapes.

Party Rings: The party ring is a British cookie first made by Fox's Biscuits in 1983. It is a circular biscuit with a central finger-sized hole topped with a thin layer of colored icing with wiggly lines in a different colour. A pack comes with four or five rings in each of the five different color combinations. Tasted like a crispy animal cracker with hard, crackly royal icing on top.

Fun Fact: Party rings were a product of the 1980s fashion for the newly developed chemical food dye system that enabled more lavish colours to be incorporated into the manufacture of biscuits. This made them a very popular choice for children's parties, where not only could the colours amuse, but the holes in the middle enabled them to be placed on a finger, often resulting in "ring races". These involved each child taking five rings and placing one on each finger of a hand. They would then proceed to eat them as fast as possible.

Mistletoe Kisses: Two milk chocolate rectangles filled with soft chocolate and caramel. Nothing too exciting.

• Katherine - "I'm reasonably pleased."

Cadbury Crunchie: Milk chocolate covered honeycomb toffee. The innards look like a golden sea sponge. Very odd texture - slightly powdery but sticky like a Butterfingers. Neutral taste.

• Katherine - "Like a cross between a malted milk ball and a Butterfingers."

Fun Fact: In the UK and Republic of Ireland, Crunchie is marketed as "The fun, feel good chocolate bar". It was advertised from the 1980s onwards with the phrase "that Friday feeling", although it also became associated with the phrase "Thank Crunchie it's Friday".

The Verdict:

• Me - Happy Hippo
• Rachel - Crunchie
• Katherine - Mistletoe Kisses
• Brie - Poppets