Wonka Crème Bruelee (Tesco) [By @cinabar]

This is the third new bar from Wonka that has launched in the UK. It was actually a bit more difficult to find than the other which seem to be stocked more widely. Still I did find it in huge Tesco in the next town, so maybe that says more about where I live!

This new bar is quite pretty when opened, with the chocolate pieces all having a round coin like motive on the top, some decorated with a W for Wonka. The pieces of chocolate are quite thin but are fairly wide squares so still feel quite substantial. The bar is quite a sweet affair, with its sugary mousse filling. There is a nice rich flavour of vanilla and good helping of brown sugar and cream making the bar impressively sweet and rich, but I have to say it was very reminiscent of a proper Crème Bruelee. The texture is pleasant, the mousse is smooth, but there is a gentle crunch from what feels like brown sugar crystals distributed within each piece.

It’s as nice bar and it does go a long way to recreating the dessert it is named after, with its set dairy custard like filling. I have a sweet tooth and as such rather enjoyed the bar, but it may be to sugary for some.

I think the biggest issue for me with the new Wonka range it's that the brand gives the image that it should consist of crazy and adventurous chocolate ideas, and yes all the bars have been nice but Cadbury still have the upper hand with their Marvellous Creations range .With Cadbury having bars with popping candy and cola jellies I do think Wonka are going to have to sprinkle some more imagination into their next product.

By Cinabar

[New] Wonka – Chocolate Nice Cream (Local Newsagent) [By @Cinabar]

After trying the rather lovely Wonka Millionaires Shortbread, I was rather keen to get my hands on the other new bar to hit UK shelves. This Chocolate Nice Cream bar felt lumpy in the wrapper, and I feared my bar might actual be damaged, but once opened the strange feel of it made sense.
The bar has a name that sounds a bit like ice cream, and each of the chocolate pieces have an ice cream sundae design on the outer shell, which does look rather cute. There are four chocolate squares inside, joined together in bar formation. Inside the sundae bubble is a thick gooey layer of chocolate sauce, and under that is a slightly firmer base with a vanilla filling.
As a whole the ingredients are quite sweet, but still nice. The chocolate sauce is probably the biggest let down; on its own it has a syrupy flavour that tastes more like chocolate flavourings, than the good stuff. I realise that you aren't suppose to try the sauce part on its own, but I could resist! To be fair it does taste like the chocolate sauces you get on an ice cream van, but that isn't really what I want in my chocolate bar. The vanilla base is nice though and adds a creaminess to the bar. The coating chocolate is pleasant enough, but the flavour doesn't go that well with the sauce. Yes it has the flavours of a chocolate sundae, but its lacking an interesting texture, or clever flavour combination.
The bar comes in at 193 calories, so fairly high but not too bad compared to its peers. It was nice enough, but not one I’d rush out to buy again sadly. Out of the two new Wonka bars I've tried the Millionaires Shortbread is the clear winner.

By Cinabar

[New] Wonka – Millionaires Shortbread (Local Newsagent) [By @Cinabar]

Those of us who hang out in the import food shops will be well aware of the prevalence of Wonka sweets and chocolates in America. I know that we at Foodstuff Finds have already covered quite a few of their goodies too, but this bar is a little different. This is a UK launch for the brand, with which they hope to bring a bit of the Wonka magic direct to UK shores.
The problem with promising something different is that at the minute Cadbury are working through their Marvellous Creation range, which are all seriously crazy combinations – Cola, Pretzel and Honeycomb chocolate anyone? By comparison Millionaires Shortbread doesn’t sound all that different at all, it is after all biscuit, caramel and chocolate. It seems strangely safe.
The bar has also came with a fair amount of bad press, mainly due to its calorie content. To be fair this particular size of bar has 200 calories which really isn’t out of the ordinary. For comparison sake the new Maltesers Teasers is 186 and the new Quality Street My Green Bar has 196 calories, and are both of a similar size. Kit Kat Chunky’s are around the 250 calorie mark.
Putting the calorie count aside, as any true chocoholic would, I unwrapped the bar. I found four neat squares of chocolate, all with the trademark ‘W’ adorned on them. I broke a piece off and was a little bit disappointed that I couldn’t see any oozing caramel. Still I bit in and gave it a try. No matter how much I looked at the piece of chocolate I couldn’t see gooey caramel, just a pale solid, but in texture it was all there which was rather nice. The biscuit layer was crunchy and buttery and tasted very rich, the golden caramel flavour on top just turned it into such a lush treat. Yes it was sweet, but the cocoa flavour broke it up, and every piece was just spot on.
It had a nice mix of textures; sweet, buttery, caramel and chocolate tastes intertwined and the bar thoroughly impressed me. It was a fab choccy treat, and I can’t wait to try the other new varieties from Wonka.

By Cinabar

Wonka Chewy Gobstopper (@Yankee_pop) [By @SpectreUK]

Wonka Chewy Gobstoppers came in a 50.1g colourful cardboard carton. Six spherical 1cm rounded balls at 16g were considered a serving size with roughly three servings per carton. There was 60 calories per serving, with 13g of sugar and no fat. From the photograph you’ll see that there were five Gobstopper colours, which were quite hard on the outside, and very chewy on the inside. Their ingredients included; dextrose, corn syrup, maltodextrin, hydrogenated coconut oil, malic acid, calcium steabate, egg albumen, mono- and diglycerides, carnauba wax, artificial flavours, and colours added, which were; blue 1, blue 2 lake, red 40 lake, yellow 5, yellow 5 lake, and yellow 6. Not that any of those colours meant anything to me and possibly to you, but they certainly didn’t sound natural in any way, which was a shame.

The first flavoured Gobstopper I tried was orange, which had a tangy orange flavour, and was very tasty and moreish. The yellow had a mild lemon flavour, not sour at all, more sweet and unlemonlike (I know, I know... not a real word)! The purple Gobstopper was grape flavour. Not too bad, but not my favourite. The day Americans start to use blackcurrant for a sweet flavour will be the day they realise that they have wasted their time trying to reproduce grape as a sweet, which is a fruit that might as well be a sweet because it always tastes better naturally. The red Gobstopper had a very mild cherry flavour. I actually really liked these, which was a big surprise considering I usually hate cherry flavoured sweets. The last coloured Gobstopper I tried was the green. This had a strong watermelon flavour, which was a little chemically, but certainly not unpleasant. These jawbreaker Gobstoppers were fun to chew on and I’d recommend them to anyone with strong teeth and a decent sense of humour. If you take your time to suck them, they’re supposed to change colour too, but I just dumped one after the other in my gob and chomped. I guess it’s up to you how you eat them though!

By Spectre

Wonka – Squishy Sploshberries Gummies [By @SpectreUK]

These Squishy Sploshberries Gummies were made in the Czech Republic with 25% “real” fruit juice, as opposed to juice from fantasy Wonka fruits. Although I could think of a few fantasy fruits, such as the blobbish brown foul smelling Blastberry and the rock hard Papplegranite, which is harder to squeeze juice out of than blood from a stone! Anyway, I digress, served in a 155.9g bag these Sploshberries have 370 calories per 100g, with 60g sugar (no surprises there…) and 0g fat. The 25% real fruit juice was strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry and apple. There were four different gum flavours, each with a different berry shape, all of which had an orange tinted colour with a red squishy inner and a white foam bottom. The Cloudberry gum had a sweet strawberry and apple flavour. The Raspberry gum had a mild raspberry and blackberry flavour. The Blueberry gum had a gentle blueberry and blackberry flavour. Finally the Goji berry gum had a juicy apple and raspberry flavour. All of these Sploshberries had a lovely natural sweet flavour, which were moreish to the extreme, and before I knew it, the whole bag of Squishy Sploshberries had disappeared into my tummy. The problem is that if I eat too many of these sweets I’ll end up the size of Violet Beauregarde when she eats Wonka’s chewing gum in the film. Moderation is what counts with sweets, rather than ending up the size of a great big blueberry! ;-)

By Spectre

Wonka Laffy Taffy Mystery Twirl (American Soda @americansoda) [By @SpectreUK]

I’m always excited when Cinabar passes me another of Wonka’s fine sweet inventions. This Laffy Taffy was a two flavour Mystery Twirl from Nestlé USA. The long stick was half purple and half green in colour. It was around the same length as a thirty centimeter ruler and less than a centimeter in width, weighing in at 22.9g. The two coloured flavours were stuck next to each other in a line, rather than twirled around each other. I noticed that there was no juice mentioned in ingredients, like Rowntrees pride themselves on adding at least some juice into the manufacturing of their gums. The Laffy Taffy was very sticky to touch and I had to completely destroy the packet to get to the sweet. Fortunately the wrapper didn’t rip like some chewy sweet wrappers can and you end up eating half the packaging. I worried that the sweet would pull my fillings out, but the Laffy Taffy was nice and chewy, like Starburst or Chewits. The purple colour had a false, but not unpleasant grape flavour that mostly overpowered the green colour, which I figured was apple flavour. The wrapper did state “Mystery Twirl”, and there might not have been a “Twirl” involved, but the second flavour did keep most of its “Mystery”. Having said that, I did enjoy this sweet, it had a pleasant flavour and didn’t pull my teeth out. It made me feel young for a while, as I had fun tearing apart the wrapper on the bus after another busy day at work. So thanks, Wonka, I can always rely on you to make me smile. :-)

By Spectre

Get you own Laffy Taffy from American Soda: There are plenty to choose from!

Wonka – Sour Nerds: Amped Apple and Lightning Lemon (American Soda @americansoda) [By @SpectreUK]

I haven’t had a different flavour of Nerds to try for a while, so I relished the concept of eating these Sour Nerds when Cinabar placed them in my Foodstuff draw deep in the Foodstufffind’s Dungeon. This box of Sour Nerds offers two sour flavours, which are; Amped Apple flavour and Lightning Lemon flavour. Made by Nestlé USA, there were 46.7g of Nerds in the box at a healthy sounding 60 calories. The Amped Apple flavour tasted initially like a zingy apple, then as I chewed on them there was a bite of sourness that made my face screw up into a small ball, before leaving a mild aftertaste of apple in my mouth. Like the apple flavour, the Lightning Lemon flavour tasted at first like a lemon, but became very sour indeed when chewing, leaving a sour lemon aftertaste. The sourer lemon flavour was complemented by the more subtle, yet still seriously sour apple flavour. There were some critically twisty faced moments when eating these sour Nerds. I ate them whilst at my desk at work, so the twisty looks on my face as well as the rattling of the Nerds as I greedily gulped them from the box, gained me some funny looks from my colleagues in the office. I just couldn’t share the Sour Nerds though, as they simply tasted too good!

By Spectre

Want you own? Sour Nerds are available from: American Soda

Wonka Sweetarts (American Import) [By @SpectreUK]

On the front of this sturdy colourful cardboard box it mentions “tangy candy”, some where on the back it warns “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”. This warning made my colleague sitting at the desk next to me laugh, as he knew after I’d tasted a few of these sweets that his five year old daughter would be finishing them off. Not that I expected to dislike the sweets, but I’m trying to stay a bit healthier these days. Weight lifting, the odd swimming session once a blue moon and less snack food doesn’t seem to be taking as much fat off my belly as I’d like. 170g of “tangy candy” just makes me think that after eating I’ll blow up like a balloon, and not one of those light floating ones, more like a gas tower.

After struggling to open the top of the box with my fingernails for a while, I advanced to using my penknife. This worried my colleagues no end, and they proceeded in instructing a 35 year old man on how to use a knife! The box was pretty much half full of solid thick tablets with the texture of Refreshers, rather like the Bottlecaps. There are five colours of sweets; Orange – orange flavour, blue – blueberry flavour, green – apple flavour, pink – cherry flavour, brown – rootbeer flavour (which was pretty nasty). You have to suck these for a short while before biting or you’re likely to break your teeth. With their respective flavourings they taste pretty much as they’re coloured, asides the medicinal like rootbeer flavour. On sucking them they have a good sweet taste to start with, but sucking for too long the sweet taste becomes sourer in a mild twisty faced sort of way. I shared a few around my colleagues and they seemed to like them, and then passed the box to the man with the soon to be super hyperactive child. By now he’d stopped laughing and was starting to look more than a little apprehensive. I wished him luck!

By Spectre

Wonka Bottle Caps (USA / Import Shops) [By @SpectreUK]

These sweets come in quite a big colourful 170g box that you need super strong finger nails to get into, or a sharp knife and a deep breath to avoid cutting your hand open. The box is just over half full of these sweets which come in a range of colours. They are very hard centimetre round sweets with a bottle cap design embossed on one side of each sweet. The sweets are the same make up of Refreshers and I would love to try the cola sweets in a cola bottle, but I taste tested these at work and I didn’t think my colleagues would like me making a fizzy drink explode in the centre of the office. Well you never know….

Rootbeer flavour

Yak! These are a khaki colour. They taste like rootbeer, which to me tastes like dentist’s mouthwash. Not nice and I just couldn’t get rid of the taste for ages.

Cola flavour

These sweets are medium brown in colour. I still couldn’t seem to get rid of the horrid dentist’s mouthwash taste from my mouth; the cola taste was very mild and made no impact on my taste buds. I had to really wash my mouth out to get even a hint of cola and then I bit the inside of my mouth trying to bite through the hard sweet.

Cherry flavour

There was quite a heavy cherry hit from these pinkish sweets that reminded me of cherry flavour in Double Dip. My colleague sitting next to me hates cherry flavouring also, but likes actual cherries. He made the mistake of trying one of these and his face screwed up to the size of a pinhead! LOL

Grape flavour

These sweets are bluish purple. They didn’t really taste like a grape to me, rather what someone in a lab thought a grape might taste like having never eaten one.

Orange flavour

The orange flavour was unsurprisingly orange coloured. These have a mild orange sweet flavouring taste that’s not altogether unpleasant, but certainly not moreish either.

I tried these on two of my colleagues and neither liked the sweets, one described them as travel sickness pills mixed with Refreshers. He took them back for his own child as we agreed she’d probably enjoy them more than we did. Well, you never know, kids can be weird.

By Spectre

New Wonka Kazoozles - Pink Lemonade [By Spectre] (Selfridges)

Looks like I got the short straw on this review (pun intended). Two short straws in fact, both have cherry flavouring. According to my customary information source (Wikipedia), pink lemonade originated from the Native Americans who used to make it with sumac berries. Nowadays it can be made with anything from food colourings, grenadine, strawberries, pomegranate, red grapefruit juice, cranberries and also cherries. I hate cherries, hence the short straws. The two straws are about a centimetre wide yellow sugary ten centimetre long tube with a soft pink cherry flavoured filling. On tasting, the flavour is quite a sweet cherry hit turning quickly into a sour cherry punch. I must admit I had to screw up my face when the sourness took hold, but I enjoyed munching down the first stick and took more time over the second. First I licked off most of the sugar from the outside of the tube, which drew some disgusted looks from some of the women in the office. I then chomped down the rest of the stick one sour screwed up faced bite after another. Even though I hate cherries I did rather enjoy the sourness of these sticks. They made me feel childlike, which is a must with any sweets, and it woke up an otherwise dull day at the office. Cheers Wonka!

By Spectre

Wonka Fun Dip [By Spectre] (Selfridges)

I mentioned my liking for Barrat's Sherbet Dip Dab in the Wham XTRM post. Another old favourite of mine is the orange flavour in Swizzels Matlow's Orange and Cherry Double Dip with Swizzelstick. I never particularly liked the cherry flavour and always ate that first to get it out of the way. Let's face it cherry flavoured things don't go down well with me - cherry sweets, cherry beers, cherry in cakes, whatever... I just don't like cherry flavouring in food. Weirdly, Cinabar made me eat a real black cherry the other day and I actually liked it! Both types of dips had the worrying moment when you either ran out of dip before finishing the Swizzelstick / lolly or visa versa, or the moment when your furious licking and munching punched a hole in the paper packaging. And let's face it, you do not want to sneeze when this stuff is around and devastation for a child is a broken Swizzelstick!

Owned by Nestle, the Wonka brand has a wide variety of products. Fun Dip started off life in 1942 under the name of Lik-m-aid, which is still subtitled on the packaging. Lik-m-aid was first produced by Sunline Inc., which was bought by Nestle in 1989. This Fun Dip has three flavours of dip with 2 candy stix in the usual paper packaging. The flavours are RazzApple Magic Dip, Grape-Yumpilous Dip and Cherry-Yum-Diddly Dip. Gah! What's the fascination with cherry flavour all the time? Three dips and two candy stix seems like Wonka is trying to trounce Swizzels Matlow with the more, more, more theory. Most people know what a Double Dip is though, and as far as I know the phrase hasn't turned into a euphemism yet.

Cherry flavour was first up, for reasons previously mentioned. I ripped open the top of the first stick, which is a white vanilla flavoured icelolly shaped stick with Lik-a-Stix embossed on both sides. With some trepidation I opened the cherry flavour compartment. Having said that, I had a shiver of excitement that reminded me of my school days on ripping open packets of these type of sweets on an almost daily basis. The usual sweet cherry flavouring complimented the vanilla stick very well and in no time I found myself hungrily dipping and licking away like a small child. In an office environment you can imagine this received some odd looks from my colleagues. One mentioned it reminded her of when she was a child eating Double Dips. "This is Triple Dip" I replied greedily. As with Double Dips I was still faced with the same problem, the stick is rounded at the ends so can't get all the sherbet out of the packet. The more you try, the more you lick, the more the paper packet starts to rip under the constant pressure from the wet stick.

Still on my first Lik-a-Stix I ripped open the raspberry apple flavour. The raspberry apple sherbet is blue in colour, which threw me a little to start with. The sherbet goes green when wet, so when the wet stick hit sherbet my initial confusion was ended. There's a subtle raspberry mixed with apple flavour to this sherbet that becomes very moreish very quickly. I found myself gorging on this flavour and wanting more and more. A thin film of raspberry apple flavoured sherbet started to cover my keyboard, monitor and desk. At one point I caught myself rocking back and forth whilst dipping and licking with a little too much excitement. During the cherry flavour I'd found myself missing the orange flavour from Double Dip. The raspberry apple flavour made up for the disappointment. At the end of the raspberry apple sherbet the wet packaging started to buckle and I dumped the Lik-a-Stix into my mouth realising I had one whole flavour left and one whole Lik-a-Stix...

Ripping open the second Lik-a-Stix compartment I noticed my heart was pounding faster in my chest and I was having a massive sugar rush. Watch out if you feed this to an already over active kid, it'd probably be like adding a Refresher to a bottle of Coca-Cola. In quick succession the grape flavour compartment was torn asunder. The sherbet is a violet / purple colour. Mistaken in my greedy rush I dipped the stick in and was slightly confused by the taste. I thought this flavour would be the greatest of all. Not really tasting of an actual real life purple grape, this sherbet has more of a medicinal flavour that would come in some child's grape / blackcurrent medicine tablet. What was first conceived as the best flavour of the three immediately became the worst. I must admit I couldn't finish the compartment and crashed out of my sugar high with a resounding wheeze. I ate the Lik-a-Stix though.

So "Triple" Fun Dip could easily become Double Dip by dropping the revolting grape flavour. The over rated cherry flavour could easily be taken over by an orange flavour, that with the raspberry apple flavour could therefore create the greatest Double Dip of all time. One Lik-a-Stick is quite enough though, and for crying out loud; make it a bit more pointy to reach the corners of each paper compartment! Not too pointy though, for obvious reasons...

By Spectre

Wonka Rainbow Nerds (USA via Cyber Candy) {by @Nli10}

When a product states on the back of the box that it "may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children" you know that you are on to a winner!

This is a bumper 170g box of the old children's favourite from the early 90s Nerds. The flavours/colours are all mixed together and flow freely within the box so it took a couple of pourings out to even find the Orange ones, but I'm guessing that all are equally represented inside.

I think the pink ones are raspberry, the purple is either some kind of melon or grape, the orange ones I'm pretty sure are orange or tangerine, the yellow ones are vaguely lemony and the green ones are maybe watermelon? They are all sour. Not destructively so, just tart enough to give the taste-buds a work out, but enough to confuse the brain over the flavours. It's a nice sensation though and as in my teenage days these are a pleasure to eat. Crunching them up is a fairly unsatisfying affair, but allowing them to melt as the flavours mingle is truly magical and one of the reasons I'm a much bigger fan of sweets/candy than chocolate.

I'm not sure on the massive box though. Not only does the packaging make the colours look more muted than the versions in my memory, but I think the OCD sweet consumer in me would rather have separate compartments for each flavour. This box is very much for sharing though and tipping a small pile into someone’s outstretched hand is a great experience and what Mr. Willy Wonka would have wanted. They even advertise that you can find the origins of Wonka in the book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" on the back of the box - as if any child would have the attention span for books after all the wonderfully artificial colours and flavours these Nerds contain.

by @Nli10

Wonka Runts Candy (America)

This is another item from the candy swap that I have been doing with Gigi from Gigi Reviews. :-)

Now, and I realise this is a generalisation, but it seems that sweets / sweet packaging in America is wonderfully luminous and bright. They are designed to stand out on the shelf, and the internal product is full of colour too. In Britain things seem much more muted, the packets may be fairly bright, but the sweets themselves although coloured never seem so vivid.
When I shook some of these out of the box, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the sweets themselves, so cool! Each brightly coloured sweet has just a coating of its colour and turns white when it starts to dissolve. The sweets are hard, but they do crumble if you bite in. Each one gives a really cool sweetness rush, which is just ace!

• Grape – purple oval -wow, we just don’t get grape over here! It had a lovely sweet full flavour.
• Banana – yellow crescent - similar flavour to British foam bananas, and my favourite shaped sweet in the box.
• Strawberry - red heart – this was sweet and fruity, full of flavour, but not a sharp taste.
• Orange – orange ball – very citrus in flavour, so zingy it’s almost like lemon and lime.
• Apple – green heart - full of flavour, like a Cox’s apple, then as strong as a Granny Smith when you bit in, really good.

All in all, a lovely set of sweets. If I had to pick a favourite it would be grape, but it was just a novelty to me as we get so few grape flavoured items here. All of them had lovely strong vibrant flavours. There are also bonus points for the banana ones as they are such a cute design.

Wonka Tinglerz (House of Fraser)

This is an import chocolate product, manufactured by Nestle, which has made its way into my local branch of House of Fraser. I have to say department stores seem to be getting better and better at stocking more interesting goodies from around the world.
The product consists of bits of chocolate, which crackle heavily when eaten. On top of the popping-candy contents, there are also bits of rice crispy in there too, which add to the texture and the crunch. The milk chocolate isn’t of the highest quality, but it does the job and delivers a nice cocoa taste, and the product if fun and enjoyable. One thing though, do not try a handful at once... let’s just say I’ve learnt from my experience, and I thought my mouth was going to do more than ‘tingle’! ;-)

Wonka Bar (Selfridges)

This is an American chocolate bar from Selfridges food hall. The bar is a reference to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, and I was kind of hoping I could win a golden ticket of some sort!
The bar itself is described as containing Grahams Crackers, but I have no idea what those are. (It is either a reference to the film that I’ve missed or it's some sort of product available in America?)

I was impressed by the design on the top of the bar when I opened it, it makes it much more worthy of being a stocking filler. The chocolate has a really nice taste with a good hint of cocoa. Graham's crackers in this context seem to be chunks of crunchy caramel flavoured biscuit. There are quite a few biscuit pieces and they go really nice with the chocolate. A tasty bar, well worth a try!