Gilliam Horehound Hard Candies

Yes, I know the word "horehound" sounds like something that best describes aging Disney Channel stars. (Cease and desist letter from Disney in 3,2,1...) But horehound candy is actually one of those old school treats that has been around for so long that your great-great-grandpappy probably got them from his great-great-grandpappy.

Though horehound drops aren't seen much anymore, the folks at Gilliam have been making them since the 1920s -- and they still do. So, what is horehound, you might ask? Excellent question. My rather exhaustive research on Wikipedia says that it is a bushy herb in the Lamiaceae family, which is a fancy-schmancy way of saying it's a type of mint. Horehound is also said to be good for colds, asthma and general I-feel-ickyness. It can even be made into a soft drink called horehound beer, which is reportedly drunk in the Deep South (although I don't recall seeing it when I lived in Georgia), parts of the UK, and Australia.

All of the above is well and good, but how does it taste? And does it make a good candy? If candy doesn't taste good, what's the point? Well, we'll soon learn...



Each drop is lightly sanded and roughly the size of a cough lozenge.

As for the flavor? It's an herbal taste that reminds me of a mix of tea and mint -- and that's a pretty good mix. It tastes the best for about the first 20 seconds. After that the mint notes become more subtle, and you start to notice the sadly familiar flavor of the corn syrup that the candies are made with. (These candies also have sugar; and to be fair, pretty much all hard candy -- in the United States, anyway -- includes generous amounts of corn syrup. I just don't care for that taste.)



I wish that the tea/mint flavor stayed strong for a longer time. But even with the flavor drop-off, and even with the corn syrup, this is still a damn good candy. It's just so simple and basic, and...well, nostalgic. It's as if they'd taken the golden parts of the 19th Century, things like Currier & Ives prints, garden-fresh heirloom produce, Great Aunt Euphemia with her apple cobbler, gingham dress, and exclamations of "Land sakes!", and somehow managed to distill it all into candy form -- while simultaneously filtering out the less pleasant parts of the 19th Century; things like slavery, appalling industrial accidents, congenital syphilis, and...well, you get the idea. It's a selective nostalgia, but a sweet and gentle one nonetheless.

I found myself nibbling on several over the course of writing this review...and anytime that happens, it's a good sign. There's definitely a reason why this unfashionable flavor with the silly name has survived through the generations.

If you see these, get a bag. I certainly will.



PURCHASED FROM:
Sample from company

CALORIES:
60 calories per 5 pieces.

OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
qcandy.com

King Leo Peppermint Bark Bites

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably know that I love love looooove me some peppermint bark. Sadly for me, peppermint bark seems to be one of those things that a lot of people love, but that you only really see out en masse around the winter holidays...

Well, maybe not. Because tucked inside the enormous box of loot the good folks at Quality Candy sent me was this nice box of King Leo Peppermint Bark. Peppermint Bark in June?! SCORE!

Reading the blurb on the box, I was also quite happy to see that this is one of the products King Leo breaks out the real chocolate for -- and not only was it actual chocolate, but according to the box "only the richest chocolate" was used to make it. Woohoo, no mockolate! We're off to a promising start here!

Since it's a tried and true fact that King Leo does indeed make some of the best peppermint out there, let's see how we did with the bark.



First off, I like that the peppermint chunks are huge. You know from the moment you open the box that the bark is going to be chock full of peppermint. You can smell it even before you open the cellophane bag the candy is packaged in.

The slab is a thick layer of dark chocolate followed by a thinner layer of white chocolate, which is topped with crushed peppermints.



The chocolate: in the case of the dark chocolate, it is indeed real chocolate -- and it also has real vanilla as well. Maybe it's just the strength of the peppermint, but the chocolate doesn't have the most assertive taste. If anything, the whole thing tastes (minus the peppermint on top) like like a big slab of Andes Mints. That's by no means a bad taste; it's just kind of generic. The texture of the chocolate is oily. It does melt in your mouth rather than seize into a lump, but it's not the rich, creamy melt I was hoping for.

As for the white chocolate, it's very understated. You can hardly taste it at all...which in my book is a good thing, as I don't care for white chocolate anyway.



The star of this bark is really the crushed peppermint on top. As I said at the start, the pieces are large and plentiful. It's fresh, it's sweet, it's bold. And I love crushing the shards with my teeth.

Bottom line, the peppermint is very nice and the chocolate is...well, forgettable at best.



PURCHASED FROM:
Sample from company

CALORIES:
130 calories per 1 oz piece.

ADDITIONAL INFO:
Made on equipment shared with peanuts, tree nuts, soybeans, milk, eggs and wheat.

OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
qcandy.com

King Leo Soft Lemon Puffs

I think that it wouldn't take much to make me like any food with the word "puffs" in it. If just for cheesy puffs alone, the word Puff=Good in my mind. Toss in the word "lemon" and you practically have to pull me off of it like a Jersey Shore kid from a tanning bed.



This candy pretty much lived up to my expectations. Each puff is about the size of a large gumball. The flavor, truthfully, is on the fake lemon side -- but in a good way. It has a sweet lemonade flavor to it.



The texture is interesting. For some reason when I read "soft," I thought the texture might be sort of like a butter mint: almost creamy and smooth, sort of like a wet cereal marshmallow. But that's not what this is like. It's not smooth like, say, a hard candy. But at the same time is not as crumbly and chalky as a dextrose candy (like Sweetarts or Smarties), at least not at first. Once you have let the candy melt in your mouth a little, it will start to honeycomb and break off into little pebbles. The texture becomes quite addictive.

Bottom line? This was a tasty little candy!



PURCHASED FROM:
Sample from company

CALORIES:
60 calories per 3 pieces/puffs.

OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
qcandy.com