Raspberry M&Ms

This blog certainly features a lot of artisan chocolate bars, which I like doing because first, these bars are generally well-crafted and delicious, and second, because they are not cheap and most readers likely want to know what will and won’t be worth their while before they invest.

Yes, chocolate is an investment. Possibly a more sound investment than a lot of equities these days.

However, not everybody has access to this kind of chocolate on a regular basis. So every so often, I try to review something that might be more accessible to most, possibly chocolate that can be found at a standard grocery or drug store. When I found out that Raspberry M&Ms were being rolled out, I figured that this was a perfect opportunity – a new product, easy to find, and delightfully combining berry and chocolate flavors.

Then, I tried to find them myself, at a few dozen grocery stores and drugstores. No luck.

So much for accessible.

Until the day that I saw them on a shelf at a downtown DC CVS.

Wonderful day. Even more wonderful: the raspberry M&Ms are dark, not milk, chocolate based, which gave me homes for a more intense chocolate flavor than the standard M&Ms.

A distinct berry aroma emerges the minute you open the bag, while the red and pink colors give raspberry M&Ms a nice aesthetic appeal – for M&Ms – and elicit thoughts of berry flavors.

They also happen to be quite large compared to plain M&Ms, with a thicker candy shell that takes longer to melt away, but a higher overall chocolate to candy ratio.

 

Once the shell dissolves, the raspberry flavor is clear, with a generic coffee-centric dark chocolate flavor coming forth next. The chocolate has a gritty melt characteristic of low quality chocolate – but come on, these are M&Ms. Not fine chocolate with carefully selected cocoa butter. Enjoy them for what they are – candy, and in this case, candy with a relatively varied and pleasing flavor profile.

And of course, if you are an M&M chomper without the patience to let them melt (you know who you are), you’ll get less of the raspberry and chocolate flavors with the sugar of the candy shell dominating instead.