Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Review: Hawaiian Host Macadamia Medley


I sometimes get contacted by completely random companies asking me to try out their products and I would put today's review into that category.  It's not often that I've been contacted by candy companies with the request that I review their product, but that is the case today in this review of the Hawaiian Host Macadamia Medley that was sent to me to test out.  Each 6.0 ounce box of this medley has fourteen chocolate candies and nutritionally (an oxymoron, perhaps?), three pieces of this candy is roughly the equivalent of 210 calories.



The above picture shows all the varieties that are included in each box and as you can see, that means there are four varieties in this one.  I'll touch on these individually, but I wanted to give you a sneak peek of what I'll be reviewing before I showed the "glamour shot" of what the candies looked like below.


So, there it is.  The glamour shot.  Yum.  Anyway, I promised that I'd dive into these individually, so let's get rolling.  I've positioned each of these so that they sit at the quarter marks on a clock, so I'll refer to them that way.

*Macnut Crunch (12:00):  I believe this one is Hawaiian Host's play on the classic Nestle Crunch bar as it is milk chocolate mixed with ground up macadamia nuts.  Where this differs is that this is in a "cup" format and included in a wrapper.  The chocolate itself smells like sweet milk chocolate and that carries over to the flavor, which is accented by the grainy macadamia nuts.  It's got good taste to it too and the macadamia nuts definitely bring some "fun" to this.

*Dark Chocolate Macadamia (9:00):  I can say going in that this was the one that I was least looking forward to.  Being that this was dark chocolate, the chocolate exterior of this was very dark colored and smelled kind of flat.  It was shaped like a teardrop in that the chocolate encased a full size macadamia nut in the interior.  In terms of mouthfeel, the dark chocolate melted quickly over the macadamia nut to provide a degree of decadence and of course the nut itself had solid crunch.  The complaint I have about this one was that there was no sweetness and it was just kind of boring.  The only thing that saved this from being a waste of time, in my opinion was the aforementioned melting chocolate decadence.

*Maui Caramacs (6:00):  If you look just at the outside of this one, you just thing it's going to be another chocolate covered nut made with milk chocolate this time instead of dark chocolate.  If that's what you think (and I did), you'd be dead wrong because the interior of this is that macadamia nut along with a large helping of gooey caramel and after eating this, I guess I should have figured that out from the name of the product.  That sweet and gooey caramel mixed beautifully with the sweet and melting chocolate and then that was all accented with the crunch of the whole macadamia nut in the middle.  Frankly, this one was the best of the bunch and reminded me of the underrated Caramello candy bar, albeit with nuts included.  I think I could eat about a million of these in one sitting because it was delicious.

*Chocolate Macadamia (3:00):  Taking a look at this one, you can draw one obvious comparison...it looks like a peanut.  It's two macadamia nuts at each end that are all encased in sweet smelling milk chocolate.  It's a pretty basic mix, but when you bit into it, it's surprisingly crunchy as the nuts provided a solid pop of crunch and the chocolate itself provides a brittle crunch to go along with it.  The chocolate of course melts decadently over the nuts and for being such a basic mix, this was pretty darn good.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Three of the four chocolates in this were obvious winners, so being that means the majority of the box, I have to give this a BUY IT rating.  Depending on your feelings on dark chocolate, all of these could be winners, but I just found the dark chocolate one to be far too boring for me.  If I saw these sitting out at a party, the dark chocolate ones are the ones that I'd leave for others to eat while I went after the other three varieties, especially the Maui Caramacs.

BUY IT!!

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