Know how I regularly talk about “Grandma Candy”?  It generally requires some variation of hard candy and licorice, and there damn well better be pink involved.  Imagine my shock when I opened this bag fresh off the boat from my German insider:

I was all like “whaaah??!” and “whoa”  & stuff.

The pictures on the bag couldn’t look MORE Grandma-esque.  But the fact that they were in truth licorice/fruit concoctions really excited me, as that tends to be one of our featured jams here.  I love the symmetrical pattern of fruit/licorice on each candy.  Both of my passed on Grammies would be proud, I’m sure.

Individually wrapped, we get lemon, orange, and strawberry.  But as you can see, I got a hell of a lot more lemon than anything else.  I’ll never complain about that though, I adore lemon.

Not bad, right?  Good job of looking reasonably like the product on the bag, I say!  Nothing left but the tasting at this point, so I tried half of each flavor….and….I got confused.

Didn’t the bag say “licorice” fruit?  Isn’t that black part of the candy in theory supposed to be licorice?  Because I got literally NO licorice flavor at all.  Instead, I got a milder, less intense version of a Starburst.  Of course, I ate a few more just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and it turns out I’m not crazy.

However…apparently my taste buds are bit…jaded from all the sour/spicy food I eat?  I say this because my brother of all people tried one, and he immediately got a licorice element-albeit mild.  I tried another and realized what he was talking about, but it was just too mild for me to consider a prominent flavor.

So in short, these aren’t earth shattering, I wouldn’t buy them again, but they’re far from bad.  If the fruit flavor was notched up just a bit and licorice was notched up a LOT, these would be amazing and very unique.  Until that time though, my brain’s vision of the perfect “Grandma” candy is still sitting in her candy bowl in Philadelphia, PA.