Werther’s are one of the most popular  brands of caramel hard candies around.  They don’t get a lot of attention, but their hard candies are classic, tasty, and always good.  Apparently it’s their mission to make more varieties than Starburst, so here we have their take on caramel apple filled hard candies.

Nice looking bag, and they cram  lot of them in it, so that’s nice.  Anyone from the Americas is aware of how excellent the combination of caramel and green apple is (or red apple, I recently discovered) so it’s not surprising when a caramel candy moves towards this  variation.

They’re rounder than the flat original hard candies, and the ends of the individually wrapped pieces are greenish.  I like that.  Feels fun.

So here’s the problem.  And it’s a problem I was aware of for a long time-thus the reason I didn’t review these.  They’re not hard candies.

How did I know?  Well, I questioned it right from the start.  Therefore, in the super market, I did what any annoying consumer would do: I squeezed a piece-hard-through the bag.  It gave.  This isn’t a hard candy.

However, Mrs. Guru was with me when I bought these.  I insisted they weren’t hard, she tried squeezing one, and was adamant that they are, in fact, hard candies.  She be weak, yo.  Evidence:

I broke the piece above in two with relative ease.  So…yeah.  Not a hard candy, but let’s move past that-for now.  Truthfully, these candies are almost great.  If you fool your mouth into thinking it’s hard, and simply suck it, you get that trademarked delish caramel taste.  But you also start to get a tiny amount of green apple flavor, from the goo inside.  Yep-goo.  The thing is, sooner or later, the candy breaks down, and then the goo influx starts.

The problem with the goo is twofold: it’s too gooey and there’s too much of it.  What happens is that you go from joyful innocent sucking to managing this blob of sticky, albeit tasty, apple caramel goo.  The fix, if I had been in on the development of this thing, would have been relatively easy: more structure to the “hard” candy, meaning more mass, with just a tiny open core in the middle, which would hold the goo.  It would even be fine to leave the goo recipe as is if there was less of it.

As is, however…they’re just mediocre.  Don’t get me wrong though, they’re fun to eat.  But I’m a candy perfectionist folks, so you don’t have to be.  I’m spoiled by the advances in candy technology across the globe, so when I come across something like this that’s essentially promise unrealized, …I shed a tear.  And pour one out, to what could have been.

Too much goo, yo.  Too much goo.

 
But hey, buy them here!