I´m the girl you see lingering at the grocery store, looking oh so happy at the aisles, reading through labels and picking items with a smile. Grocery stores are my kind of wonderland! Here are the goodies I´ve brought back from my trips to the grocery, because, really, good stuff are meant to be shared!

Saturday 4 July 2015

Buys Zoenen: Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Kisses

I always buy myself a special treat every weekend.  It´s my reward for a week´s worth of work.  Most Saturdays, I wake up in time to catch the first opening hour of my neighborhood grocery.   I like to shop early  in the morning during the weekend, when the store´s still tranquil and there´s not a crowd along the aisles.  It makes my shopping time more relaxing as it allows me more time to linger through the aisles  to scrutinize the merits of the weekend specials.



I have seen these interesting yellow boxes of what appeared to be chocolate covered marshmallows for sometime.  And I admit, being partial to marshmallows, I have been tempted to pick one a number of times but always, my rational side won.  This box of marshmallows is huge! Almost the size of a ream of bond paper.  So I always felt that buying a box would lead me into a dangerous path of utter candy gluttony.  But today, these goodies were 50% off and there it was, the perfect reason  to buy a box!

The name Buys Zoenen literally translates to Buys Kisses. Apparently, here in Europe, chocolate-covered marshmallows were once called by the politically-incorrect term of Negro Kisses.  In Holland, these were shortened to plain Kisses.



The box contained 12 huge Kisses



These babies were huge! 



                                See how tall and fat these Kisses are?  They look delectable!


  Sadly,  the "marshmallow" for the Kisses is not really marshmallow, it´s made  of Italian meringue, which is light and airy and a bit too fluffy for my taste.  There was also not much flavor in the meringue except sweetness.  I think some hit of vanilla flavor would have done a lot of good to
improve the taste profile of these Kisses.


But what really dissapointed me with these sweets was the base.  Instead of a chocolate cookie base, Kisses has tastesless wafer rounds for the base, the kind of tasteless wafers found in cheap ice cream cones.  Blech!

The only saving grace for this product was the sweet chocolate shell, which in itself was not spectacular but at least it tasted like chocolate.  But really,  I can´t imagine why kids would love these goodies.  Though apparently people from around here do love these Kisses since they´ve been making these since 1920.   Perhaps, it´s just me.  I have grown up eating a different sort of Chocolate-covered marshmallows.  These Fibisco mallows were flatter yet denser, with a delicious cookie base.  These airy Kisses mallows just couldn´t compete with my memory of biting into the chewy deliciousness of Fibisco mallows.  Eating Kisses is like biting through chocolate flavored air, the marshmallow and base are too insubstantial, both in flavor and texture.

                                Fibisco Chocolate Mallows  (Image from johncarlotan.blogspot.com)

It´s not often that I find a sweet dud in Europe. But these Marshmallow Kisses is definitely not my cup of tea.  I would probably never buy a box of this again.  Not worth the 1€ discounted price I paid for it.  Skip this sweet.

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