Mars Bar Archives - Candyrageous

May 23, 2021 Michael

Mars Bar – One of the Greats

Candy Bars

Mars Bar (A.K.A. Milky Way if you’re in the States) is an absolute classic. It’s essentially the platonic ideal of a candy bar: it’s chocolatey, substantial, chewy, sweet, and thoroughly satisfying. It’s always been one of my favourites — I haven’t had one in years, and it might have been even better than I remembered.

(In fact, I think I was so eager to eat it that I actually forgot to take a photo of the bar itself. Whoops.)

It’s extremely simple: it’s just nougat, caramel, and chocolate.

Everything here just works. The fluffy nougat and dense caramel are chewy, but not aggressively so (it’s not going to work out your jaw like some overly enthusiastic nougat or caramel bars). The nougat has malted milk powder mixed in, which might just be the bar’s secret weapon. It adds a delightfully malty flavour that brings some complexity and helps to balance out the intense sweetness of the bar. Mars Bar is very, very sweet, but it’s a well-tuned sweetness; it never tastes overbearing.

And then, of course, there’s the generous layer of decent quality milk chocolate, which is what you want it to be. Sometimes the chocolate on a candy bar is basically there for appearances only, or just to bind everything together, but the chocolate here adds a lot to the bar. It’s good stuff.

Manufactured by: Mars
Nutritional info (1 bar, 52 grams): 240 calories, 9 grams of fat (6 grams of saturated fat, 0.1 grams of trans fat), 5 mg cholesterol, 70 mg sodium, 36 grams of carbohydrates, 30 grams of sugar, 1 gram of fibre, 2 grams of protein.
Ingredients: Sugar, corn syrup, milk ingredients, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, hydrogenated palm and palm kernel oil, lactose, malted milk powder (malted barley, milk ingredients, sodium bicarbonate, salt), palm oil, soy lecithin, salt, dried egg-white, artificial flavour.

September 20, 2020January 10, 2021 Michael

Mars Fudge – A Pleasant Variation on a Classic Candy

Candy Bars

The last Mars Bar variant I tried was Mars Caramel, which was a pretty clear downgrade from a standard Mars Bar. So my expectations weren’t particularly high for this one, which replaces the original’s nougat with fudge.

But hey, what do you know — it’s actually not bad. It probably helps that unlike the Caramel version, this one feels more like a tweak than a huge change.

Mostly, it tastes like a standard Mars Bar, but with a slightly stronger punch of chocolate flavour (though I will admit that it’s been a few years since I’ve had the original, so I might not be the best judge of this). If there’s a huge difference between the original’s nougat and the fudge here, I certainly couldn’t tell.

It’s quite satisfying, with a nice chewiness from the fudge and the caramel, and an intense sweetness that’s in-your-face but not too overpowering. It’s nothing to get too excited about, but it’s a solid candy bar.

Manufactured by: Mars
Nutritional info (1 bar, 50 grams): 230 calories, 9 grams of fat (6 grams of saturated fat, 0.1 grams of trans fat), 5 mg of cholesterol, 75 mg of sodium, 35 grams of carbohydrates, 1 grams of fibre, 30 grams of sugar, 2 grams of protein.
Ingredients: Sugar, corn syrup, milk ingredients, cocoa butter, hydrogenated palm kernel oil and/or palm oil, cocoa mass, cocoa powder, lactose, soy lecithin, salt, dried egg-white, natural and artificial flavours.

April 26, 2020January 10, 2021 Michael

Buccaneer – An Overpriced Mars Bar without the Caramel

Candy Bars

Buccaneer is a bit of an odd one. It’s ostensibly a premium candy bar; I bought it at Whole Foods for over three bucks, and the wrapper proudly proclaims that it contains “nothing artificial.”

But the wrapper also uses the word “chocolatey” not once, but twice. Chocolatey is absolutely, positively not a word you want to see on a chocolate bar wrapper (or on the packaging for anything, really). It’s the word companies use when they can’t legally use the word chocolate, because the thing in their product that purports to be chocolate is not actually chocolate.

So that’s not great.

That being said, the “chocolatey coating” here is actually not bad. It’s not great, mind you, but it has very little of the waxy greasiness you associate with mockolate. Eaten with the rest of the bar, it could pass for middling dark chocolate.

As for the bar itself, it’s basically a Mars bar, but without the caramel (it’s also quite 3 Musketeers-esque, though the nougat here is a bit more dense, which makes me think of a Mars bar).

It’s fine, I guess? Its sweetness is a bit more restrained than its inspiration, which is nice, but there’s also nothing about it that particularly stands out. It basically tastes like one of those cheap imitation candy bars you can find at Dollarama, only it costs like triple the real deal, for some reason?

Manufactured by: Go Max Go Foods
Nutritional info (57 g bar): 230 calories, 7 grams of fat (6 grams of saturated fat), 75 mg of sodium, 43 g of carbohydrates, 1 g of fibre, 33 grams of sugar, 1 gram of protein.
Ingredients: Cane sugar, organic rice syrup, organic dehydrated cane juice, palm kernel oil, cocoa powder, palm oil, enzyme modified soy protein, salt, natural flavors, sunflower lecithin, guar gum.

November 12, 2008January 10, 2021 Michael

Mars Caramel – A Downgraded Mars Bar

Candy Bars

You can file Mars Caramel under “U” for “unnecessary” – not that it’s completely without virtue, it’s just that it’s essentially superfluous. It’s an offshoot of the Mars Bar (Milky Way in the states), which normally consists of nougat topped with a layer of caramel. Mars Caramel forgoes the nougat altogether, and consists entirely of caramel enrobed in milk chocolate.

The problem here is that the bar contains the exact same caramel you’ll find inside a regular Mars Bar, which normally, balanced out by the nougat, works quite well. Here, however, the soft, slightly chewy and very sweet caramel just seems to be missing something. You expect to taste the nougat, but of course, it’s not there. The caramel itself doesn’t really have the complexity to carry the whole bar, and while it does have that Mars Bar taste, it’s just kind of plain – sweet, but without anything to ever make you want to pick this over a standard Mars Bar.

Ultimately, Mars Caramel is unnecessary because it’s just a downgraded Mars Bar. It’s kind of like listening to a song you like with one of the main instruments removed – it’s a little bit interesting at first, but ultimately there’s a reason why all the instruments are there.

Manufactured by: Mars
Calories (45 g bar): 210