Merry MEGA Buttons (Holiday Flavors) - Wegman's: Cherry Hill, NJ
Sometimes you see a candy and you know it's going to be bad, but for some reason, you buy it anyway. This is one of those candies.
This was one of those cheap novelty holiday candies that was piled up in the seasonal aisle, and if it weren't for the sugar cookie flavored button, there was no way I was going to buy this. If memory serves, I think this was a dollar, so I figured, why not review it and have a laugh? So into the cart it went.
This package was so tall it barely fit into my photo set up, which resulted in the most awkward hand positioning ever. (My hand looks so claw-like in that one photo.) As you can see, this design screams BAD NOVELTY PRODUCT. We have generic stock-photo smiley faces wearing winter attire and a little American flag. On their own, candy buttons are always a fun visual, but this package...is not. Rather than tear it apart, it's clear I'm no fan, so I'll skip over that and we'll start getting into the candy itself.
Inside this package are two large sheets of "MEGA buttons." Unlike normal candy buttons, which are dried sugary icing on a strip of paper, these seem to be meringue based. They are lighter, similar to a baked meringue cookie, and the ingredients list eggs.
The little buttons instantly crumble and dissolve on your tongue, with a very interesting and almost malt-like texture, but these flavors...
Let's start things off with sugar cookie, which is the reason I bought this in the first place.
Yellow (Sugar Cookie): This candy button isn't that bad. It dissolves on your tongue and it has some nice vanilla flavoring, but this tastes just like vanilla instant pudding powder. There's no way this can ever attempt to be called sugar cookie, but the vanilla flavoring is really nice and this was my favorite button out of the pack. (It's also the easiest to eat flavor-wise.) If this was sold as a pudding flavored button, I bet it'd be really popular.
Brown (Hot Chocolate): No. This is a no. It starts out tasting chocolatey, and faintly like chocolate instant pudding mix, but the finish is really artificial. I ate a few of each button to really get a feel for the flavorings, and I swear that some of these chocolate ones had a dish soap-y after taste that I don't quite understand, but not every button had it. This one started out okay, not great, and quickly went into "NOPE" territory.
Green (Merry Berry): Oh boy, what is a Merry Berry? This wasn't awful, but it really wasn't good. I can't really tell what this is trying to emulate, it has some kind of vague fruity flavor, but I can't really detect any one fruit. Maybe there's some raspberry in these? These weren't as bad as the chocolate, and it doesn't have a weird aftertaste, but the general flavoring for it is weird enough. I really don't want to eat any more of these...
Red (Candy Cane): Oh thank goodness, mint! They can't mess up mint, these red buttons are just as crumbly and meringue-like as the others, and they have a really really weak mint flavoring. This is perhaps the weakest mint flavored candy I have ever eaten, but it's still leaps and bounds better than the Hot Chocolate and Merry Berry.
I judged this product by it's packaging, I saw it and thought, "This is going to be bad," and it was. The vanilla pudding-like flavoring of the sugar cookie button has some promise, I do like those quite a bit, but there is no way anyone would ever mistake that flavoring for sugar cookies, and the rest of these buttons are duds. If you see this in the aisles, I would not recommend buying it at all, even if it's only a dollar. These aren't even bad in the fun, "Try this it's gross" kind of way. Save your money and get some other novelty candies.
© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net
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