Those Cotton Candy Mike and Ikes weren't alone, they were released with a matching faux-vintage box of Root Beer Float candies and I couldn't just review one without the other, could I? (Well I could, but I'd feel like a bad food blogger.) Besides, I like root beer and root beer flavored sweets. When I was little root beer flavored medicine was always my favorite and I loved eating those little root beer barrel shaped hard candies. As an adult I still like root beer, I just don't care for it in cookie form.
Fun Fact: Root beer is extremely unpopular in Japan! This post went viral on Tumblr, then it quickly spread all over the rest of the internet.
Image © Yuru Yuri San☆Hai - Comment credited to nerdfighterwhatevernumbers
So it's pretty safe to say that these candies would be a flop in Japan, but what will I think of them?
Unlike the cotton candy box, which was originally released in the early 2000's, this flavor has a bit more history. Mike and Ike released root beer flavored candies under the name Root-T-Toots back in the 1960's and that box featured an adorable tug boat mascot. It was re-released with the original cotton candy box in the early 2000's with a somehow more horrifying root beer float mascot than the one we're looking at here. Seriously. Check this thing out. It's like Master Shake from Aqua Teens, but root beer themed...and horrifying. This new fake vintage box is pretty cute, and the mascot is must less nightmare inducing, but of the two flavors, the cotton candy (despite it's creepy mascot) is much cuter. (Then again it's hard to make really cute and appealing designs with a brown color scheme. Mike and Ike did what they could.)
Once opened, the candies inside the box smell surprisingly mild. They main aroma is sugary sweetness and vanilla with only a teeny tiny hint of root beer and they look like speckled pill-shaped jelly beans.
I tossed a few candies into my mouth. As the sugary shells crumbles and dissolves you can taste creamy vanilla sugar notes with a slowly building root beer tingle. The root beer flavoring gets stronger as the chewy center mixes with the candy coating, and these taste pretty darn accurate It has just the right amount of vanilla to mellow out the root beer without either element getting too overwhelming. Not bad at all Mike and Ike!
These taste pretty great, but I gotta say, after a few handfuls the novelty wore off and I was craving some variety. You get a LOT of these candies in this box, which is awesome money-wise, but I starting getting bored pretty quickly. I have more than half a box left and I really want to move on and eat something else, so I can see why this flavor went into retirement. It's great, and I'd love it in a mix with some other soda flavors or something, but an entire box of root beer candies is just too overwhelming. I wouldn't buy these again, on their own, but I'd love for them to stick around in some kind of vintage mix or something.
nice
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