When I was a little kid and had the extreme pleasure of Trick-or-Treating, my favorite candy to get was always Kit-Kats. No, not these green-tea wasabi Kit Kats I hear you can get in Asia, and not the white chocolate or dark chocolate ones they seem to pack in “fun size” wrappers nowadays. I’m talking your straight up, four-stick milk chocolate and crispy wafer Kit-Kat. There was just something about the crunch that reminded me of the Voortman cookies I loved so much, and just enough balanced decadence with the hardened chocolate on the outside as to not overwhelm the pleasure of the snacking novelty.
I hardly eat candy bars anymore. At some point I more or less banished them as “junk food,” although given my love of cereal, chips, and useless carbs, it’s a label I obviously use in an incredibly loose sense. But there’s just something that deprives the joy from candy bars as you get older, as if that childhood need for a wrapper to open gives way to a sense of having been there, done that. granola bars, protein bars — those are the new unwrappables. Not the standard Kit-Kat we’d take to school in our lunch boxes for weeks after Halloween when we were kids.
Every once and a while something new will come about though. No, not from these shores, but from a strange, exotic land. One where chocolate and crispy wafer alone don’t suffice, and children and adults everywhere are met with the comforting and sweet taste of coffee between each crunchy bite.
Coffee Crisp, you have rekindled my love for the candy bar, and thanks to you and my friend Melissa, I may never open a granola bar again.
There’s something about a King Size candy bar which makes you slow down when eating it. It’s not like those sustenance-designed granola bars we scarf down in between classes or jobs. Probing the 50-gram Coffee Crisp bar like the alien creation of cocoa mass and soya lecithin it is, you soon develop your own style for eating it. Perhaps you start around the edges — licking the hardened milk chocolate coating before chipping the shards off with your front teeth, or maybe you work meticulously to extricate the thin sheet of coffee cream from each crispy layer, allowing the edges to fall, like raindrops, into your steaming cup of joe besides you.
Dipped in coffee, that smooth, milky chocolate coating takes on a smokey-sweet earthiness that recalls the processed beans to an earlier state. Now you move to dunk the whole bar into the dark roast blend, imagining yourself as some Yukon-based Park Ranger doing the Canadian version of American cops’ favorite morning pastime. As you bring the bar back for a taste, you’re seized by the aroma, textures and tastes. A synthesis of the three tablespoons of sugar and cream coffee drinker and the all black, Ethiopian brew consumer takes place in this moment, as a spectrum of initial sweetness and smooth cream gives way to the flaky, aerated crisp.
I have heard some people choose to take their coffee black so they can have their donut and eat it too. I don’t know about a donut, but I’ll gladly take Coffee Crisp any day of the week.
- Price: N/A
- Ranking: 9/10
- Chances I’d Eat Again: 95%
Never my favourite, but always a preferred choice, Coffee Crisp is a solid bar. Somehow it felt less like “junk food” than the other chocolate bars out there.
I used to really enjoy them once they had been in the fridge for a while. Excellent with a cup of good coffee, of course. Glad you like them!
That’s the way I feel about Paydays (do they have those in Canada?) They’ve got some protein so they’ve got to be good for you, right? But really. Does nayone ever notice that on a per oz. basis, candy is caloricaly the same as granola bars?
I have noticed that, actually. And sometimes you just need the chocolate kick!
I know I’ve seen PayDays in Canada, but only sporadically. Never tried one, though.