Annabelle's Rocky Road

Annabelle's Rocky Road Milk Chocolate Coated Marshmallow With Cashews (240 calories, 25 g sugar) $0.89 @ Safeway 

Thursday May 28, 2009 Consumed at 9:30PM EXACTLY

Hot damn these are delicious! Seriously in my top 10 favorite candies of all time, easily in my top 5 favorite candy bars. I'm not a huge fan of milk chocolate as a general rule, but the thin layer of milk chocolate isn't the sickeningly sweet Hershey variety either. They make a dark chocolate variety called... Rocky Road Dark (anticlimactic, I know). I like the dark chocolate bar better, but they're both fantastic.  Annabelle Candy Company (Annabelle's) makes some of the best candy bars period. I'm a huge fan. The company only make 8 candy bars currently, which is a shame.

Products of Annabelle's (Past & present) include:

Rocky Road, Rocky Road Dark, Rocky Road Mint, Big Hunk, U-No, Skinny Hunk, Abba-Zaba, Abba-Zaba Sour Apple, Look! & Abba-Zaba Chocolate.

Back to the candy at hand. It seems almost misleading to advertise it as having cashews, I doubt the amount in each bar would equal 1/2 of an actual cashew. The tiny cashew bits are embedded in the chocolate on top of the bar, you can barely even see them. 

The chocolate melts onto your fingers before you can finish the bar which leads to a ravenous finger licking similar to "Cheeto Fingers Syndrome" (CFS). You can't exactly wolf down this bar, you'd probably choke on the marshmallow. The marshmallow itself isn't super sweet either, which is nice. American candy is usually mouth numbingly sweet above all else. Flavor and mouth feel are usually an after thought. 

I highly, highly recommend this candy, although it's unlikely you'll find it at a major retailer. Candy makers pay for shelf space at stores which is why you usually find candies made by the big 3 (Nestle, Mars & Hershey's) so predominantly featured. It's also why the more mom & pop stores always seem to have a much better/more interesting candy selection. The Dollar Tree also has a good candy section, though you can't find consistent products.  It's one of those things. At bigger chain stores (if they have them at all) they'll probably be on the very bottom shelf, so poke around. Big thumbs up!