Little Secrets: Milk Chocolate Caramel Cookie Bars

Little Secrets has been steadily making their way into the candy bar alternative market. Their Chocolate Pieces are generally pretty good, but their Crispy Wafers are lacking. How go the Caramel Cookie Bars? They already had M&M's covered and KitKats and there are already a million Reese's Cup alternatives, so Twix seems like a great next step. I'd vote for Milky Way or 3 Muskteers next, but Little Secrets has so far been sticking to the crunchy textures, so maybe they'd be quicker to go for a Snickers alternative?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The bird in hand is the Milk Chocolate Caramel Cookie Bars, so called in plural because there are two sticks inside of the wrapper. Two sticks of milk chocolate with the vanilla cookie and some weird colored caramel that's strangely sticking together. As I was taking the pictures, I was truly curious as to why I would want to put such a strange-looking item as that caramel into my mouth. I would have expected the caramel in a candy bar alternative to be better than typical candy bar caramel--not weird looking.

But everything else seemed fine. The milk chocolate smells like creamy, confection milk chocolate. Biting in, I tasted the vanilla of the cookie and it's nice to be able to get some flavor to the cookie instead of just texture. Speaking of texture, the cookie's texture is a tad on the crisp side, which is only a slight negative if you are hoping to exactly replicate the Twix experience; otherwise, it's neutral.

The caramel, though, unless you're eating this on a hot afternoon, is a little too stiff. It takes the attention too much and lingers stuck in your teeth after you've chewed everything else. Also not a huge deal, but improving it would make a big difference. This simply isn't very good caramel. While I know that this is still just a candy bar, I'd still like to see better quality caramel than what's in Rolos.

It is basically the same experience as eating a Twix bar, though, which is the idea. This is a much more successful alternative than the wafers were. This could be a genuine replacement. Granted, once you started looking at the ingredients in more detail, you'll find that they're not necessarily the best in the world, either--but like I said, it is still just a candy bar. The chocolate and sugar are supposed to be fair trade and the palm oil is sustainably sourced even if it does have palm oil and it does skip the artificial colors and flavors. So yes, it's a step up.