Candy Review:  Brach's Mellowcreme Spooky Graveyard

I'd say by about the third week of July I start getting a little "Halloween Antsy."  

I try and remain present in Summer and all it's sunny-delights but my thoughts drift to the Halloween season, black and orange, cooler nights, and fluttery autumn leaves.  Thankfully, due to seasonal-creep, retailers start leaking info and merch online and while tooling around the interwebs, taking in all the early wares, I discovered that Brach's ("The candy corn people."™) was releasing a new flavor assortment called Mellowcreme Spooky Graveyard for this spooky season.

My candy consumption has slowed to a trickle these days, but I always enjoy looking for the 'new' Halloween candies and use it as an excuse to sample.  I prefer brand-spankin'-new, but I'll take a re-release of something that maybe hasn't been on store shelves in years and is making a celebratory return.  

Generally speaking, though I will partake in some candy corn every October, I don't gravitate to "mellowcremes" which is odd, because the default 'mellowcreme flavor' is very similar to your standard candy corn kernel.  I think it's a candy ratio issue.  What I mean is a single candy corn is the perfect amount of sweet and candy corn flavor.  But if you were to enlarge a single candy corn to a silver dollar size (What a strange thing to use for a comparison.  Does anyone even know what a silver dollar IS?  Does anyone know what SPARE CHANGE is anymore?  I digress...) the flavor ratio would be off.  A silver dollar-sized candy corn would be too much sweet and too much candy corn flavor in an object of that size.  And THAT'S what mellowcremes are to me.  They're just a little too big for that level of sweet and flavor.

But this is different.

Brach's Mellowcreme Spooky Graveyard candies seem to be just the right size and the variety of flavors and shapes provide the variety a good Halloween candy needs. 

Let's go from the outside in, though.

THE BAG (front):

Foregoing the typical autumn and Halloween colors, Brach's has gone with the colors of, well, a 'spooky graveyard.'  There's a midnight blue sky; a dead tree along the right side; a rickety picket fence, some gravestones--- in shades of green, yellow, and blues; a lumbering faceless Frankenstein (or -ahem- Frankenstein's Monster), and a dancing red-headed witch holding a candy pail.  

The left side of the bag has more gravestones, a smiling skeleton doing a ground-breaker smile-and-wave, another spooky tree running along the heat-sealed bag-end, and a signpost (think M.A.S.H.) extolling the flavors contained within:  Caramel Corn, Cotton Candy, Marshmallow, and Green Apple.  The sky is dotted with a couple of ghosts and three kinds of bats.

THE BAG (back):

The back has some of the ghosts and bats carried over from the front.  A color/flavor key and a QC code in the shape of a square white pumpkin.  

Don't get too excited about that QC code--- I had high hopes it would take you to a Mtn Dew VooDew-level of a spooky point-and-click game, but alas it's just the Brach's site with family-friendly imagery, recipes, and seasonally-appropriate other candy choices.  I can't blame them.  I get it.

THE CANDIES:

I feel like the parent on Christmas morning who forces the child to appreciate how well wrapped the gift is before they can tear into it.  I'm sorry.  In the words of Garfield the Cat "CandyCandyCandyCandyCandy."

GRAVESTONE:  

The purple gravestones look great.  Lots of edges.  A distinct multi-level gravestone with a tapered top, platform base, the distinct letters "R.I.P." (for Rest in Peace) and some flourishes on the grave face.  They could have easily made this a generic blank tombstone with rounded top and flat bottom but they didn't and I recognize and celebrate the candy craftmanship.  

Flavor-wise, it's supposed to be "Cotton Candy."  That's a tough one to pull off because if I think back to my state fair days, cotton candy is merely pink and sweet.  My tastebuds call this one 'coconut.'  But not over-the-top coconut.  More like 'subtle coconut.'  Reverse engineering it as I chew one I can see what they're going for with 'cotton candy.'  But if you handed me this candy in a Pepsi Challenge scenario, I'm going to call it coconut.  

GHOUL / ZOMBIE: 

At first I assumed these were yellow skulls. But that is definitely a nose on there.  And skulls don't have noses.  But the teeth are showing, like a skull.  No lips.  So this is either a zombie or a ghoul.  I'm gonna go 'ghoul.'  We don't get a lot of 'ghoul' candies these days.  Zombies have elbowed their way into the mainstream and they're here to stay.  

The ghoul's yellow color is supposed to be 'caramel corn.'  And I get that definitely.  If you tried the Carmella Creeper General Mills Monster Cereal from 2023 it has a lot of those flavor notes.  Some will say it tastes like "Kettle Corn" rather than "Caramel Corn" and they're not wrong.  That's a fine hair to split.

BAT:  

The green bats I would classify as the 'vampiric' variety.  The pointy-ness of the ears, the spread wings, the beady eyes, the fangs.  Yep.  I've watched enough Scooby-Doo to know a vampire bat when I see one.  

I definitely get green apple from this one.  As someone who tried the Brach's Fall Festival Candy Corn (READ ABOUT IT HERE) and their "Caramel Apple" back in 2024, this is a return-to-flavor.  In fact, remembering that, I tried a little flavor experiment:  I took the green apple bat and ate it WITH the caramel corn ghoul and -BOOM- that's exactly the Caramel Apple flavor I remember from 2 years ago.  

GHOST:  

The white ghost has great detailing.  It's a 'sheet ghost' (think Michael Myers' "Bob" disguise sans glasses) with two eyes and a smile.  A slightly sinister smile if I do say so myself.  

The white ghost is supposed to be marshmallow.  To me it tastes like vanilla frosting.  You know on a cake sometimes there's the frosting that covers the cake, but then there's the piping that is harder and goes along the edges of the cake?  It tastes like the piping-frosting.  Delicious.  But not marshmallow to me.

CONCLUSION:

Despite my mellowcreme aversion:  I like these!  I like their unique shapes (a ghoul?  A GHOUL!), off-the-beaten-path flavors, and great detailing.  When candy can double as a decoration that's a win, and these will look great dumped in a candy dish ---noteworthy for their second tier Halloween colors (Tier 1:  black, orange, white; Tier 2:  purple, green, yellow).  Also:  the flavors are a welcome change from candy corn, and a great sweet alternative to pair with salty popcorn for a spooky movie night.  

Lastly, those gravestones are just begging to be used on a spooky graveyard cupcake or edible opening-credits-to-The-Simpsons-Treehouse-of-Horror diorama.

If you're looking for that 'new' candy with something different going for it, give these a try.