When I ask you to associate one food with California, what comes to mind?

Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t know. Wine? Fish tacos? I’ve only been to Southern California once and it was a culinary melting pot.

With that ignorance, I decided to roll with Hershey’s “Flavor of California” – the chocolate covered strawberry.

Yeah, strawberries, fine, that makes sense. Delicious California strawberries – the number one food I associate with California. Everybody loves sweet California strawberries!

Now, what if I told you Hershey decided to inject some California strawberry flavor into their world-famous Kit Kat bar? I bet that would interest you, right? Luckily, I’m here to let you know if it works.

As I broke off an awesome smelling stick at took a bite, nothing seemed to differentiate from a normal Kit Kat, but fear not because the strawberry flavor snuck in almost immediately, and man, it was nice!

There isn’t a HUGE strawberry flavor, but that’s exactly why I dug it. They could have easily made it artificial and overbearing, but there’s a delicious, light strawberry flavor that lingers. It’s a perfect mix, acting as almost an inverse of a real chocolate covered strawberry. Once you get through the chocolate shell, the freakishly huge strawberries usually become the dominant flavor.

You’re obviously not gonna get the juicy refreshing element of a real strawberry, but you’re also not gonna get that tartness of the fruit either. I’ve always found that unless you’re eating perfectly in-season California(!) berries, they can be a bit of a buzzkill.

I ate a chocolate covered strawberry for comparison, and maybe I’m just a child with an unrefined palate (I am), but I’ll take the Kit Kat all day, every day.

I haven’t had a ton of chocolate/strawberry flavored candies, but as far as I’m concerned Kit Kat is the new top dog. This is easily better than Strawberry Nut M&M’s.

If I was basing my review on the smell and the taste, I’d consider giving these a perfect score, but I gotta nitpick a bit.

Hershey put out

While I’m whining, I also expected more off the wall ingredients from Hershey’s “Flavors of America” line. Chocolate covered strawberry is pretty tame, no? Good, but tame. Last year, I

So yeah, I can sit here and pine for all the weirdness of Japanese Kit Kats, or petition Hershey for some Philly Cheesesteak-infused Whoppers or something, but that would be a disservice to this sweet flavor of California. Pick these up if you see them.

It looks like Hershey’s has been on a roll lately. First, it comes out with all those Cookie Layered Crunch Bars. Then, it created those bars of salty-and-sweet perfection appropriately dubbed as “Hershey’s Gold.” And now it’s decided to jump onto the donut-inspired-everything bandwagon with the creation of its new Hershey’s Bites.

Not to be confused with Hershey’s Snack Bites, these are, according to the package, “soft donut bites with a sweet & creamy chocolatey filling.” They seem as if a lava cake and a donut hole met up, had a few drinks together, and ending up with these little guys as a permanent reminder of their drunken love for one another.

Opening the box, I’m happy to see Hershey’s put a flap on it so that you can close it. It always irks me when food companies make multi-serving frozen snacks and then fail to give you any kind of way to re-seal the package. That said, Hershey’s only gets half credit, since it didn’t give you any kind of way to reseal the box’s inner bag, thus dooming the uneaten portion to freezer burn.

Out of the box, the bites don’t look exactly how I expected them to. The sparkly picture gave me the impression that these were going to be rolled in some kind of granulated sugar, kind of like those donuts you find at Chinese buffets. In reality, there’s no such coating, and they look like unappetizing brown lumps.

The box said I could prepare these by either baking them at 350 for eight minutes or by microwaving them for 20-30 seconds. I decided to try both methods so I could give a comprehensive analysis.

The ones baked in the toaster oven had a crunchy outer shell, but the “creamy chocolate filling” wasn’t so much of a filling as it was more like a half-baked center.

As expected, the microwaved ones were softer, but neither one had the texture of a real donut hole. The baked ones were more cookie-like and have chocolate flavor is, ironically, closer to an Oreo cookie than Hershey’s Chocolate. The microwaved ones reminded me of a microwaved snack cake.

Between the two, I liked the baked ones better since they had a little more texture, but both needed more filling. I was expecting something like rich chocolate ganache, but this tasted like undercooked batter.

My primary complaint, though, is that both seem so incomplete without a glaze. Don’t all donuts have it or some kind of sugar coating? I made some to coat mine and it made them taste much more like actual donuts. Hershey’s should have taken notes from Pillsbury on this one and included a glaze packet, like Toaster Strudels.

Valiant effort, Hershey’s, but your newest experiment is a miss.

(Nutrition Facts – 4 bites – 180 calories, 6 grams of fat, 50 calories from fat, 3.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, less than 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 310 milligrams of sodium, 29 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 15 grams of sugar, and 3 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $3.29
Size: 18 bites (8.8 oz. box)
Purchased at: Kroger
Rating: 6 out of 10 (Baked)
Rating: 5 out of 10 (Microwaved)
Pros: Lava cake/donut hole love-child! Re-sealable box! Tastes like Oreo cookies!
Cons: Deceptive picture on the box. Inner bag isn’t re-sealable. More poop-looking snacks. Doesn’t taste like Hershey’s chocolate. No glaze included.