PANCAKES & MAPLE SYRUP JELLY BELLIES

"Maple" is rapidly approaching "pumpkin spice" on my list of most-hated flavors.  Not because I hate maple (or pumpkin spice for that matter).  My issue with pumpkin spice...beyond the fact that there is nothing pumpkin about it...is that it has become the go-to Fall flavor for almost every product under the sun.  And while some of these products are tasty and appropriate, many are not.  Seriously--do we really need a pumpkin spice English muffin or pumpkin spice Mini-Wheats cereal?

In the same tradition, I'm now seeing numerous maple-flavored junk food such as candy corn, cereal, Pop Tarts and now jelly beans.  Note, however, that none of them are content with just naming themselves "maple" and calling it a day.  Instead, they use much more interesting names such as French Toast, bacon and pancakes.  Which would be fine if the products actually tasted like French Toast, bacon and pancakes.  They don't.

Now, I'm not a confectioner, so I don't know how to recreate the flavors of breakfast foods using sugar, high fructose corn syrup and a handful of artificial flavors.  But I can tell you how these companies have decided to do it: with smoke flavor.

That may make sense when it comes to bacon, but pancakes?  Apart from the testers, which I always throw away, I don't think I've ever made pancakes that taste smokey.  And "burnt pancakes" is probably not a good name for a commercial product anyway.

So, yes, these Jelly Bellies taste like maple...with a little smokey flavor.  Come to think of it, it tastes slightly like their coffee jelly bean.  I know that the Jelly Belly people have already recreated the flavor of butter (in their "buttered popcorn" jelly beans), so I'm not sure why they didn't use that instead.  Maple and butter, while still not tasting like a pancake, would at least taste better than maple and smoke/coffee.  And before you are tempted to buy a bag of buttered popcorn Jelly Bellies and combine the two, let me warn you: don't bother.  That doesn't taste quite right either, unless you are a person who drizzles maple syrup on your popcorn.

If you like the flavor of maple, stick with those maple leaf creme cookies.  If you absolutely positively must eat a maple jelly bean, these will do the trick...but they no more taste like pancakes than a ketchup jelly bean would taste like a hot dog.

RATING:  3/5