Godiva Gems Caramel Apple Truffles

Ah, the clearance section. A cheap gourmand's paradise, where one can freely browse the shelves, chucking dented cans and oozing bottles in a basket until it's full and still not go over $10. My senses are finetuned to the point where I can see that beautiful orange sticker 100 yards away. Usually, it contains seasonal items painfully past their prime, like chocolate Santas with their heads cracked in and melting bags of candy corn, but today, at my local Walgreens', I came across a strange surprise, Godiva's poorly named G Gems in Milk Chocolate Caramel Apple, a distinctly autumnal flavor evocative of Halloween and the people who only give away fruit or nickels at their houses. Bastards.

For a mere $4.49 I received a bright green and gold bag full of 10 Godiva truffles. Godiva strikes me as the Molly Ringwald of the chocolate world. They're prettily wrapped, they try too hard compared to the je ne sais quoi Ally Sheedys of artisanal bars, and they give away diamond earrings like they're nothing. Doing the math, I can pretty much figure that I've spent about 40 cents per truffle, allocating a generous 49 cents to the cost of providing such a luxurious and aesthetically appealing bag. (/sarcasm) So even before I get my grubby paws down Ms. Standish's pink Laura Ashley top, I've already paid for dinner, drinks, and a movie. So how do they taste?

I'll give Godiva some credit. It DOES taste like a caramel apple, in that I take one bite and throw the rest away so that the ants can colonize it. The milk chocolate molding breaks crisply to reveal the filling inside, a potently smelling, grainy substance that tastes like the inebriated byproduct of a Brach's caramel after a night of too many Appletinis. The fruit flavor is fake and sour with a sweet fermented flavor and strongly contrasts with the milk chocolate, which is far too sugary to be paired with motor oil, much less caramel. The end result tastes like raisins, for some reason, or maybe that's just my taste buds telling me to abort the mission prematurely.

I don't like these but I'm anxiously awaiting the new LTO flavors inspired by this, such as "Suspect Unwrapped Candy Corn Ganache from the Neighbor Who Belongs to the State Sex Offender's Registry," "Day After Halloween Vomit," or as I like to call it, the "second taste," and "Overly Bloomed KitKat from 1996." Enjoy, folks. And happy end of summer for those imprisoned in school!