Chocolate-Covered Jelly Beans WTF!

So wrong. YET SO RIGHT.

I have a small list of things that shouldn't be amazing together but are:

• Condiments on toast. Tomato ketchup or salad cream on thickly buttered toast is a winner, every time.
• Christmas in July events (or September). I had my photograph taken with a £900 reindeer last week.
• Redheads and orange. And yellow. Also, red.

To this I am adding chocolate-covered jelly beans. Seriously. These little things are incredible. I don't even particularly like jelly beans - I passed the Wonka-esque Jelly Belly counter in Selfridges last week with little more than an "Eeh..."  - but it turns out that, much like coffee beans, covering carefully-chosen flavours in proper chocolate is bloody amazing.

Posh(er) packets

This month the Dublin-based The Jelly Bean Factory are launching their gourmet jelly beans coated in Belgian chocolate (please, please come up with a snappier name. Suggesions, as ever, in the comments...) and because I will pretty much eat anything, I picked up a packet of the mint variant from the munchies shelf at work.

They. Are. Amazing.

Let me say that again with appropriate formatting. They are amazing. So amazing, in fact, that every person I offered some to this morning (nine) adored them, except the chap who balefully refused for reasons of Yom Kippur.

There is absolutely no reason why jelly beans should taste so much better with the addition of chocolate, but they do. They're like a completely different snack. The mint is cool, but not toothpastey, and you could genuinely offer them round as an outré after dinner chocolate.

These beans will also be available in cherry, raspberry, coffee and the slightly dubious "mixed fruit", which puts me in mind of those hideous crystallised arrangements that somehow always ended up under my family's Christmas tree 10 years ago. They cost £3.50 for a 110g packet and watch this space and their website for shop details.