Lake Champlain chocolate-covered caramel

I apologize in advance for the color-balancing issues you’ll see in this post. I take my pictures with my little digital point-and-shoot (a Canon SD-1000, which I love) in a dorm room with no overhead lighting, so they’re not exactly studio quality.

Lake Champlain (BUY!) is a nice chocolatier that I can’t really afford entire boxes of, especially after buying all my textbooks for the semester, so I was excited to see a jar of these individually wrapped chocolate-covered caramels by the cash register of a Bruegger’s Bagels. I also picked up a tiny square of their dark chocolate, which I will review as soon as I find it.

The chocolates are pretty and prettily packaged. They’re wrapped in a gold foil embossed with the words “Lake Champlain”, and the chocolate inside has a good sheen and is molded with a nice design – two flowers and what I think is a beehive.

The milk chocolate covering is good. It’s not too sweet, like some milk chocolates can be, and it’s got a great mouthfeel. It takes a long time to melt in your mouth. The chocolate to caramel ratio is heavy on the chocolate, which is a good thing, as the caramel isn’t so good. It’s super stiff and sticky without any ooze, and it’s slightly bitter. While I usually enjoy bitter, slightly burnt tasting caramel, it didn’t work for me here. I’m going to give them a tepid O. Based on taste alone, they deserve an OM, but they’re rather pricey and did not live up to their hype.