Day 1 of the Sweets and Snacks Expo is over, and I’m exhausted! I stayed up past my bedtime trying to get some science done, and then it was up again at 5AM to catch an early flight to Chicago, then straight from Midway to the Expo. Our first stop was the Ritter Sport importer [...]

This little half ounce Vosges Habana bar was an A Southern Season find. These tiny bar formats are a nice size for a candy blogger on a budget – I get enough to get a taste, and while $3.25 is a lot for such a little bar, it’s still cheaper than their full-sized versions. The [...]

Hammond’s PB&J Sandwich bar was creating quite a stir at Sweet and Snacks. It won the most innovative new product award in the chocolate category, where they were up against some Hershey’s products and some Wild Ophelia (from Vosges) bars. The bar was segmented into 10 H-embossed rectangles with a solid break between each piece. [...]

This Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Bar comes with fun old-timey art on the front and a lengthy narrative on the back of the box. Ready? “Exotic Hawaiian Black Sea Salt hails from the Pacific seawater that surrounds the Hawaiian islands. This stunning black salt is evaporated in above ground pools that form naturally from lava [...]

I’m slowly tasting my way through Vosges’s many different bars – slowly because they run about $10 for each 3 oz bar. The Smoke & Stout Caramel Bar was comprised of “Rogue Ale’s chocolate stout beer, alderwood smoked salt, burnt sugar caramel” and 70% dark chocolate. Like all of Vosges’s full-sized bars (at least the [...]

A little over a week ago, I discovered the new eater of my minimal grad student disposable income: A Southern Season. It’s a megalopolis of gourmet goods: fine meats and cheeses and chocolates and pastas and pastries and spices and candy… I wanted to eat all the things! But all the things were too expensive, [...]

I picked up this Vosges Black Salt Caramel Bar at Cost Plus World Market, one of my favorite new candy sources. It contained “black Hawaiian sea salt, burnt sugar caramel”, and a 70% dark chocolate. Like their Blood Orange Caramel Bar, the caramel here was oozy and runny. It definitely made the bar messier, but [...]

You can always count on Vosges to come up with something unique and intriguing. This Blood Orange Caramel Bar boasts hibiscus flowers, blood orange caramel, Campari, and dark chocolate (70% cacao). This bar was comprised of a thin, chocolate shell filled with a liquid, limpidly oozing caramel. All of the flavorings resided in the caramel [...]

These miniature Green and Black’s bars came in my Chocolate Gift Pack, courtesy of the NCA. We’ll start with the Dark 70%. Both bars were lightly scored into 12 rectangular segments, each prettily imprinted with Green and Black’s apostrophe/leaf logo. The Dark 70% was simply described as “dark chocolate with 70% cocoa content.” It had [...]

I bought this Vosges Bapchi’s Caramel Toffee Bar along with the Organic Enchanted Mushroom that I reviewed on Monday. It’s made of 45% deep milk chocolate, sweet butter toffee, walnuts, and pecans. The first, immediately noticeable thing about this bar was the toffee. Holy cow was it delicious! The toffee cleaved cleanly with a great, [...]