Choxie milk chocolate roasted almond sea salt bar

solid milk chocolate. the perfect foil for whole roasted Mission almonds and a pinch of grey sea salt crystals. simply spectacular.

Doesn’t that sound delicious? They’re not just almonds; they’re Mission almonds. And it’s not just sea salt; it’s grey sea salt crystals.

The milk chocolate bar smelled sweet and looked nice and shiny. It had a great snap to it. The whole almonds tasted like they were actually roasted (ooh!) and were nicely distributed throughout. The sea salt was a nice sophisticated touch, but for me, it also brought out the sour finish of the chocolate with its salty hit. Not bad but could be better. An OM.

Choxie 62% Ghana cacao single origin chocolate bar

with an intense and earthy flavor that only could come from Ghana, this solid bar of deep dark chocolate is warmly accented with golden Madagascar vanilla.

There go those great adjectives (and adverbs) again. warmly accented with golden Madagascar vanilla. This bar is a nice example of Choxie jumping on the single origin marketing train without really appreciating the point of single origin (making chocolate with a superior crop of bean that deserves to stand alone). And the packaging for this one was on the bland side.

Visually, the bar is absolutely gorgeous, a great deep brown with a lovely sheen to it. And it’s very snappy, party due to the fact that Choxie bars are thicker than most. The melt to this was smooth but not creamy. Flavor-wise, it tasted quite sweet with a slight berry finish. I’d say it would be okay for mindless chomping or cooking, but by billing itself as single origin, it sets itself up for failure. I expected some great flavor nuance and got nothin’. An O on this one.

Edit: I wrote this review about a week before Cybele posted her take on all four of Choxie’s 3oz bars, these two included.

The key lime pie truffle bar is “key lime-flavored white chocolate and graham biscotti bits enrobed in dark chocolate.” What I got was a way too sweet bar with a strong limey finish. I swear I tasted grains of sugar in the filling along with the scattered chunks of graham cracker.

The graham “biscotti” (I guess that’s fancier-sounding than graham cracker) bits were just crumbs. I think the bar could have benefited from slightly larger bits of the graham to make the texture more interesting and to balance out the sweet white chocolate.

The filling was too sugary, and the dark chocolate enrobing was too bland or too weak to balance it out. My bar had bloomed, which was unfortunate, and it gave the chocolate a greasy feel and an unappetizing look (though bloomed chocolate is perfectly safe to eat). The dark chocolate didn’t have a great melt – it was nowhere near as smooth or as creamy as the Dagoba and Theo bars – and the snap was rather weak and brittle.

Some of my friends liked the flavor combination (many of them thought it was lemon) but found fault with the texture. Others were not fans of the citrus addition and thought it was too weird. It did fairly well in the taste ratings: 9th place out of 13 with a score 3.17/5, placing it higher than many fancier, more expensive bars. From me, an O. I may have been too hard on Choxie because I was tasting it alongside other, nicer bars, so I haven’t completely written off the brand yet. I’d like to try some of their other truffle bars and see if they can redeem themselves.