ZOMG, Candy!

When Amella Caramels contacted me about trying free samples of their caramels, I almost turned them down. I was out of town relaxing in Myrtle Beach, and it was a week and a half before my graduation day, just shy of two weeks when I was to move everything I owned (including my candy stash) to upstate New York (quite far from home in Texas). I thought I’d never have the time. Thank goodness I changed my mind. These guys were ridiculously good.

Amella Caramels are artisan caramels that come in three flavors, carrot cake, black forest, and passion fruit. Not only do they taste great (we’ll get to that in a bit) but also, they come in ingenious packaging. Each box looks artisinal, as if it’s made with handmade paper. Pop the lid open, and you can see the three caramels inside through a little plastic viewing window.

Carrot Cake: “Taste a medley of fresh carrots, roasted pecans, and cocoa butter with creamy caramel, hand dipped in the finest white chocolate.”

White chocolate? I could’ve sworn the topping tasted like cream cheese frosting. This guy blew me away. The chew was soft and non-sticky. It was like eating a bite of gooey carrot cake that just happened to have a light caramel-y finish. The flavor was quite genuine, and a few bits of pecans were dispersed throughout. The white chocolate overpowered the caramel flavor of the bite – I really only got the caramel-ness when I nibbled it sans white chocolate – but it was still quite good.

Black Forest: “Lose yourself in a blend of real Amarelle cherries, 70% dark chocolate, and Tahitian vanilla with buttery caramel, hand dipped in fine white chocolate and topped with dark chocolate sprinkles.”

This was far more caramel-like in texture than the Carrot Cake. It was soft and chewy with just the right amount of sticky, so that the chew didn’t last too long and so that your fillings are never in danger. The caramel has a deep, dark chocolate flavor that would be great as is – but it gets better! After a few chews, a strong and fruity cherry finish comes through, delighting the palate. The white chocolate top isn’t really noticeable because the caramel is so strongly flavored, and that’s just fine by me.

Passion Fruit (bottom right): “Discover pure bliss from real passion fruit, cocoa butter, and Tahitian vanilla with buttery caramel, hand dipped in the finest milk chocolate.”

This was the most caramel-y of the three. It starts out like a nice, buttery caramel (same texture as that of the Black Forest) before bursting into a sudden bright and vibrant fruity sweetness with citrusy high notes. The chocolate is there, but I didn’t care, as the caramel flavor with the transition to fruity sweetness is the selling point. I think I could eat these all day and never get bored by that sudden switch.

These all get ZOMG!s, though I like the Black Forest and Passion Fruit much better than the Carrot Cake. I tried the Carrot Cake first and gave it a ZOMG!, not realizing that the other two would get even better, and I decided that it wouldn’t be fair to downgrade it.

Sadly, they ain’t cheap – $4.99 per 3-pack, with free shipping on orders of $29.94 or more. You can order online for now. I do hope they wind their way into stores. I can see places like Williams Sonoma and Sur La Table keeping these by the register (they’re certainly better than the Mitchell Sweets that Sur La Table already sells), and I’d even enjoy these as dessert in a nice restaurant.

Dear readers, your regularly scheduled review of the rest of the Schocolat chocolates appears below the break. But first, a story. Just scroll down and click “Read the rest of this entry” if you want to skip straight to the review.

The box of chocolates came from Rita’s mom with a request that I pass the reviews onto the proprietors of Schocolat. About a week ago, I sent them the three links to the three reviews, with a note that each link would go live the day that it was scheduled to run. Here’s part I and part II.

Yesterday, I received the following email:

Rosa

Thanks? Maybe you will find chocolate covered fruit gushers more pleasurable.

Regards
Susie

I was initially offended and pretty hurt. Then I thought, maybe I’m jumping to conclusions and being overly sensitive. Maybe she was suggesting that I try another product of theirs, these “chocolate covered fruit gushers”? But I didn’t see those anywhere on their site, so I guess Susie was referring to actual Fruit Gushers after all.

So that’s my story. You can interpret it as you wish, and I’ll bet you can guess how I ended up taking it.

And do click through and read today’s review. It’s exactly what I wrote a week and a half ago – in other words, I didn’t change anything after Susie’s email. As I told Susie when I wrote back, “I don’t have to like anything or everything that I review. I do have to be honest with my readers.”
Read the rest of this entry »

I was in Rochester, NY last week and came across a delightful little chocolate shop called Hedonist Artisan Chocolates. While there I struck up a nice conversation with one their chocolate makers (perhaps the proprietor?) and partook of their generous free samples of just-made rolled champagne truffles and some bits of chocolate bark. The great samples convinced me to buy two of their ever-changing selection of handmade truffles: molasses ginger and peanut butter cayenne.

The molasses ginger (left) was a square of molasses ginger flavored ganache covered in dark Valhrona and topped with a tiny piece of candied ginger. It was fresh and tasted amazing. The ganache was creamy but not greasy and had a distinct fresh ginger flavor without the less pleasant bite that real ginger has. I didn’t get any direct molasses notes, but there’s a mellow sweetness that permeates throughout. The little dab of candied ginger was a wonderful touch that again, brought ginger flavor without any bitter notes. All this was nicely juxtaposed against the snappy shell of good quality dark couverture.

Peanut butter cayenne was topped with a little half peanut. The filling in this was stiffer and slightly gritty. It initially starts with a roasty fresh nuttiness before giving way to a lingering cayenne burn. The heat is more intense than other chili chocolates, so it may not be for the faint of heart, but I loved it.

Both truffles were great, if not exactly cheap at $2 a bite. Still, they get a ZOMG! for their high quality and wonderful flavors. There were other interesting sounding flavors that I didn’t try (like raspberry wasabi and lapsang souchong), so I’m sure that I’ll revisit Hedonist Chocolates again and again once I move to Rochester.

That’s right – I’m moving to Rochester! I get my BA in psychology/neuroscience at the end of May, and sometime during the summer, I’m starting a two-year stint as a research assistant/lab manager at the University of Rochester. The decision to move there wasn’t an easy one to make, especially since my other option was a fully funded, generously stipended year in a Master’s program at Cambridge University (back in England, with British accents and Cadbury and Haribo…), but Rochester made me a great offer full of great opportunity. Besides, it’s close to Canada, so I’ll still get to explore an international candy scene while there!

A couple of weeks ago, on February 25th, I skipped my bootcamp class at the gym and went to a Master’s Tea with Judy Logback, the founder of Kallari chocolates, instead. After complaining about the Times Styles’ snarky chocolate review that fawned over Kallari a bit too much, how could I pass up the opportunity to meet and taste chocolate with the woman who founded the cooperative?

Judy, a student at Yale’s School of Management, gave a great talk and tea. She covered the details of how the Kallari cooperative works, what the cooperative’s farmers and chocolate makers do, and how each step that they do themselves earns them more money and helps them work their way out of poverty. I was quite impressed.

Along the way, Judy threw in neat chocolate facts. I learned that processing cacao with alkali (aka Dutch processing) darkens the color of the cacao without affecting the flavor, which explains why some chocolates manage look so much darker than they taste. I also learned that high quality chocolate doesn’t need lecithin as an emulsifier because they’re comprised of just cocoa butter and cocoa solids. And, most shockingly of all to me, I learned that in the U.K., single-origin bars only need to contain 10% of beans from that single-origin. In the U.S., the claims are totally unregulated.

We tasted 8 bars along the way, four of them from Kallair. Three were the above bars that Kallari is now selling via Whole Foods, and the fourth was one of their artisanal bars. While the Whole Food bars are machine tempered and molded, the artisinal bars are entirely handmade, from tempering to molding. Judy had us taste the chocolates as she went through her Kallari slideshow, stopping every few slides ask us about what we thought about what we were eating. It was a little intimidating to verbalize my tasting notes to a chocolate expert, but it was also neat to hear her responses and feedback.

The bars were tasted blindly, though Judy gave us their percentages as we went. The bars and my notes are below the photo.

1. 86% Ghirardelli – cool, thin, glossy melt thanks to good use of cocoa butter. Pretty bitter, dry finish, but not exactly unpleasant.
2. 85% Kallari artisinal bar – more burnt smell; sweeter, winey notes to the flavor. A thicker melt than the above bar, but still not thick, exactly, and with a slight grit
3. 85% Kallari bar available at Whole Foods – thicker melt, fruity finish. Astringent.
4. 85% Lindt – strong smell, thick melt. A light, fruity sweetness that gave way to a super dry finish.
5. 75% Kallari bar available at Whole Foods – milky, caramel notes with a wonderfully dusky finish (Judy said the caramel notes were from their use of organic raw cane sugar). ZOMG
6. 75% Chocolove – sweet, strong cherry notes. Suprisingly thick melt for dark chocolate.
7. 70% Green & Black’s – flat fruity citrus sweetness. Unexceptional and, well, flat.
8. 70% Kallari bar available at Whole Foods – reminds me of European bars with the dusky caramel flavors.

My favorite bar of the lot was number 5, Kallari’s 75% bar. I went back for seconds, and it definitely merits a ZOMG! I’ll be looking for it next time I’m in a Whole Foods.

Finally, just a logistical note to point out, these bars aren’t technically certified Fair Trade, but I’ve chosen to tag them as such. Kallari has gone so far above and beyond the ideals of Fair Trade that they’re really beyond certification.

I’ve worked with Emily’s Chocolates several times before, and since they make solid, decent chocolate, I’m always happy to try their products. After a few shipping snafus, I finally received a generous sample box of their holiday goodies. Even though it’s now March, no worries; their holiday/seasonal wares are still available on their website.

While I’d already reviewed the cherry hazelnut and cranberry almond mixes, I’d never before tried the milk chocolate cocoa dusted pecans or the milk chocolate covered graham crackers. I’ll cover the former today; you’ll get the latter on Wednesday.

Calling these guys “milk chocolate cocoa dusted pecan halves” are quite a mouthful, so from now on, they shall just be pecan halves. But they are far more than pecan halves. They are whole pecan halves (is that oxymoronic?) evenly coated in a thin layer of high quality milk chocolate and dusted in unsweetened cocoa powder. So simple, yet somehow so good!

I can’t figure out why these were so addictive. Pecans are a mild nut, and these halves are unroasted, so they’re extra mild. Yet there’s something about their grainy crunch that, when combined with Emily’s high quality milk chocolate coating, makes these guys extremely poppable and addictive. I wish I had more. Just goes to show, simplicty can be sumptuous. A ZOMG!

When reviews of Q.bel chocolates started hitting the candy blogosphere, I was intrigued. It’s not often that Cybele bestows a candy with a 10 out of 10 rating, and Q.bel managed to nab the honor.So when Q.bel asked me if I wanted free samples to review, I eagerly said yes. I’m so glad that I did.

Q.bel (the Q is for quality; the bel is for Isabel, the wife of the creator. When will I get a delicious candy named after me?) chocolates come in two types, wafer rolls and wafer bars, with three iterations of each: milk, dark, and peanut butter. Today, I’ll cover the wafer rolls. The wafer bars will be reviewed on Monday.

The wafer rolls were crispy, crunchy, fresh, and flaky wafer cookie rolls filled with chocolate or peanut butter and enrobed in more chocolate. The milk chocolate of the milk chocolate wafer roll (center) is wonderful – rich and creamy, but not too sweet, and with a dusky finish, earning it an OMG.

The peanut butter wafer roll (right) is covered with the same milk chocolate, but it’s filled with salty, thick peanut butter that tastes fresh roasted. The overarching finish of the peanut butter lingers a bit, and I found it a bit overpowering for the chocolate. An OM from me, but peanut butter lovers would absolutely adore this.

My favorite of the wafer rolls was the dark chocolate wafer roll (left). The dark chocolate and wafer were an amazing match. The dark chocolate had an earthiness to it, but its finish was sweet and fruity, which needed the cookie wafer to cut it. It gets a bit cloying in the finish, but if you have enough self control to stop after one roll (I don’t), it’s perfect. A ZOMG!

I highly recommend you check these all-natural chocolates out. Q.bel is doing a huge rollout in Whole Foods, so look for them there. They’re probably a bit pricier than your average candy bar, but these are not your average candy bar. And check back on Monday for my review of their wafer bars!

Today marks the conclusion of Rosa eats her way through an entire box of See’s on her own because it’s delicious and free. I began my journey on Monday, continued on Wednesday, and today, the finish line is in sight.

I’m not sure what makes the California brittle Californian. It’s a hard toffee with almonds that’s covered in milk chocolate. Unlike some toffees, this brittle doesn’t really cleave. It kind of just breaks. I could almost feel the tiny air bubbles dissolving on my tongue as I chewed it. The salty almonds go well with the brittle, which was pretty throat-burningly sweet. An O, but a positive one that I can see others enjoying.

The Mayfair was probably the easiest to identify, at least once I bit into it, because it was shockingly pink. This is described as buttercream with cherries and English walnuts. I don’t care for buttercream chocolates in general because I find them too sweet, and this guy is both too sweet and unappetizingly bursting with artificial cherry flavor. An O.

Two of my favorite See’s chocolates were the most simple, the above milk peanuts and the dark almonds (photo here). Good quality roasted nuts plus good quality See’s chocolate makes for yum. Both were great combinations of salty/sweet and melty/creamy/crunchy with toasted nut overtones. I could eat these all day. OMGs for both.

The cocoanut (sic) was milk chocolate around a coconut buttercream. I actively dislike most coconut candies, so to say that I found this tasty is a significant compliment. It had a nice coconut flavor without too much of the shreddy textural issues I have with sugared, dried, and shredded coconut. It helped that the milk chocolate mostly overpowered much of the coconut flavor. An OM.

Last up in our pictorial component is the milk pattie, vanilla caramel in milk chocolate. The caramel is soft with a moderate level of chewiness and stickiness. It doesn’t have much flavor that stands up to the milk chocolate, but I did enjoy its dusky finish. I’d love to try the dark version, which may let the caramel assert itself more. An OM.

Finally, I’d like to note two See’s chocolates that I do not have photos for. First, the molasses chips that were in my box got damaged during shipping and ended up in bits and pieces all over the box. I greatly enjoyed picking those pieces out and devouring them. Molasses chips are one of my favorite See’s products. They’re a thin brittle sweetened with honey and molasses and covered in chocolate, and they are divine. They come in dark and milk, and while I prefer the dark, I still love the milk. A ZOMG! for either iteration. You can see them in the below photo of a box I bought myself over a year ago. They’re the four thin rectangles on the left. You can also buy them by themselves, in a mixed assorted box or in milk and dark boxes.

The other See’s chocolate that I do not have a photo of is their Scotchmallow. The Scotchmallow is  absolutely, hands-down my favorite See’s product, and I have no photo of it because I am saving mine for a special occasion. An ex-boyfriend of mine loves them (in fact, he’s the one who introduced me to them), and I knew he really liked me when he was willing to share his beloved Scotchmallows with me. See how seriously I take my Scotchmallows? They’re even at the top of my all time favorite candies list.

They also come in bar form, as in the photo above, in heart form for Valentine’s Day and in egg form for Easter, but the round chocolate form in their assorted chocolates selection is really the best, I think, as it gets the proportions just right: thick squishy honey marshmallow over a wonderfully butterscotchy caramel, all enrobed in dark chocolate… If you couldn’t see it coming, it gets a ZOMG! like whoa.

So after all this See’s reviewing, what would go in my ideal custom box? At least two sets of dark molasses chips, a set of milk molasses chips, a dark cocoanut, a dark pattie (which I didn’t get to try), a dark almond and a dark peanut, a milk almond and a milk peanut, a caramel with almonds, a couple of marzipans, a dark nougat, a butterscotch square, and fill the rest of the box to the brim with Scotchmallows. The next time I’m in a See’s store, that’ll be exactly what I’ll order (plus a few Scotch kisses, Almond Royals, and Toffee-ettes).

I can’t stress enough how great a value See’s is. They may not be as fancy or as dazzlingly pretty as some of the more expensive chocolates that I’ve tried, but you really can’t beat paying just under $20 a pound for great tasting chocolate. Even I can afford that. And as a bonus, at that price, you don’t feel so bad when you come across one that you don’t love.

Today brings the anxiously awaited conclusion to my review of Surf Sweets‘ product line that I began on Wednesday. First up (or is it fourth up?), their Gummy Swirls.

The Gummy Swirls were little gumdrop shaped gummis about the size of the first joint of my pinky finger. They came in two versions, pink/white swirled and orange/white swirled. Pink/white was strawberry, I believe, and its flavor was of lightly muted “red” candy. I’m not sure if the muting came from the white swirl or from the all-natural ingredients. A bit of each, perhaps? My guess is that orange/white was orange-flavored, except I didn’t find it to taste very orangey. Instead, I got more of a pear profile. The gummy itself was fairly firm and sproingy, while the sugar coating added a bit of textural grain.

Surf Sweets’ Gummy Worms were absolutely gorgeous, proving that one doesn’t need artificial colorings to make something look tasty. They came in red and yellow and red and lighter yellow/clear. Cherry and pineapple, maybe? The flavors weren’t terribly distinct, but they were nice and fruity. Appearances aside, however, there wasn’t much to separate these gummy worms from their artificially-flavored (and much cheaper) counterparts.

While the Gummy Worms were fairly run of the mill, I found the Super Sour Worms to be truly exceptional. Like Wednesday’s Fruity Bears, these were more like a fruit pate or a fruit gem, which may be why their moniker leaves out the word “gummy”. The sour sugar coating on these is mostly sweet and only lightly tart, but it’s just right.

The red and yellow one tastes of cherry – as I’ve written many times, I have difficulty differentiating red-flavored candies, but this one had a bit of a bite to it, so I’m going with cherry – with a sour finish of lemon. The orange and white one tasted like a lovely sweet yet tart orange. Either the white part was also orange flavored, or it was too lightly flavored to compete against the brightness of the orange.

The Super Sour Worms were my favorite of the Surf Sweets bunch. I couldn’t stop eating them, so they get a ZOMG! The Gummy Swirls and Gummy Worms, while good, weren’t exceptional, and, as I said on Wednesday, I’m too poor to shell out extra for all natural and organic when artificial and full-of-pesticides tastes pretty much exactly the same, so they get Os. If you’re not poor like me and care about what you put into your body, or your kids’ bodies, then the whole Surf Sweet lineup is probably perfect for ya – they taste all-natural, but in a good way, and you or your kids won’t miss unnatural flavorings/colorings one whit.

Here’s the review of the rest of the box of Charles Chocolates that was introduced on Wednesday. We did the top row then, so today we’re going over the bottom row.

First up, bottom right, the bittersweet chocolate fleur de sel caramel. It was goooood. You can buy a box of 10 or 20 of just these, and I can see why. It’s a “a fleur de sel caramel with bittersweet chocolate and enrobed in 65% bittersweet chocolate.” The caramel was chewy and just slightly sticky with wonderous burnt notes, making it dark and salty and delectable, with the whole thing mellowed a bit by the chocolate coating. I could eat a whole box of these.

Next are the two square ones, the blood orange Yankee (why Yankee? I have no idea), which contains a blood orange marmalade ganache in a dark shell, and the meyer lemon Yankee, with a Meyer lemon marmalade in a dark and milk shell. If it’s made with lemons, does it still count as marmalade?

Orange and chocolate are a pretty common combination, but lemon, and chocolate, not so much. The Meyer lemon Yankee was good – it had a slight citrus finish with just a hint of zest, so its lemon-y-ness was not at all overpowering. The blood orange was similarly lightly citrusy, but with a sweeter, rounder flavor profile. In both, the ganache was smooth, silky, and lightly greasy, but not unpleasantly so.

The scalloped oval one in the middle is the espresso caramel, “rich caramel with real espresso and Kahlua in a  65% bittersweet oval.” The filling inside was soft and creamy, which surprised me, as I expected a stickiness due to the caramel moniker. I got a slight hint of the Kahlua flavor but didn’t pick up any espresso notes in the filling.

And last, and in this case least, the bottom left lemon marzipan: “Marzipan made with fresh, organic Meyer lemons and organic California almonds are coated in our rich 65% bittersweet chocolate.” I think one should always become a bit suspicious when one is being sold to with so many enthusiastic adjectives. Why is the same chocolate enrobing “rich” here, and the Meyer lemons “fresh, organic”? I didn’t taste any lemon in my marzipan, and I was just not a fan of the taste or the texture. I didn’t even finish my first one, and the second one is still sitting alone in the box, the only one left (I didn’t eat the entire box myself, by the way; I did share some with friends).

The marzipan alone gets an O, the espresso caramel and the Yankees get an OM, and the bittersweet fleur de sel gets a ZOMG! At around $2 a truffle, these are not exactly cheap indulgences. I wouldn’t buy the assorted box for myself (though I would happily accept one), but I would buy them by weight if I got to pick and choose which ones I wanted. I think that’s an option at their store/cafe. And I would buy these for gift-giving for special occasions.

There’s a wonderful restaurant in Cambridge (England) called Le Gros Franck near the city’s train station. Apparently, at night it’s a fine dining establishment. I only went there during the day, when it’s a French cafe that serves a deliciously decadent salmon crepe. Nom nom. They also had a wide selection of Carambars, which are these French taffy/chew type candies. They definitely cost more than 5 cents (what Wikipedia gives as their suggested retail price) at Le Gros Franck, but I forgive them for upselling a bit. With import costs and the weak dollar, some things can’t be helped.

Carambars are long, thin rectangular prisms of a soft and chewy taffy that’s not at all sticky. See above photo for size reference. If you check the Wikipedia page, you can see that Carambars come in a bazillion flavors. And if you can read French, you can check out the Carambar website for another list under la marque Carambar, des gouts pour tout (tastes for all, I think). I bought one of every flavor Le Gros Franck carried, so here’s the quickshot list and mini-reviews:

• strawberry – surprisingly bright and unartificial
• raspberry – strong seediness
• lemon – bright and fake
• pomme d’amour – caramel apple? like a chewy taffy version of those caramel apple lollipops. Yum!
• big oouu pomme cassis – blech. seedy raspberryness. I looked it up – it’s blackcurrant and apple

• pineapple – WHOA! So pineappley; fresh with a tinge of acid. A clear ZOMG!
• mango – also whoa for it’s genuine flavor, carried through by a slightly bitter bite. It almost tastes stringy, if there’s a way to taste like a texture.
• diabolo cassis – more blackcurrant? Good, but not really blackcurranty. I get more citrus and fizz
• peach tea – like peaches with a tea finish rather than like tea with a peach finish.

Overall, Carambars earn an OM from me, with a hearty ZOMG! for the pineapple. I think there are a few more flavors that I bought that I have yet to taste too. If I ever get around to those, you’ll get a Carambar, Part II review.