ZOMG, Candy!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a review of Lily O’Briens crispy heart and sticky toffee. It was about as scathing as I get:

“From the two I tasted, a crispy heart and a sticky toffee, either Ireland has poor chocolatiers or Lily O’Briens is quite overrated.”

The next day, I got the following email from one of their representatives:

“I work for Lily O’Brien’s Chocolates and have read your comments on our two signature recipes with great interest. Our chocolates, when fresh, taste truly fantasti and the two recipes critiqued are among our chocolate fans’ favourites (check out the testimonials on our website from across the globe). Unfortunately I would suspect that the chocolates tasted we were past their best and should not actually be on sale still… I would be happy to send you fresh chocolates if you would like to critique them fairly.”

I was impressed that Lily O’Briens was so willing to stand behind their chocolates, and I was eager to take them up on their offer of a re-review. After all, I had bought the original chocolates from an Italian coffee shop in tourist trap Las Vegas, not exactly a place that would be worried about quality control and customer loyalty. When a generous package arrived from Ireland, and I happily ate my words, along with the chocolates they sent: one pouch each of their Chocolate Collection, their Sticky Toffee, their Crispy Hearts, and their Trufflicious (that name needs a noun, I thin), a two sets of their luxury bar assortments. This review is of the Chocolate Collection, which includes a sticky toffee and a honeycomb crisp (just like the crispy hearts, but not honeycomb shaped).

The Chocolate Collection, starting from the white chocolate cup going clockwise and finishing in the center, includes crème brûlée, hazelnut torte, honeycomb crisp, farmhouse ice cream, sticky toffee, lemon meringue pie, chocolat noir, and cookies ‘n’ cream. There was one of each and two of a few (the sticky toffee, the honeycomb crisp, and the chocolat noir, if I remember correctly), and I’m ashamed to say that over the course of a few days, I ate the entire pouch. What can I say; it’s that time of year when final papers are due and final exams are coming up.

crème brûlée - White chocolate shell with granulated sugar sprinkled over a white cap; white chocolate ganache filling and a touch of caramel sitting in the bottom of the shell. I don’t particularly like white chocolate. Still, the cup is a cute design.

hazelnut torte - one of my favorites of the bunch, this one was quite nutty. Like most hazelnut/chocolate combinations, it was sweet, but this one managed to be just shy of overly so. The ganache almost had a slight grain to it from the hazelnuts. I liked the textural difference.

honeycomb crisp - honeycomb and crispies in milk chocolate that was soooo much better than the stale crispy heart I bought in Vegas. The chocolate was creamy and yogurty rather than brittle, and though it was still on the sweet side, the sweetness was more bearable when the chocolate melted heavily on the tongue.

farmhouse ice cream - I also enjoyed this one, a dark chocolate shell around a white ganache. The ganache wasn’t white chocolate (I think). Instead, it tasted like fresh cream.

sticky toffee - the other one that I had originally panned. This time around in a fresh version, the “toffee” caramel was smooth and flowing with a slight butterscotch tinge. No grain and grit here. And again, the sweetness was helped by the proper melt of chocolate (whereas my Vegas ones were pretty brittle).

lemon meringue pie - milk chocolate shell, white chocolate button, bright lemony ganache. Didn’t make too much of an impression on me.

chocolat noir - dark chocolate shell and a lighter, sweeter, and fluffier dark chocolate ganache. I liked the dark chocolate the shell was made of, as it had a nice fruitiness to it. For those who are easing their way into enjoying dark chocolate, this dark chocolate was on the sweet side.

cookies ‘n’ cream - somehow, Lily O’Briens managed to get the a nice bit of cookie crumb grain into this one, a milk chocolate shell surrounding a white chocolate ganache studded with tiny chocolate chips. I was amused that there were actually more chocolate chips in the actual chocolate than in the photo of the chocolate on the box. Usually, it’s the other way around. This tastes overwhelmingly of white chocolate. I think I would have liked it better if it tasted more like the cream of the farm house ice cream.

So, Lily O’Briens, I owe you an apology. Your chocolates are tasty. They’re a little overly sweet for my palate, and the ganache fillings are almost on the greasy side, but I liked them enough to eat them all. Irish people do have good taste in chocolate. Hooray! An OM for the lot as a whole, with an OMG for the hazelnut torte and farmhouse ice cream.

According to their website, Lily O’Briens is one of Ireland’s top chocolatiers. From the two I tasted, a crispy heart and a sticky toffee, either Ireland has poor chocolatiers or Lily O’Briens is quite overrated.

Edit: Lily O’Briens believes that my chocolates were past their best-by date and have offered to send me fresh samples so I can give them a fair shake. I respect companies that stand behind their products, so I’ll re-review Lily O’Briens.

I actually picked this box up from an Italian coffeehouse/gelato place in the Venetian on the Las Vegas strip. The right is the sticky toffee, and the left is the crispy heart (duh).

The sticky toffee is toffee as the Europeans would describe it. In other words, it’s what we could consider a caramel. I found it to be grainy and gritty. The chocolate shell and its filling were overly sweet, and I had no urge to have more than my tasting bite. Not a good sign.

The crispy heart had bits of crisped rice that was a bright yellow. My initial notes describe it as a saffron yellow, but I now think it is yellow because it’s made of honeycomb. Either way, it’s not enough crispies to temper the sweetness of the chocolate shell. I liked the crispy heart better than the sticky toffee, as it reminded me of a Nestle Crunch bar, but I still found it cloying.

An O for the box. Granted, since I bought it from a coffeehouse and not a chocolate shop, and since it may have been imported, my box probably was not exactly fresh. But still, I wouldn’t recommend Lily O’Briens’ chocolates based on the ones I got to taste.

The Cadbury Picnic is a UK bar composed of milk chocolate with toffee, wafer, peanuts, sultanas, and a crispy cereal centre. You can tell it’s British not only from the spelling of centre but also from the “toffee,” which in British vernacular is actually what we would call caramel. That is, cooked sugar that is still sticky and viscous rather than solid and crunchy.

In case you’re wondering, like I was when I first read the wrapper, sultanas are basically raisins made with a specific grape. Not that it mattered much in the case of this bar. The chocolate that coated it was way too blandly sweet and overpowered all the “Picnic” treats. The toffee/caramel ribbon that sat under the wafers (or was that supposed to be the crispy cereal centre? hard to tell) could barely be tasted, and the peanuts that studded the bar were unroasted, a wasted flavor opportunity.

Overall, the bar was at least texturally interesting. It was a shame that so much went into this bar, so little actually managed to flavor it. A disappointing O.

I’m always on the prowl for candies I’ve never tried before, and when I saw the Lee’s Chocolate Mint bar on the shelf at Randall’s, I snapped it up, along with a Jaffa Bar, which I haven’t opened yet. I’d never heard of Lee’s, a Scottish based food maker, before, so I was eager to see what they had to offer.

The Chocolate Mint bar is billed as “a delicious mint creme fondant covered in real dark chocolate.” Immediately upon unwrapping the bar, my nose was invaded by a super strong, minty scent that reminded me of a York Peppermint Pattie. Unlike a York, however, the mint filling was hard - so hard that it was nearly impossible to break in half, a fact my friends all commented on when they tried to break apart the remainder of the bar to share it amongst themselves. With enough muscle, the bar does snap and cleanly cleave like a piece of toffee, except that toffee is brittle and much easier to break. Once it gets in your mouth, the fondant softens and becomes chewy in a grainy sort of way.

The mint fondant isn’t nearly as strong as it smells. Instead, it’s super sweet with a minty feel but without much actual mint flavor. The finish is sweet, and the fondant got stuck in my molars. The layer of “real dark chocolate” that coats the bar is thin, bland, and rather grainy. It might as well be fake, as there’s so little of it and it’s of such poor quality.

I’ll stick with York Peppermint Patties for now. Like the York, the Lee’s is quite low in fat (3 g total, 1.5 g saturated) and pretty reasonable calorie-wise (230 for the whole bar, which is so hard that you’ll be forced to eat it slowly), probably because the bar is mostly sugar. It gets just an O, but it was good enough to make me want to try the rest of the Lee’s line, though I do fear for my teeth a bit.

Here in the U.S., the Kit Kat is manufactured under Hershey’s. Elsewhere in the world, Kit Kat is made by Nestle. My Kit Kat Hazelnut Cream was given to me by my friend Katie, who bought it for me while in Egypt last Christmas, so it’s made by Nestle. And because it’s probably manufactured in the U.K., I’ve filed is as European rather than African.

The Hazelnut Cream is a Kit Kat of the Big Kat (in the U.S.) or Chunky (everywhere else) variety. That is, rather than being four small “fingers,” it’s one giant stick. The chocolate around the wafers is extremely thick. In fact, there’s about as much chocolate as there is wafer. I found the milk chocolate to be creamy and sweet without being cloying, unlike the Hershey’s Kit Kats you can buy here. For mass-produced candy bar chocolate, it was pretty nice.

Despite it’s name, there was little hazelnut or cream to this bar. It had a sweet nutty tinge that’s far from the in-your-face hazelnut approach taken by Ferrerro. The light nuttiness served the bar well, but there was still room for more hazelnut taste to come through.

I personally don’t like the Chunky/Big Kat bars because I think they’re too big and hard to chomp down on. This would be wonderful in the smaller, standard Kit Kat form, I think. The hazelnut flavor could stand up better with less chocolate to overshadow it. An OM from me.

I saw a box of Michel Cluizel’s Champignon truffles at Cafe Moka in the Houston airport but didn’t buy them because they were so pricey. It was a choice I regretted. Thankfully, Viva Chocolato opened in Austin, and they carry lots of truffles by Michael Cluizel, including Les Champignons. Hooray! I bought one of the Champignons and a 99 Cacaoforte (the first and fourth in the lineup).

Les Champignons (French for The Mushrooms, by the way) are gorgeous and adorable. The cap is made of chocolate and filled with a crunchy toffee-like almond nougatine. It’s sweet and delicious. The stem is made of a soft, sticky, and super chewy caramel surrounded by white and dark chocolate. The caramel itself is not terribly sweet and instead tastes strongly of butter. They get an enthusiastic OMG, with a letter off for being so pricey.

I was nervous about trying the 99 Cacaoforte because they are made of 99% cacao. I’ve tasted a 100% cacao bar from La Maison du Chocolat (it was bitter, creamy, and good, but I could only handle a tiny bit at a time), and I’ve eaten raw cacao nibs before. Neither were entirely pleasant tasting adventures, so I was afraid the 99 Cacaoforte would be too much for my palate to handle.

The truffle was super dark, of course, but surprisingly enough, I didn’t find it bitter at all. It certainly wasn’t sweet, but it was far more palatable than the pure cacao I’ve tasted. The ganache was super smooth, thick, and almost paste-like. It had no grain, but it wasn’t exactly creamy, probably because there should be no milk or cream added to the ganache. It tasted of smooth, pure cacao, and it was splendid. I found it sophisticated, intense, and ZOMG!-worthy. Next time I come across one of these, I’m definitely splurging again, as it’s worth every penny.

Edit: According to Sera, I was misinformed about the nature of the Cacaoforte. The enrobing is 99% Cacao, but the filling is a ganache made with the 99%, meaning that there is cream in there.

I bought the Toffee Crisp at the same time that I bought the Coffee Crisp, but I tasted them several weeks apart. When I dug the Toffee Crisp out of my drawer and unwrapped it, I misread it as Coffee and wondered why it didn’t taste at all like coffee. Funnily enough, that what I thought about the actual Coffee Crisp.

Thankfully, the Toffee Crisp was much better than its coffee counterpart. It’s very sweet milk chocolate with rice crisps and a ribbon of caramel. The chocolate is what I would call the standard British candy bar chocolate that’s sweet and lacking the sour tinge that Hershey’s has. The rice crisps are soft and are lighter and less dense than those of a Crunch bar - they reminded me of actual Rice Krispies in terms of their airiness - and they’re all mixed in with a chocolate cream so that the bar is soft and almost crumbly in a really nice way. This stands in contrast to the 100 Grand and the Nestle Lion, which both just cover their rice crisps in chocolate.

When I think toffee, I first think of the crunchy kind that you’d find in a 5th Avenue or Skor bar. I can accept that English toffee can refer to a soft type of caramel, but then I expect a darker caramel, maybe more molasses-flavored than sugary. The toffee of the Toffee Crisp was pretty standardly unremarkable. It’s nicely sweet but otherwise has no personality.

Overall, I give this bar an OM. It’s good, and I love the soft texture, but I liked the Lion better.

I think it’s time to update my favorite candies page, as I’ve found a wonderful replacement for my 100 Grand love: the Nestle Lion.

I bought the Nestle Lion from The Candy Store in San Francisco. I’ve since seen it in Austin at Central Market (where it cost half as much as it did at The Candy Store, by the way). It caught my eye because it was a chocolate bar in the international section that I had never heard of, and there were no indications on the wrapper as to what it was, exactly. One of the proprietors of The Candy Store was able to tell me what was inside; I don’t remember how she described it, but it was enough for me to want to buy it.

And now to end the suspense of what a Nestle Lion is: A wafer cookie (the kind with layers of thin wafer and cream) covered with caramel and rice crisps, all enrobed in milk chocolate. Or sheer deliciousness in candy bar form.

The thin strip of caramel was sweet and chewy but not sticky, so it didn’t get caught in my teeth. The rice crisps were extra puffy, giving the bar a great lightness that I loved. I thought the Lion was a better version of a 100 Grand because the wafer cookie and the extra puffy crisps make the Lion a less dense and more texturally pleasing bar. I also liked that the Lion had less caramel than the 100 Grand, as I get annoyed when I have to somehow surreptitiously get all that 100 Grand caramel out of the nooks and crannies of my teeth (though I’m sure for some, that’s a selling point).

I really enjoyed the Nestle Lion, even though it was still a little sweet for my taste. It was one of those bars that I had to give away the rest of, lest I ate it all myself. An OMG from me. If the caramel was a little duskier or if it came in dark chocolate, there would be no question that it would earn a ZOMG. But because I could bear to give it away, I knew the Lion fell short of my highest rating.

My friend Laura spent a semester abroad in Denmark and was kind enough to bring me back a box of Mini Froer by Carletti. Froer is Danish for frog, and Mini Froer are chocolate frog truffles. I love how Harry Potter-ish these guys are. I wonder if J.K. Rowling had visited Denmark before she wrote them into her books.

The mini froer assortment I got had four varieties: cream, mint, orange, and toffee.

The “lys med oragetroffel”, or milk with orange truffle, had a nice orange flavor. It was subtle and zesty (as in orange rind zest, not full of life zest) instead of being sweet and super citrusy or juicy, and I liked that unusual rind taste. The milk chocolate froggy shell was sweet with a slight sourness, and the filling was very soft - just short of flowing. I’d give it an OM.

“Lys med toffee” was milk chocolate with a toffee truffle filling. I think of toffee as the brittle, hard stuff. This toffee was almost like a caramel but without any stickiness. It had a nice, dark complexity, making the toffee flavor my favorite of the bunch. An OM bordering on OMG because the chocolate wasn’t of spectacular quality.

The two dark chocolate truffles were “mork med creme” and “mork med mint”, which the box translated as bitter with cream and bitter with mint. These two contained an opaque white liquid center instead of the ganache-like center of the two milk frogs. The mint flavoring was very mild, while the creme had some sort of weird aftertaste that was almost minty. In fact, I thought the creme was the mint until I tasted the real mint one (which was truly minty) and realized that it was creme after all. I didn’t like these two as much as the milk chocolate versions of the frog because the filling flavor wasn’t exactly pleasant in either case, so they get just an O.

I loved the adorable little frog designs, and the box they came in had a nice flip up lid. You can’t tell from the photo, but the frogs that adorn the lid are actually embossed on there. Still, these appear to be a fairly common candy in Denmark, like something you’d pick up at a drugstore rather than at a boutique, and I think they’re a great little treat for their price range.

When I was told that a sample Galaxy dark bar was on its way to me in the mail, I never expected the 125 g (4.4 oz) behemoth that finally arrived. It was ginormous!

The bar’s wrapper reminded me of Dove chocolates. A quick Googling revealed that Galaxy and Dove are actually the same company. It’s Dove in the US and Galaxy in the UK. I felt like a sham of a candy reviewer for not knowing that already, but at least I noticed the packaging similarities.

Though it’s supposed to be the same product as a Dove chocolate bar, I found the Galaxy Dark to be inferior to my memory of the Dove Dark. The Galaxy was smooth and creamy with a slightly brittle snap, but I think Dove bars are even creamier than the Galaxy, have a firmer snap, and have a nicer, smoother melt. So I’d say the bars aren’t identical, even if they’re by the same brand.

I liked the presentation of the Galaxy bar. Instead of boring straight-edged segments, the rectangular segments of the Galaxy have wavy edges with a small stylistic G on each one. The back of the wrapper promises that the Galaxy dark is “not at all bitter,” and they live up to that promise. Unfortunately, I found the bar to be not at all interesting as well. It was serviceable chocolate, but bland and boring. I ate four rectangles before I gave up on tasting anything of note.

Overall, the Galaxy bar is serviceable for snacking but not for savoring. If I’m going to indulge in chocolate, I want something that I can savor and really enjoy, not a piece of chocolate that I eat just for the sake of eating chocolate, so this bar deserves an O in my book. Those who are used to milk chocolate and are trying to train themselves to like dark may enjoy this bar. I’m giving the rest of mine away.