Stracciatella is a flavor of Italian gelato that’s analogous to chocolate chip ice cream. I have to admit I didn’t try stracciatella gelato while I was in Italy – I was too busy eating yogurt gelato!

This bar was milk chocolate with a creamy white filling that was studded with bits of black/brown chocolate. It was quite pliant with a soft break.

The milk chocolate was rich and sweet. That white filling started out sweet and creamy, then developed into a more complex vanilla bean flavor with an almost nutty coffee-tinged finish. I also caught a slight tang in the flavor profile.

I thought that the bits of chocolate in the filling would provide a textural contrast of either hard chocolate or crunchy cookie bits. It didn’t, as my filling was uniformly smooth.

No matter – this bar was delicious. The filling had a well-developed complexity that was intriguing and tasty. I wish this were available in the US – along with yogurt gelato! An OMG.

Jim’s also reviewed this bar, this year this time. It’s apparently brand new for 2010, and I hope Ritter Sport has the sense to bring it back next year or to promote it to a full-time bar.

The Wildberry Yogurt bar had a milk chocolate coating with a mixed berry yogurt filling, both of which gave the bar a soft break. I loved the color combination that resulted – mottled pink-purple within a luxurious cocoa brown!

Like the Peach-Passionfruit Yogurt bar, Wildberry Yogurt was also studded with bits of toasted rice crisps. You can see the edge of one in the right corner of the photo below, and you can also see a real berry seed near the break!

The bar itself smelled spot on like berry yogurt. The filling carried a light yogurt tang, but it was mostly dominated by a strong berry fruitiness.

The wildberry mix finished with the complex mellowness of blueberries. I was impressed at how well they’d captured that. It probably helped that Ritter put real berry bits in there.

While I enjoyed the bar, I found it to be a tad too sweet for my taste. If Ritter Sport would turn down the saccharine just a notch, it would be perfect. As is, an OM.

The 2009 version of this was also reviewed by Jim last year.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this bar. Peach + chocolate and passionfruit + chocolate are both fairly novel flavor combinations, and what would the addition of yogurt bring?

The bar was white chocolate, with a white yogurt filling studded with bits of light tan. Like all Ritter Sport bars, it was neatly segmented into 16 smaller squares. The whole thing smelled extremely sweet and peachy.

The yogurt/fruit filling tasted mostly of the vibrantly piquant fruitiness of passionfruit with a bit of floral peachiness mixed in. I didn’t notice the influence of yogurt’s tangy flavor. To me, the yogurt contributed mostly to the filling’s texture.

The mild white chocolate really let that bright filling sing but also brought in a creamy cloyingness that made the bar too sweet for my taste. Still, I did appreciate that the white chocolate was of high quality.

Those bits of light tan in the filling turned out to be rice crisps. They brought a light crunch and toastiness that helped break up the extreme sweetness of the bar.

The Peach-Passionfruit Yogurt turned out to be a bar that I’m glad I bought, but I won’t lament its lack of availability in the US. An O.

If you want another take, Jim reviewed the 2009 version of the bar and gave it high marks.

The chocolate itself was very mild. At 55%, it was nicely shiny and snappy and had a smooth texture and taste. It wasn’t very distinctive, but it served as a great foil for the bar’s mix-ins.

The pecans and walnut bits add a light nuttiness and textural contrast. The hazelnuts are wonderful – the best nuts of the bunch. Their distinctive nuttiness floats above the chocolate flavors.

The currants and cherries were also great – little chewy bits of sweet and tartness that brightened the bar. I think I only got a few errant pieces of ginger, and I only think I did because they were quite candied and had lost their ginger flavor.

The orange zest was my favorite add-in. It was bright and tart and citrusy and paired amazingly with the chocolate.

The fruits and nuts really made this bar. I wish the chocolate had a bit more depth and complexity instead of taking a backseat to all the additions, but it still made for a tasty combination that kept me popping more squares. An OM.

Cody came up with some great stuff – the cardamom was the stellar standout for me – and I made off with a goodie bag full of treats: a Rosa-selected box of 5 truffles (above) that I paid for (including another of Cody’s cardamom truffles), and free samples of their Autumn Truffle Collection, their milk chocolate sesame bark, and their pistachio ginger bark.

I’ll review the milk chocolate sesame bark on Friday; today’s all about the Autumn Truffle Collection. This season’s collection includes fennel, whiskey sage, honey thyme, cinnamon, and rosemary.

I love that Hedonist includes a customizeable guide with every box, to help you identify which is which. So much easier than trying to guess or cross-reference with the chocolatier’s website.

Fennel was easy to spot, as it was garnished with whole fennel seeds. Fennel goes quite well with the high quality, dusky dark chocolate (Valrhona, I think) even in its most potent, whole-seed state.

In the actual truffle, a dark chocolate shell around a white ganache, the fennel flavor is tempered, and it works even better, especially with the slight saltiness that Hedonist added.

Whiskey sage smells a little boozy but in taste, the whiskey mostly manifests as a light sweetness. The most prominent flavor in the truffle is sage.

The herb and chocolate meld together beautifully. It tastes velvety, and it’s a unique flavor combination that melds beautifully.

Honey thyme smells just like the jar of thyme in our spice rack. It tastes just like thyme too, with a dusky, dry cocoa finish. I can’t pick out honey flavors from the overall sweetness of the truffle, as the thyme has such a strong presence.

Again, the flavors go together well, but it makes me think of Italian food and pasta sauce when I eat it, and that’s cognitively jarring. I enjoyed it, but I don’t know if I would seek it out again.

Cinnamon, understandably enough, smells just like fresh ground cinnamon. I think it’s Ceylon rather than your more run-of-the-mill Cassia, as the cinnamon tastes delicate and maybe slightly sweet. Its presence is super strong in the truffle, so much so that it becomes slightly astringent. It definitely seeks a different target palate than Cinnamon Toast Crunch (which I love, too, by the way).

Rosemary was a rolled rather than a molded truffle and came wrapped in cheery orange foil. I didn’t get an unwrapped picture of this one, specifically, but it looked like this (actually Hedonist’s Imperial Stout, another rolled truffle), all charmingly lumpy and dusted with unsweetened cocoa powder.

Again, it smells and tastes of my spice rack. The ganache inside is rich and fattily cool on the tongue. I know “fattily cool” doesn’t exactly sound appetizing, but it’s a good sensation!

Hedonist’s Autumn collection of savory spice + dark chocolate is definitely a winner. Their flavor combinations were novel (well, cinnamon and chocolate is relatively common, but not the way Hedonist made them) and despite their… unintuitiveness… worked together quite well, making this an intriguing and delicious set.

Whiskey sage was my favorite, and even my least favorite (the honey thyme) was tasty – it just messed with my mind a little too much. It makes me want to whip up a pan of chocolate bark and sprinkle the contents of my spice rack over it to see if I can find chocolate magic too. An OMG for the collection as a whole, with whiskey sage meriting that extra Z.

If you want to try them out for yourselves, remember that they’re offering free shipping until the end of the month!

They were released as a limited edition promotional tie-in for the Transformers sequel, and I finally found them a week or so ago in a local discount grocery store. Only in a giant bag, but oh well. Now I have roommates who eat chocolate to share with!

Strawberry, peanut butter, and chocolate are an unusual flavor combination to find in candy, though it makes perfect sense. Peanut butter and chocolate are great together, and strawberry jam and peanut butter are a classic, so why not combine the three components?

The M&M’s are colored to look like those three elements: brown, red, and orange with light red specks. I’m not sure if that was the intention – maybe they were going for fall colors? – but I appreciate the color scheme.

Like regular peanut butter M&M’s, they’re irregularly sized and lopsided. Also like peanut butter M&M’s, they’re a peanut butter spheroid (oblate, to be precise) surrounded by chocolate, which is covered by a sugar shell.

These guys smell like artificial berry with an undertone of chocolate. No peanut butter scent comes through. When bitten into, there’s the usual M&M’s crunch, then a burst of sweet strawberry fruitiness that finishes with a cloyingly artificial tinge.

Beneath it all, there’s the underlying flavor of creamy peanut butter. It’s reminiscent of cheap jarred peanut butter, as it’s not that roasty or nutty.

The flavor combination really works well, but it’s a tad too sweet for me, mostly due to the artificial fruit finish. I mostly enjoy them when I eat them, but I can’t handle more than a few at a time (built in portion control – maybe not necessarily a bad thing?). I can’t decide if I’d buy another bag of these or not. Normally, I’d say no, but they are a limited edition…

They get an O from me. My roommates seemed to like them more, as the bag didn’t last long in the living room.

Or so I thought. When Mattel approached me about doing a giveaway of their new limited/collectors’ edition Hershey’s Barbie Doll, my first thought was, “I want one!” And because Mattel is so nice, I got one!

She’s “adorned with a fun and flirtatious cocktail dress in a rich milk chocolate brown, accented with twinkles of silver,” just as the press release promised. And killer shoes, which weren’t touted in the fact sheet that I got. Yes, I’ll never be able to walk en point in heels, and I’ll never have Barbie’s impossible figure, but I’m old enough to accept that and enjoy my Hershey’s Barbie for what she is – a neat collaboration between two old and beloved American institutions.

And, thanks to Mattel, I’m running a giveaway for a second doll, so that one of you can have one to enjoy as well! One randomly selected reader (U.S. only, please, unless you’re willing to pay your own shipping) will win a Hershey’s Barbie. To enter, leave a Barbie or Hershey’s related comment on this post with a valid email address by midnight on Friday, April 17th.

Good luck! And if you don’t win, you can still buy your own at Toys R Us, Hershey’s stores, select U.S. retailers, and at BarbieCollector.com .

NOTE: This contest has now closed. Winners posted here!

Granted, it was just a dollar at the Dollar Tree, but still. Junior Mint, why did you even go there? You make a perfectly lovely chocolate mint confection. Why branch out into these horrible things that you call fruit cremes, which are dull and ugly while your Junior Mints are bright and shiny, which erroneously claim “creamy coated fruit centers!” and which taste of unfortunate approximations of black cherry, orange, and raspberry?

Seriously, these guys were gnarly nasty. I’ll give Junior Mints the benefit of the doubt – maybe my box was a bit old, and that’s why the fruit centers had solidified into greasy messes. But that doesn’t excuse the greasy crumbly coatings or the strangely artificial, can’t-find-anything-close-to-it-in-nature waxy “fruit” flavors. I took a nibble of each and just couldn’t bring myself to taste more. These guys went straight into the trash, earning them a null –. I want my dollar back. Actually, I want Tootsie Roll to pay me for eating these horrible things. I don’t understand how they ever made it onto the shelves.

Though they’re ostensibly for Easter, the bars’ packaging didn’t seem that Easter-y to me. It had the requisite daisies and pastel eggs on the wrappers, but I think the shiny hot pink and silver foil wrappers went against the Easter mood. The packaging exhorts you to “bring the spring feeling home,” but they just don’t look like spring to me.

The Minis are perfect little squares (about quarter-sized) of pink-tinged nougat covered in dark chocolate. The nougat is typical 3 Musketeers nougat, soft and fluffy. The packaging promised “whipped up, fluffy chocolate-on-raspberry taste. ” They smell medicinally fruity, and they kind of taste that way too, with a seedy, artificially and overly sweet fruitiness that mingles with the mild dark chocolate coating.

I didn’t particularly care for these myself, so they get an O, but that’s a personal taste preference. I also wouldn’t care for a See’s version of the same thing. The people I shared these with liked them, and one of my friends even remarked that they taste remarkably high end for a Mars mass-produced product. So if chocolate covered fruity-nougat is your thing, by all means, add these to your Easter basket.

My friend Steve just asked what makes it crunchy. Just like peanut butter, the peanut butter cups are crunchified by the presence of peanuts. The peanut butter cup doesn’t look any different on the outside, but the peanut bits are visible in the pb cup cross section.

The peanut bits add a nice textural component to the cup and contributes a strong peanut scent, though I don’t have a regular pb cup to compare it to. Even without a regular pb cup handy, I can tell that the peanut butter filling in the crunchy cup is sweeter and less salty than its non-limited edition counterpart.

I think the crunchy is an improvement on peanut butter cups. The peanuts aren’t too intrusive and don’t get stuck in your teeth, and the peanut butter cup texture is more exciting. I do wish the nuts were roastier but still give this limited edition a solid OMG.