Droste Orange Pastilles

My friend Neil, who’s currently living and blogging in the Netherlands, brought me a generous assortment of Dutch goodies when he was back in the states over the holidays. Included among the treats were these Droste Orange Pastilles.

The packaging is unusual – a hexagonal paperboard tube with an inner sealed roll of silver. The chocolates’ shape is unusual too: large, flat disks, each etched with the Droste logo.

I think the disks were a good chocolate delivery device. They were the perfect shape to place flat on the tongue and let melt against the roof of the mouth.

The chocolate was snappy with a creamy, tongue-coatingly thick melt. According to the packaging, the chocolate was 35% cocoa, making it technically dark chocolate.

With chocolate and orange, it’s hard to avoid Terry’s Chocolate Orange comparisons. This was far better. It tasted very strongly of orange oil with a lot of citrus zestiness, far less artificial than Terry’s version.

I enjoyed it in small amounts, but any more than a disk or two, and the chocolate’s sweetness became cloying, with that cloy lingering in the finish.

I give it an O. I liked it, but the mounting sweetness keeps it from being addictiable.

Yes, I just made a mash-up word.