Chocolove is the chocolate for lovers ... or the chocolate for chocolate lover, or something like that. Whatever or whomever you’re supposed to love, Chocolove has the tools. Each bar is wrapped like a mash note and a love poem inside the outer paper (this one was an excerpt from Dream Love by Christina Rossetti).

Nothing says deep infatuation than Chocolove’s Strong Dark Belgian 70% dark chocolate.

The bar itself is a wonderful testament to true love: it’s glossy smooth but has bumps. The scent is a heavenly mix of the woodsy and smoky chocolate flavors as well as a hint of rum. There’s no vanilla in this bar, it’s all chocolate and sugar. The melt on the tongue is smooth (the little domed piece fits really well in the roof of the mouth for maximum comfort during meltage).

It’s very buttery and has some nice dark notes to ... a little coffee but mostly just that quintissential chocolate flavor.

It’s an easy last minute gift for someone you care about ... already wrapped. They have a pretty large selection of bars, most are sold at Whole Foods, Cost Plus World Market and Target. Much better than a greeting card. They also have a limited edition Dark Chocolate with Cherries and Chilis that’s sold only at Whole Foods. I tried it at the Fancy Food Expo and though it was very interesting, the cherries weren’t really my friends. (But if you like cherries, it’s a worthy bar to give a try.)

One of the more familiar candies that’s marketed for Valentine’s Day would be the Ferrero Rocher. They’re pretty candies all year round but during the season for lovers they’re placed in clear plastic heart-shaped domes of varying sizes.

I picked up a 3 pack because I was cheap and didn’t really want another heart-shaped box. It’s what’s inside that counts, right? 

Ferrero is an Italian company that makes all sorts of hazelnut confections, some under the Ferrero name and others under the Kinder name. Their best known, perhaps, is Nutella, but they also make the Kinder Eggs, Tronky, Pocket Coffee, Kinder Bueno, Kinder Happy Hippos and Tic Tacs. The Ferrero Rocher wasn’t introduced until 1982 and didn’t make it to the US until 1985 but it has quickly filled a niche in the confectionery market as an upscale chocolate available at drug stores and grocers in more than 100 countries.

But what is a Ferrero Rocher? At its center is a whole hazelnut, surrounded by a chocolate hazelnut paste filling which is inside a light chocolate wafer sphere covered in more chocolate and crushed nuts. 

These were nice and fresh and had a wonderful sweet chocolatey aroma mixed with the smell of hazelnuts. They’re a bit big, but can fit in your mouth as one bite, though I usually do it in two (to see if I get the whole hazenut in the first or the second). They’re very nutty which helps to keep them from being too sweet. They’re much better, as far as I’m concerned, than Tronky, Happy Hippos or Kinder Bueno. I think it’s that the hazelnuts are so strongly featured. The packaging is also quite smart and classic. If you see them on sale after Valentine’s, this is an excellent product to pick up.

Their caloric density is rather high (169 calories per ounce) so it’s a good indulgence for a special occasion or in moderation. There are no trans fats in them.

Related Candies

1. Ferrero Raffaello & Rondnoir
2. KitKat Temptations: Hazelnut & Coconut
3. Ferrero Mon Cheri
4. Baci Bar
5. Kinder Bueno

I’ve been eying the stuff on the Oriental Trading Company website for years, just wondering if it was any good. I really have very little need for four dozen candy rings, but I just wanted them so much.

So I put together what I thought was a modest order of items that I knew I couldn’t get anywhere else (they do carry a lot of items you can find in the grocery store like candy bar miniatures):
1 x Valentines Candy Rings (4 dozen) - $4.95
1 x Everyday Candy Rings (4 dozen) - $4.95
2 x Gummy Candy Band Bracelet (1 dozen) - $2.95
1 x Candy Shot Glasses (6 each) $4.95

(More on the Candy Shot Glasses next week!)

The Gummy Candy Band Bracelet came in four colors, each with a different inspirational word on them.

All of them were less than stellar looking. They looked and felt a bit dry to the touch, kind of like old Play Doh. They were each individually sealed in little clear cellophane sleeves (and those were all inside another sealed bag) so I don’t think it was a storage issue on my side. However, I did buy them on sale (they were normally $5.95 a dozen and I got them for $2.95, so maybe you get what you pay for).

Purple :: Faith :: Grape - very dark and pretty purple, and I only think it was grape flavored, it was hard to tell. Faith has a strong bitter aftertaste to it for me.

Yellow :: Strength :: Pineapple - pretty good! A nice floral fruity flavor with a good tangy bite and no weird aftertaste. Strength is good!

Green :: Hope :: Apple - tangy and fruity and actually pretty tasty. Hope is edible!

Orange :: Dream :: Orange - also rather tasty. It had a good rounded orange flavor with both the zesty notes and the tangy bite. Dream had a slight aftertaste to it, not a bad one, but a little like chemicals or artificial flavors.

On the whole, I liked the novelty of the bracelets, but as you can imagine the reality of wearing a gummi on your wrist isn’t that appealing after about five minutes. You can gnaw it off your wrist, but if it’s all about the taste and texture, these leave a bit to be desired. I think I’d prefer a clear gummi like Haribo makes instead of this opaque stuff.

They make other varieties for different holidays, there’s a Halloween set and I thought they had an Easter one (but I can’t find it on the site now).

It’s not something I’d order again and I’m kind of sorry I got two dozen now. 4 out of 10

The Everyday Candy Rings are just stunning to look at. Instead of the chunky ones that I used to buy when I was a kid that were impossibly thick and uncomfortable to wear. These are petite little compressed dextrose creations, rather similar to the Candy Blox I reviewed earlier this week.

The rings are small, or fit small fingers. I could only get them on the top of my smaller fingers or my pinkie (my ring finger size is an eight). The bands come in four differen colors:

Pink Band :: White Jewel - After eating this one, I’m not afraid of the pink ones. A light raspberry flavor, it has a little bitter aftertaste but overall I find it agreeable. This is the only one that made my fingers a little discolored.

Yellow Band :: Orange Flower - the candy is a soft lemon flavor, no sour tang to it.

Orange Band :: Pink Flower - this one was bad the first time I had it, a bit sour in an unpleasant “bad burp” way. Subsequent ones were just fine. They taste a little like Froot Loops.

White Band :: Yellow Star - I think this is pineapple. Again, soft with only a light flavor and no tartness.

I really liked these. They’re compact and even though they don’t really fit my fingers they’d be great for kids because they’re not too much candy and are less likely to make a big mess. They’re also darned attractive.

They’re individually wrapped and easy to stow in your pocket (so I plan on carrying them around to blogger events to hand out to my new friends). The flavors are okay - not quite as tasty as the Candy Blox, but they all arrived in great condition (only one out of the 4 dozen was broken). The price per item is only 10 cents each, so if you’re planning a theme party for a little girl (Princess!), this might make a nice addition to the favors.

I give these an 8 out of 10 ... definitely something I’m going to keep on hand as the Candy Blogger.

More HiCHEW! This assortment was courtesy of a friend traveling in Japan though I’ve seen similar assortments at the Japanese grocers in Los Angeles. Since the label was all in Japanese (because it wasn’t imported), some of this stuff may be made up or perhaps pictures really are the universal language.

Grape is rather like the Grape Mentos I had late last year, it tastes more like concord grapes (most especially the skins of concord grapes). It grows more intense and complex as the chew goes along and it made me wish that there were more of them in the assortment.

It also makes me wish that we had a truer “grape” flavor in the States.

Litchi is odd. It’s a cross between a honeydew melon and a citrus aromatherapy candle. It’s fragrant and flowery and a little soapy but it also has a nice tangy quality with a bit of musk to it. It also tastes kind of creamy towards the end, like a yogurt.

I’ve decided I’m not a big fan of lichis. Maybe I’ve nust never had them prepared properly, but like macadamias, they’re not bad, just not for me.

Strawberry is sweet and tangy that begins with a strong natural flavor that makes me wonder if there’s a little stem in there somewhere. Later in the chew it starts to taste a little artificial, but still sweet and floral.

It’s less tart than a Starburst, and has a longer chew that doesn’t break down into a little grainy blob.

Apple is immediately tangy and tastes of apple juice. It’s not as complex as the others, but still soft and bouncy with a good flavor to the very end.

Like the Grape, it has a slight essence of the apple peel in it.

I kept half of them and put the other half in the family stockings ... I haven’t heard anything back from the family one way or another about them.

Here are my other HiCHEW reviews: Grapefruit (fantastic) and Strawberry (Doh, I didn’t realize I’d had them before. I wonder what I said.) There are lots of other flavors and one of these days I’m going to try the other citrus flavors because I’m pretty sure they’ll go over well.

Related Candies

1. HiCHEW Aloe Yogurt
2. Japanese Black Sugar & Tropical Chews
3. HiCHEW Yuzu & Valencia
4. HiCHEW Grapefruit
5. Strawberry HiCHEW

Though I try to be on top of the Limited Edition candies and review them when they first come out, I totally dropped the ball on this one. The KitKat Mint Dark Chocolate Minis came out in time for Christmas, though they’re not specifically packaged as a holiday item (other Hershey’s holiday products had little snowflakes on the packages).

The good thing about them being a quasi-holiday item is that they came on sale after Christmas along with all the other holiday candy that may be fresh but sports a now dated red and green wrapper. According to the freshness code, these are good until July 2007!

(On a side note, I have not seen the Cookies ‘n’ Mint Nuggets again this year.)

Let me just start by saying that I liked these far better than the Mint KitKat that came out in the middle of last year. While that one was sickly sweet, this was minty and fresh tasting.

The little shape of these Minis is also fun. Instead of the usual two-fingered snack size, these are a little shorter and of course are only one finger. About the size of my pinkie, which is rather small as fingers go. Because of the small size I felt like there was more chocolate on these. But I also felt like the crispy wafers were really, really crispy. The minted chocolate is pretty smooth, a bit sweet and lacking a rich chocolatey experience, but generally in support of the cookie and mint elements.

I don’t know if I’d buy these again since I’m getting a little tired of them since it was a 10.5 ounce package, but I found them to be far better than most of the other Limited Editions I’ve had in the past year or so.

There are lots of other reviews of these online cuz I am late to the party: SugarSavvy.net, SugarHog.net, News You Can Eat & Slashfood.

SweetRiot released a new flavor for the holidays to go with their current array of chocolate covered cacao nibs.

Flavor 70 Cinn is 70% cacao with a hint of cinnamon over cacao nibs. The last time I tried SweetRiot I gravitated towards the darkest as well.

The light hit of cinnamon was more evident in the scent than in the taste. There’s a little spicy kick on the tongue at the start, but basically it’s a rich roasty chocolate taste with a solid acidic hit and a mellow bitterness. The nibs themselves were crunchy and not the slightest bit fibery (which is a pet peeve of mine when it comes to nibs).

I covered SweetRiot and nibs pretty well in this review back in the spring, so check that out.

Each SweetRiot tin comes with a little geography “fortune” and mine went like this:

Cacao Country Sierra Leone reveres a tree, the “Old Cotton”, for standing through terrible storms & furious battles. These days cats get stuck in them all the time.

SweetRiot also has a “riot club” where you can select from two different delivery plans so you can get your cacao nib fix regularly (and at a better price). They also have their sets that bring the price down when you buy a mix of three. Ordering a whole box of 12 of course brings the tins down to $4 a piece. Still, not to sound like a broken record, it’d be nice to buy a quarter pound or half pound on the website and be able to refill my little tin myself.

The little tins change throughout the year, with new artwork featured periodically. If you’re interested in having your art considered, check out this page.

Holly Moly! More toffee!

This stuff, Shaymee’s Aussie Toffee, isn’t actually from Australia, but made right here in California.

They boast about their real, all natural ingredients including organic cane juice and fresh butter as well as their genetic predisposition to great toffee on their website. They also list a long variety of flavor combinations for their bulk toffees: Dark Chocolate Macadamia (shown), Dark Chocolate Espresso, Dark Chocolate Almond, Milk Chocolate Almond and Milk Chocolate Pecan. They also have single serving packages that have three pieces (2 ounces) of the Almond in both Milk & Dark Chocolate.

The wide array of nut combos have one thing in common, a hefty plank of sweet, salty and crisp toffee at their center. A good buttery (and chocolatey) scent combined with a good cleave of the toffee. The pieces were about four bites each for me. The were very buttery tasting with a mellow salty hit that kept everything in balance.

The nuts weren’t overly abundant in any of the varieties, but definitely gave a flavor definition to all of them. My favorite, even though it was milk chocolate, was the Pecan. The Almond was quite good, with a good nutty taste and a slightly crumblier texture than the others. Macadamia reminded me of coconut, it felt a little butterier. Espresso was dark and mysterious and quite tasty to have the bitter bits of coffee in the chocolate to balance out the sweet caramelized sugars. The quality of the chocolate was particularly good - mellow and creamy without even a hint of chalky grain.

I supplied a large assortment of these to the family over Thanksgiving alongside the Charles Chocolates and everyone was duly impressed with both.

I love that the pieces are regular and dipped in chocolate. I much prefer that to the rustic broken planks that always seem to have the chocolate fall off of the last pieces in the box.

The best part about all these toffees is the price. You can pick up a half pound on Amazon for $7.19 ... less than $15 a pound for premium toffee? Sure the packaging isn’t as elegant as some others, but stuff it in a gift basket with some nice coffee or hot chocolate and someone will definitely love you. If I have a criticism it’s that all the toffees look the same when dumped out of the package. Once I mixed them together on a plate for serving to friends I completely lost track of which was which. (Of course as a good hostess I offered to bite everyone’s toffee pieces to discern the nut.)

You can also buy it in plenty of Whole Foods-styled stores all over the West. If you’re in the store and want some toffee, definitely give the single serve package a go.

On my last San Francisco visit, after the night of the chocolate induced coma, I went to visit a chocolate factory. Unlike the Scharffen Berger factory that I saw last year around this time, I went to a place where they make more than just bars. Charles Chocolates in Emeryville makes heavenly concoctions under the direction of Chuck Seigel composed of fine chocolate, premium nuts (roasted on the premises), fresh fruits, teas and of course lots and lots of sugar & butter.

What sets Chuck apart from some other chocolatiers I’ve met is his lack of pretension (he admits not only to eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers, but he likes them!) but also his conviction to make candies to his standards and no one else’s. By example, we were talking about the new craze for salted caramels. He makes his own (chocolate and plain - review below) but doesn’t bother with the little salt crystals on top because he thinks that the texture gets in the way of the pure caramel and salt experience. He also makes his own marzipan from scratch and infuses it with citrus. I watched as they made a batch of lemon marzipan, and if I ever said here that I didn’t like marzipan, it was because I hadn’t tried Chuck’s. It’s sweet, mellow, nutty and zesty without that bitter medicinal taste of amaretto that so many others have.

Chuck is known for his nuts, which are roasted a little darker than others, he says to bring out more of their intrinsic flavors. I’m actually a big fan of raw nuts, so I was worried that these would be burnt and acrid tasting.

My problem with roasted nuts up until Charles Chocolates has obviously been quality control. His Triple Chocolate Almonds were divine. Instead of being just dark or milk chocolate, it’s both. There’s a rich milk chocolate layer and a dark chocolate layer (or maybe two, who knows, I couldn’t be bothered with dissecting them) and then they’re rolled in cocoa.

The Triple Chocolate Hazelnuts were gone long before the Almonds. These darkly roasted nuts remained crunchy and sweet and still managed to assert themselves under the luxurious coatings of chocolate.

The little tin they come in is pretty fun too. They’re sealed in not only with a plastic wrap around the whole cylinder, but there’s also a little plastic cap inside the metal one. Air is the enemy of nuts, so Chuck has done his utmost to keep rancidity at bay. Not that I had them long enough. Of the haul that I left the factory with, this was gone within the first week ... and I only begrudgingly shared.

One of the other items sold in a tall clear tube are one of Charles Chocolates signature items, the Orange Twigs. It’s a milk chocolate ganache infused with orange and then dipped in dark chocolate and rolled in confectioner’s sugar. They look a bit like little twigs, I guess.

I wasn’t that keen on them. They were sweet and yes, the orange flavor came through, but I didn’t get a lot of chocolate to the whole thing.

If you’re curious about the box shown above, yes, that’s made entirely of chocolate. The bottom is made from fine dark chocolate and the lid of white chocolate. Inside were two layers of salted caramels. The caramels are small and soft, then covered in a thin layer of dark chocolate and decorated with a lightly embossed design.

The soft chew of the caramels was definitely buttery and creamy, but also had a slight grain to it. The salt hit was mild and pleasant and set off the chocolate well. But I didn’t care that much for it. Though the flavor was there, something a little off to the texture. It was like the whole thing wasn’t properly emulsified.

The chocolate caramel was interesting, but an intense buttery mouthfeel and a dark smoky taste to it. It also had less chew to it than the salted caramel and while I enjoyed the flavor, the texture just wasn’t for me.

The chocolate box itself was very good. I was afraid it was going to to suffer from being “functional first” but the chocolate was so good that over Thanksgiving the family busted up the box pretty quickly while there were still caramels inside. (Yes, I was sharing!) The white chocolate top wasn’t quite as notably tasty, I’m not sure why, but it tasted a little musty. White chocolate is tricky stuff, because the cocoa butter will absorb nearby scents and odors. I transported and stored the chocolate box in a cooler that also had some coffee infused bars, and I think there might have been some “contamination” there.

Other items that I tried and can heartily recommend are the Pate de Fruit (both fruit and wine flavors, so true to life), The Tea Collection (flavors that complement and rival the chocolate without overpowering it) and of course the boxed chocolates (many of which I sampled at CocoaBella - post #1 & post #2).

Charles Chocolates aren’t cheap at $54 per pound, but comparable with other high end chocolatiers. Some chocolatiers (like Recchiuti, another Bay Area chocolatier) are very focused on spices or fruits, Charles Chocolates seems to do a great job at raising mundane and common ingredients to gourmet levels, giving the ordinary like almonds luxury treatments.

You can order from their website, some of their products are carried at CocoaBella and at many local stores in the Bay Area and beyond.