In my recent travels abroad I picked up a lot of chocolate bars. Here’s a brief little run down of three of them:

As a little reminder, I went to Amsterdam and Cologne earlier this year. There are flavors there that just aren’t very well known in North America. One of the new flavor trends that I noticed was Absinthe (I’ve seen a little of it in the United States but its influence in The Netherlands was a lot more ubiquitous).

So when I spotted this bar from the Chocolatier Marc Antoine called Edelbitter Absinth Truffle, I though it would be a perfect item to pick up as it would probably travel very well.

The box was stiff and nicely designed with the sickly green swirls of anise & wormwood liqueur. Inside the bar was in a simple cellophane sleeve but remarkably unscathed by its journey.

The bar was big and the pieces were chunky. The dark chocolate was glossy with large reservoirs of the dark chocolate truffle filling inside. The truffle was smooth and creamy and very soft, almost like a caramel sauce. The scent was definitely on the grassy fennel side of things, even before I bit into it. The dark chocolate was smooth and bitter though had a lot of cocoa notes mixed with a sharp and tangy anise. The truffle center had a lot of licorice flavors, very soft and fluffy notes that were sweet along with a little hint of eucalyptus and some other botanicals.

I wouldn’t call it a hallucinogenic experience, but it was a wonderful, strong herbal bar that I enjoy quite a bit. There as a little alcoholic burn to it but it was more like tequila.

Rating: 8 out of 10

One of the best bars, by far, was the unique one for me. It was called Cuorenero Smoked Chocolate and was made in Italy.

The package was a big, flat square, about 4.5 inches. The box was pretty and featured raised and gold embossed lettering for the logo and the image on the front of a clay oven. The chocolate is described on the front a little more puro ciccolato fondente con fichi affumicati or “pure dark chocolate with smoked figs” - so it’s the figs in it that are smoked, not the chocolate itself.

The back of the package is in a bunch of different languages and featured notices about recycling but most importantly that Cuorenero does not use any dairy products other other major allergens, that means no gluten, no eggs, no soy, no peanuts, no nuts with hard shell (walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, etc.), no celery, no mustard, no sesame seeds, no sulfur dioxide, no lupines, no shellfish and no fish. On top of that, all their ingredients are GMO-free. 

The ingredients were: cacao mass, sugar, cocoa butter, smoked fig pieces, sunflower lecithin and flavours.

The bar is beautiful, a thick circular slab sectioned into 16 wedges. The bar smelled like molasses, deep and sweet with a lot of notes of smoke, leather and pipe tobacco. The chocolate flavors were tangy and had notes of coffee and charcoal. The figs were little bits with the occasional seed. There were notes of dark rum, raisins and the grassy fresh notes of figs. The smoke flavors were like cognac and fine whiskey.

If you’re a chocolatier and looking for a new flavor combination, please try smoked, dried fruit in dark chocolate. Then let me know how I can buy some from you.

The bar was 60 grams (2.1 ounces) and I think I paid about $6 for it at the Cologne Chocolate Museum Gift Shop (I think it was 4 Euros). Cuorenero Website.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Zotter is a popular maker of fair trade candy bars in Austria. They’re crazy. If you think smoked figs are off the beaten path, you have not explored the uncharted wilderness of Zotter. I’ve had two of their bars before, Banana Curry and Zitrone Polenta. They’re fair trade and organic.

This was another bar that I picked up at the Cologne Chocolate Museums Gift Store (which was a phenomenal chocolate store, if you hadn’t figured that out). It’s Zotter Mandel - Rosen which is almond and rose. (I passed up the Peanuts & Chocolate bar.)

The bar is about 4.5 inches long and about 2 inches wide and weighs 70 grams (2.47 ounces). It’s thin, for a filled bar but rather dense.

Inside there are two fillings layers. The base is a creamy but rather solid almond paste and sandwiched in between two layers of that is a rose petal jelly (which seemed to have a touch of raspberry in it). This was a great flavor combination, classic and sure, a bit Victorian in sensibilities. I liked the delicate almond flavor (no screaming Amaretto here) and even the rose was light and had less of a soapy taste than some other floral flavors I’ve tried. It was fragrant and sweet with that light touch of berry to it.

It wasn’t as crazy bar but like the others I’ve profiled here, it’s unusual for American tastes. It’s not the kind of candy you can get addicted to, it’s hard to find and the flavors come in and out of production. Check out their website.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Related Candies

1. La Higuera Rabitos Royale (Chocolate Truffle Filled Figs)
2. Nory Rahat Locum
3. Eat with your Eyes: Kopper’s Absinthe Cordials
4. 3400 Phinney: Fig, Fennel & Almond and Hazelnut Crunch
5. Zotter Candy Bars
6. Caffarel Figs & Chestnuts (Fico & Castagna)
7. Dolfin: Anise and Red Pepper
8. Vosges Haut-Chocolate
9. Figamajigs

Meiji is one of the major confectionery companies of Japan with recognizable brands like Yan Yan, Hello Panda, Chelsea and my favorite GummyChoco. I admire their products quite a bit, their flavors are bright and authentic and the attention to detail is excellent. Last year I reviewed their standard Meiji Milk Chocolate bar and found I really liked their intense flavor style. So I picked up this box called Meiji Corot which simply called them chocolate ball in English on the otherwise Japanese package.

Meiji also packages their candies well, but this is the first one I’ve really had an issue with. The box is large, it’s 4.25 inches high and 2.75 inches wide, that’s larger than a deck of poker cards or a box of cigarettes. Inside the box is a little mylar packet. It protects the candy well and certainly kept it fresh, but there’s only 1.48 ounces of candy in here - a standard bag of Milk Chocolate M&Ms as 1.69 ounces.

Hershey’s came out with a similar product last year, called Hershey’s Drops. They’re also big disks of solid chocolate with a light, shiny glaze to keep them from sticking together.

The chocolate balls are actually oblate spheroids - a squashed ball. The aspect ratio or flatness of the spheroid is determined by the dimensions. The major axis is 1.5 times the length as the minor axis. (They’re .75 inches across and about .5 inches thick at the center.)

The candies are 3.5 grams each, so a hefty little bite of chocolate compared to an M&M which are about .85 grams.

They’re creamy and milky with a chocolate pudding flavor to them. The dairy flavors are distinct and the chocolate is quite powerful, certainly a more dominant note. There’s a strong bitterness that I don’t think I get with most consumer milk chocolate products. It’s toasted and maybe even a little smoky with notes of plain old charcoal. I enjoy the flavor, it’s munchable with a great texture but a little more sophisticated than a standard milk chocolate candy.

The ingredients are not quite as desirable as the plain Meiji Milk Chocolate bar. This version of Meiji’s milk chocolate also contains some vegetable oil filler (though there’s also plenty of cocoa butter in there). The curious ingredient towards the end of the list was trehalose. Trehalose is a sugar, a disaccharide made of two glucose molecules. It’s only 40% as sweet as the standard sucrose (a disaccharide made of one glucose and one fructose molecule). I’m not quite sure what its purpose here is, it’s not here in great quantities, as it’s on the list after the soy lecithin (which is usually less than 2% of the overall mass of any chocolate product).

I also recently picked up some of Meiji’s 40th Anniversary editions of their popular Meiji CoffeeBeat chocolate candies. I’ve reviewed them before, but these versions were in different packaging and came in two versions - a milk and dark version.

The Milk version, in the tube, has a great sweet latte flavor to it. The coffee is quite strong and rich and the sugar and milk mixture is reminiscent of caramel. The one in the box didn’t come with any additional English descriptions but I can say that the milk flavors are downplayed at the coffee flavor is extremely strong, yet the texture is still creamy and smooth with a lingering charcoal bitterness.

I love these little nuggets. They’re about the size of a real coffee bean or an M&M and feature a solid coffee flavored chocolate core covered in a thin crunchy shell. I don’t know why we don’t have these or something like these widely available in the United States.

The Meiji CoffeeBeat keep their 9 out of 10 rating. (If they were more affordable and easier to find, they might get a 10 out of 10.)

Related Candies

1. Meiji Milk Chocolate
2. Hershey’s Drops: Milk Chocolate & Cookies n Creme
3. Meiji Poifull
4. Galaxy Minstrels
5. Meiji Gummy Choco
6. Coffee Beat
7. Dars Bitter

As the billboards around town keep reminding me, the Harry Potter film series ends with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2. This may or may not mean the end to the curious creations from the books and films, the candies made by Bertie Bott, a magical confectioner. His triumph and perhaps unique item is Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. The tale goes that Bertie Bott was making traditionally sweet flavored beans when he accidentally made one flavored like a gym sock and then struck upon the idea of making a flavor of everything, even things not intended to be eaten.

The reality of how Jelly Belly went about it is rather similar. Years ago Jelly Belly was trying to come up with a Pepperoni Pizza jelly bean. Something about the intensity of the flavors was more than a little off and what they created smelled so bad that they had to clear the candy kitchen and air it out, because it reeked of vomit. So when the opportunity to make the Bertie Bott’s came up, they resurrected the failed recipe and made it ever so slightly more vomitous. (In the current variety package, though, Vomit is no longer part of the mix. Perhaps a little too much reality.)

The Harry Potter books list dozens of flavors and the actual candy made by Jelly Belly does incorporate many (mostly the ones that would be recognized by Americans, not things like tripe or marmalade). This little box may contain the following flavors: Banana, Black Pepper, Blueberry, Booger, Candyfloss, Cherry, Cinnamon, Dirt, Earthworm, Earwax, Grass, Green Apple, Marshmallow, Rotten Egg, Sausage, Lemon, Soap, Tutti-Fruitti and Watermelon.

I’m not going to eat them. I’ve had quite a few of the flavors, even some of the non-traditional ones like Soap (floral), Black Pepper (spicy and well rounded), Grass (grassy) and Dirt (like beets). But draw the line there. I have no interest in rotten eggs, boogers, earwax or vomit. I appreciate the the sheer breadth of flavors in the package means that you actually have to pay attention to what you’re eating. I like that idea. When I eat the citrus mix, I don’t really care that much of I’m eating lemon or orange, because they’re both good. With the Bertie Bott’s, there are no guarantees.

Like all Jelly Belly products, they’re expensive. The Jelly Belly website lists this little 1.2 ounce box for $2.25 (though I’ve seen them for $1.50 at stores). But then again, they’re not really for eating by the handful, unless you have no sense of smell and therefore do not gag on the cacophony of unnatural flavors. (And if you can’t appreciate the wacky tastes, spare yourself the expense and just buy the regulars in bulk, the texture is the same.)

I thought Jelly Belly’s rehash of the Every Flavour Beans as a sort of Russian Roulette was pretty good. It’s called Beanboozled and you get a container of jelly beans that could be either of two flavors, a benign one like coconut or it could be the less desirable baby wipes.

I don’t actually find these tasty (as I’ve given them an 8 out of 10 rating indicates) but I do find them to be the most inventive and successful emulations of a fictional product I’ve ever encountered.

Related Candies

1. Jelly Belly Chocolate Dips
2. Musk Beechies Chewing Gum
3. Wonka Fruit Marvels
4. Airheads
5. Jelly Belly - Full Line
6. Gobs of Gobstoppers

See’s Candies has been adding limited edition flavors to the regular offerings. Sometimes I time it right when I visit one of their shops. This summer they have their new See’s Candies Double Caramel.

The package describes them as vanilla brown sugar caramel and chocolate butter caramel. So they’re a stacked product inside the milk chocolate shell - the base is the chocolate caramel then a layer of the brown sugar caramel.

They’re available in half pound boxes on the website or at the store in small boxes or in the custom mix. (I don’t think they’ve been added to the classic See’s Nuts & Chews.)

I bought this little box that holds 5 ounces, which is 6 caramels. Yeah, think about that, each caramel weighs over three quarters of an ounce. That’s a pretty dense caramel. The package says that two is a serving, which is just too rich for even me in one sitting (unless I’m sitting for a long time).

As I mentioned before, they’re huge. It’s about an inch and a half in diameter (tall and the base). I couldn’t eat them in one bite, they were definitely two bites. (You can bite them down the center or you can tip them with the bottom perpendicular and bite them so you get either a layer of chocolate caramel or the brown sugar caramel.)

The combination of the flavors is great, the ratios are spot on. The texture of the caramel is soft, smooth and chewy. Neither layer is too sweet. The chocolate one is a light woodsy and deep flavor that has a little touch of coffee to it. The brown butter caramel has a little note of honey and salt along with the light woodsy note of molasses. The milk chocolate has a strong milk flavor, though the melt wasn’t quite as silky as I’d hoped.

If I had one comment to improve these, it’d be less sweet milk chocolate. It’s really sugary, and with all the sugar in the caramel, I’d prefer a darker milk chocolate. But maybe that’d make we want to eat more at once, so I might be better off in the long run with it as is.

Trader Joe’s has some great summertime themed candies in their tubbed goodies. The Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate Smashing S’Mores with graham cracker and marshmallow have been around for at least a year. I looked for them a few times and couldn’t find them and assumed that they were another one of those transient Trader Joe’s products. On my visit over Independence Day weekend though, there were stacks so I grabbed one immediately.

My tub held 12 Smashing S’mores and the label said that it was 7 ounces. (The nutrition panel said that a serving was 2 pieces and there were 8 servings in the package - I can understand there being one or so plus or minus in the average package, but I can’t understand how they could even cram 16 of these little S’mores into the tub at all.)

The ingredients are interesting. It’s real milk chocolate for the coating, the marshmallow uses Kosher gelatin (basically non-pork derived) and the graham cracker part is almost all organic (except for the vanilla and arrow root flour).

The little squares are about an inch to an inch and a half cubed.

The base is a rustic and thick graham cracker coated with a little milk chocolate then a square of marshmallow on top of that. The whole thing is then enrobed in milk chocolate with a decorative drizzle of dark chocolate.

The bite is soft, the marshmallow, which occupies most of the volume is soft, spongy and moist. It’s not that flavorful and not that sweet, so it offsets the other levels of sweetness well. The milk chocolate coating is creamy and better than average though very sweet on its own. The graham cracker was thick and more rough, like a digestive than the sort of grocery store graham cracker I’m accustomed to. The flavor was wheaty with a little touch of honey. The effect of all of it together is great, the pieces are not too big that an adventurous person couldn’t pop it all in their mouth at once, and the marshmallow grabs the chocolate well enough that it doesn’t all crumble apart when bitten in half.

The tub advises popping it into the microwave for 4 to 6 seconds for the traditional S’more treat. The effect of this is to create a completely gooey and soupy interior though the chocolate amazingly doesn’t melt completely. The thing I like best about toasted marshmallows is the toasted part. I could probably just eat the toasted outsides and leave the gooey stuff for someone else, so the microwave option doesn’t really do much for me, but I certainly can see others really digging it.

The big bonus here is that these are Kosher. It’s pretty rare to find Kosher marshmallows, and even harder to find Kosher marshmallow candy products.

Related Candies

1. Limited Edition 3 Musketeers Marshmallow
2. Peeps Chocolate Dipped Marshmallows
3. Campfire Mini Marshmallows
4. Russell Stover Giant S’mores Bar & Mint Dream
5. The Saga of the Valomilk - Review
6. Littlejohn Caramel Marshmallows
7. Dark Chocolate Rocky Road
8. See’s Scotchmallow
9. Hershey’s S’mores

Tic Tacs come in more than mint flavors. Those flavors also vary, depending on where you are in the world. I picked up this package of Zitrone Honig Tic Tac in Germany. They’re honey-lemon flavored.

One of the key differences between European Tic Tac and the American ones are the colors. In the US, the Tic Tac candies are different colors. In Europe the package is colored; the Tic Tacs are all white.

The flavor is quite intense, there’s a lot of lemon oil flavor to it, so much that it’s a bit too zesty at time and feels a little medicinal instead of soothing or refreshing. The honey notes are quite subtle and oddly enough, remind me of Murphy’s Oil Soap. It’s a sort of flavor that’s clean but a little nostalgic.

They’re a little tangy and a little tingly because of the bitter citrus oils. I liked them quite a bit and will be sad when I finish them in about five minutes. I’d buy these if they sold them in the States, but they supposedly sell the Pink Grapefruit ones here and I can rarely find those either. 

Link: Ferrero press release about the flavor (German).

Related Candies

1. Honees Honey Filled Drops
2. Tic Tac Power Mint & Green Apple
3. Gimbal’s Honey Lovers
4. Tic Tac Pink Grapefruit
5. Jelly Belly Honey Beans
6. Mentos Plus Citrus Mix

In the United States there are only a few options for candy coated chocolate morsels. There are M&Ms, and let’s face it, they’re ubiquitous and come in so many varieties, it’s hard to fathom why anyone else would try to make them. But there are Koppers Milkies and Hershey’s Pieces (though not in milk chocolate), and every once in a while you can find a store that carries Nestle Smarties.

In Europe things are a little different. There are M&Ms, though fewer varieties, and their main competitor, Nestle Smarties. And then there are all the other lentils. I picked up a few of them in Germany, today I present the Choceur Choco Dragees. For those who are familiar with Aldi, you’ll recognize the name Choceur as one of their house-brands of chocolate confections.

The package says (in German), multicolored full milk chocolate pieces with natural colors. I picked up the smallest bag I could find, which is 400 grams (14.11 ounces). I liked the package, it’s pretty compact and features a gusseted bottom so it stands up.

The Choco Dragees come in five rather muted colors. The pieces were all perfectly formed and consistent.

The shells were crunchy and shiny. The chocolate inside, well, it’s very German tasting. There’s a strong milk taste to it, a little tangy but not spoiled like Hershey’s. It’s smooth and rather sweet as well, but has a discernible caramel note to it as well.

They’re very different from M&Ms. The crunch of the shell is more pronounced and there’s no faint bitterness from any artificial flavors like I get from brown or red M&Ms. They’re sweet, but in a more muted, perhaps honey flavored way.

I’ve never seen these at Aldi in the United States, though they might have them in the seasonal stuff for holidays and I missed it. They’re worth picking up if you do see them and if I lived in Germany, I’d probably get these quite often.

Related Candies

1. Crispy M&Ms
2. Choceur Chocolate Crisp Bars
3. Russell Stover Color Me Candies
4. Choceur After Dinner Mints: Orange & Peppermint
5. Choceur Luxury Mini Chocolate Bars
6. Head to Head: M&Ms vs Koppers Milkies
7. UK Smarties (no artificial colors)
8. M&Ms Line
9. Head-to-Head: Smarties vs. M&Ms

Trader Joe’s is usually right on target when it jumps on a trend. They seem to know when it’s too early to hop on (and customers will be too scared) or too late (customers will be weary of over saturation). Salt and caramel, salt and chocolate and of course, the combination of all three is right up there on the trend meter. Artisans and high end chocolatiers started the international push about eight years ago, and Trader Joe’s has introduced some fine salted caramels along the way.

Today I have one of their new bars, a 70% Dark Chocolate Bar - Caramel with Black Sea Salt. The design of the box is reminiscent of the Fearless Flyer’s clip art designs with fanciful sailing ships and airships and seaweed. The package mentions that the bar is gluten free.

The package describes the bar thusly:

Exotic Hawaiian Black Sea Salt hails from the Pacific seawater that surrounds the Hawaiian islands. This stunning black salt is evaporated in above ground pools that form naturally from lava flows. Together, its smoky aroma and intense caramel complement this sophisticated dark chocolate experience. Trader Joe’s 70% Cacao Dark Chocolate Bar with Caramel with Black Sea Salt pairs well with a lei, Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt.

Inside the box the bar is sealed in a tough silver mylar package. There’s no design flair to it, but something much more practical. There’s a little stamp that says not only when the bar was made, but also the best by date. (It’s pretty rare for a product to give you both pieces of information.)

I had two of these bars. The first, pictured here, I bought myself. The second was one my husband picked up, not realizing that I’d already procured one. This one was in good shape, glossy and unbroken. The color of the chocolate was a little dead - a little on the coffee ground brown side. The bottom of the bar is studded with sea salt crystals. They weren’t black, they were white and translucent. Some grains were small and well spaced, but others were clumped together or just downright large - like something you’d toss on an icy sidewalk.

The center of the bar is a gooey, near liquid caramel. It’s creamy and silky smooth with a light milky flavor with a strong salty note. The combination of salt from the dusting and the center was sometimes pretty intense. (The package says that there’s only 95 mg of salt here, but I think that’s a little off.)

The chocolate is a little bitter but strong with a fruity and woodsy note to it, kind of like smoked raisins. It’s quite decadent all together, sweet, salty, creamy and a little crunchy if you hit a salt patch.

My big complaint about this bar is the filling at times. The second bar was broken in one place, which unleashed the caramel into the package. Also, if you start the bar, you’re kind of obligated to finish it right away, because the caramel will escape within a half an hour of placing it horizontal. (I guess propping it upright might help.)

Trader Joe’s always makes a good quality product. The packaging was good, the label gave me all the info I wanted to know and the quality was excellent for the price. I don’t think this is my favorite bar, mostly because of the overly-salty spots and the mess factor.

There’s another bar in this set that I saw on the shelf, Trader Joe’s 70% Dark Chocolate - Toffee with Walnuts and Pecans - has anyone tried that as well?

Related Candies

1. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
2. Equal Exchange Chocolate Caramel Crunch with Sea Salt
3. Lindt Excellence Dark with a touch of Sea Salt
4. Marich Chocolate Sea Salt Cashews
5. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels
6. Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels
7. Fran’s Gray Salt Caramels