This is just an excuse to brag about a great recent gift that I just finished consuming. It was a gift box of Arnaud Soubeyran treats. It featured an assortment of nougats, chocolate covered almonds and marzipan. (I dropped some heavy hints about this in the holiday sales post.)
The large, flat box displayed the candy to great effect. The box itself is pretty nice too, a red linen with the Arnaud Soubeyran logo only lightly embossed on the front.
If you recall, I fell in love with the Soubeyran Nougat de Montelimar last year.
There were three different kinds of nougat here. The first was the plain with lavender honey, almonds and pistachios. The second is the same covered in dark chocolate. The third is orange covered in milk chocolate. The classic and dark chocolate were fantastic, as usual. I love the small, individually wrapped pieces. The orange was a bit too sweet for me, the milk chocolate wasn’t really chocolatey enough for me but the idea of orange nougat is pretty compelling. I’m not saying that I didn’t like it well enough to eat them all, I’d just have the others before and after.
The other item in the assortment worth mentioning are the chocolate covered almonds (Olivettes). The almonds were crisp, fresh and crunchy. The chocolate was good quality and not too sweet. The olive colored one was a “white” chocolate on the outside and dark chocolate on the inside. I thought they were pretty sassy looking and ended up putting them in a jar just so I could admire them before I ate them.
The last element in the box were two rows of marzipan called Calissons. They were pretty little leaf shaped wedges of firm marzipan with a bit of sugar glaze on them. I found them tasty, if a little dry. They didn’t taste like poison quite as much as most other marzipans do to me, so I might consider that a plus. My husband enjoyed them quite a bit, so I felt a little better that I was sharing.
You can get an assortment of these nougats sans extras from ArtisanSweets.com (scroll down to the Montelimar Nougats Gift Bag) for $11. Yes, it’s expensive stuff. I really shouldn’t have been sharing it.
Name: |
Assortment by Arnaud Soubeyran |
RATING:
- SUPERB
- YUMMY
- TASTY
- WORTH IT
- TEMPTING
- PLEASANT
- BENIGN
- UNAPPEALING
- APPALLING
- INEDIBLE
|
Brand: |
Arnaud Soubeyran |
Place Purchased: |
gift (thanks Ruth & Emil!) |
Price: |
unknown |
Size: |
unknown |
Calories per ounce: |
unknown |
Categories: |
Chocolate, Nougat, Nuts, France |
That really is nice packaging, very tempting!
Proving once again “You get what you pay for.”
Lucky you!
Yum! So beautiful!
Very pretty, but sounds delicious, too. That’s mainly why I read this…the expensive stuff that I probably wouldn’t pay to try.
oooooooo i’d really like to try these! bummer that the little gift bag only has 1 chocolate. =(
Those dark chocolate nougats are making me cry. Je suis jaloux. Are they anything like a torrone? Recently, I’ve been enjoying the Spanish version of torrone, called Turron. It’s not as soft, but good in it’s own way. And to think that I used to call a Big Hunk “nougat.”
Joanna - they’re exactly like the soft torrones ... but covered with chocolate. I have two left.
abbe - I’ll probably post if this gift box comes back on sale at Dean & Deluca (or elsewhere).
spit - I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the pretty red linen box, maybe keep photos in it or clippings.
Sera - you know it! I took oodles of photos of just the almonds. I like playing with my food.
Dave - that’s why I have the blog, too! Two years ago I don’t think I ever would have paid $6 for a nougat bar (unless I’d won the $370 million lotto jackpot).
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