Cowboy Chocolates

New Mexico being just next door, Santa Fe has become a biennial retreat for my family. In such an artistic community as it is, it follows that there are also a couple of good-quality chocolate shops in the area. Chocolate, however, not being most conducive to traveling, especially in the Southwest, I walked away with only two chocolate items.

This box I picked up at a shop on the Plaza, Yippee Yi Yo. If you couldn’t tell from the name, there is a decidedly tourist flair about the place, yet for novelty products, their quality is generally reasonable. Hence, it was hard to tell on what side of the scale a $12 wooden box of “Cowboy Chocolates” would go. There is no company mentioned on the label; it simply states they were made for the store.

The box may be cheap wood, but it is wood, complete with branding on the lid, which all contribute to the appeal for me. Only downside for us who keep boxes like this is that the lid isn’t on hinges; that may be nitpicking, anyway.

There are sixteen chocolates inside, which I shared over an evening of downtime at the hotel. Thoughts on them were generally pleasant, though everyone was avoiding the white chocolates — less of those should’ve been included. There were no dark chocolates at all, so they obviously weren’t targeting connoisseurs.

The milk chocolate used is standard, sweet and slightly dull — the cocoa percentage must be very low. It’s no wonder there was no interest in the white chocolate: it wasn’t good enough to win over the unaccustomed. As I’m sure you can guess, all of these chocolates are all very sweet.

I was glad for the Huckleberry just to get a taste of it in chocolate again, yet I wasn’t overly fond of the sugar crystals I found in the Cherry Chocolate. The Chocolate Covered Mixed Nuts had small pieces of most unimpressive nuts in milk chocolate. The same goes for the almonds in the Almond Bark, though those at least weren’t tiny pieces. The Huckleberry Bark was odd. White chocolate with frightening ice-blue dotted around. It tastes more like artificial blueberry than huckleberry.

Conclusion: they are tourist chocolates. I’d had my fingers crossed that they would be better, but they’re okay. Nothing except maybe the quantity of white chocolate would keep the average vacationing group from enjoying them as a quick sweet like we did.

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