I first tried a ‘pre-production’ version this bar back at the Chocolate Unwrapped show in October, and I’m really glad to see it’s now available in the shops. It’s another square block of solid chocolate, and as you can see from the picture below mine didn’t quite survive its trip through the post intact. But no matter, it’s the taste that’s important…
The chocolate is a 32% Madagascan milk (the same as the strawberry block I reviewed back in July) and is creamier and a little sweeter than the Venezuelan beans found in the Venezuela and Tonka Bean blocks. I’m sure that sweetness won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I found it worked really well with the saltiness of the pistachios that are studded throughout the chocolate.
And they really are quite salty – but in a way that works perfectly with the chocolate. The pistachios reminded me of sweetened popcorn with a nutty, caramel flavour. The chocolate and pistachios on their own would be pretty good, but when combined, something wonderful happens. The combination of flavours works really well for me.
And the textures work equally well. The soft, creamy milk chocolate and light, crunchiness of the pistachios make this block incredibly moreish. There’s no way you can just eat a single square of this stuff.
This is probably my new favourite Thorntons block. Definitely worth trying.
I had a friend who found a cute little ceramic pig in a shop. She bought it and proudly displayed it on a shelf in her room. And from that point on, she was the pig person. Birthdays, Christmas and pretty much any other occasion, she was given pigs. She didn’t particularly like pigs – it was just that one original pig she liked – but she was labelled from that point on and ended up with an impressive collection she didn’t really want.
Fortunately, I really, really like chocolate and so the fact that now everybody I know is giving me chocolate because of this blog isn’t really too much of a problem and I am very happy with the large box of chocolate that I’ve accumulated. In fact, it is kind of entertaining because people are trying to find the most unusual stuff to give me. Just like in the case of Werther’s Original Caramel Chocolate Dark with 42% Cacao.
Most people are familiar with Werther’s hard butterscotch candies, but they aren’t a name that immediately jumps to mind when it comes to chocolate. I think at one point they had chocolate covered butterscotch sweets, but these are a completely different and I didn’t know what to expect.
From the front of the bag, it became apparent that these were marbled chocolate and caramel although that didn’t really clear anything up because I was now imagining something chewy. The chocolates are an appealing oval shape – not too thick and right at the borderline between one and two bites. The marbling means that there’s no denying that these are pretty but unfortunately that just isn’t reflected in the taste at all. In fact, the taste is rather strange and just plain confusing. And definitely not chewy.
The caramel and chocolate fight it out right from the start, and neither of the flavours win out. They clash and it isn’t pretty. It turns out that the caramel is actually caramel flavoured white chocolate, so they are much sweeter than they should be and don’t even melt nicely. To be honest, alarm bells should have gone off when they described 42% chocolate as rich and dark but I never did expect the peculiar aftertaste that is neither chocolate nor caramel.
Definitely not recommended.
I don’t much care for Guinness. So it’s probably lucky that this little bar contains just 0.2% of the stuff. The other 99.8% it seems, is pure marketing.
Simon has reviewed a couple of Guinness chocolate products in the past, some truffles which were apparently quite passable a dark chocolate bar, which wasn’t so good.
The dark bar never gave a cocoa percentage, but this one does – a disappointing 55%. And that comes through in the taste. Although there is some vague chocolatelyness, it’s extremely sweet and it’s quite difficult to taste anything beyond the sugar.
There is a very slight flavour of something that could have been related to Guinness at some point in its life, but it’s barely discernible. If you hadn’t read the wrapper, you’d have no idea what it was. In fact, for all I know the taste could just be that the chocolate is a bit off.
Inside each square of chocolate is a fair amount of caramel, which like the chocolate doesn’t taste of much. It’s sweet, and there is a vague butteriness to it, a quick glance at the ingredients – glucose syrup, sweetened condensed milk, vegetable fat – will give you an idea of what to expect.
As is so often the case, the overall product is edible and not offensive, but it just doesn’t do anything for me. The fact that only 0.09g of Guinness went into this 45g bar shows. It’s a gimmick rather than a treat for a Guinness lover. One to avoid.
Last year, I looked at Ghirardelli’s seasonal Peppermint Bark; this year, I went for the bag of Chocolate Pecan Pie squares. While I wasn’t too impressed by the mostly white chocolate Bark, the Pecan Pie is wonderful.
Pecan Pie isn’t so much of my holiday traditions. I can only even think of once that I’ve even eaten it. Yet its warm feel, especially when combined with chocolate, makes for a fitting wintry treat. These squares keep up that feel — as soon as you tear their wrappers, a maple sugar and chocolate smell shoots out as quickly as light from a lamp when you flip the switch. Inviting, to say the least.
The squares are milk chocolate with pieces of caramelized pecans. The chocolate is creamy and milky, but full-tasting. it blends with the maple sugar/caramel flavor, the creaminess of the chocolate standing apart from the crunch of the pecans. That difference in texture only makes you want to eat more and more. I find myself glad that the bag was double the usual size, with about twenty-four squares. The candy dish I filled is already emptying, so I’m obviously not the only one to enjoy them.
I’m only wondering what sort of idea Ghirardelli had when they came up with their little rectangular bags of chocolates. Especially around the holidays, I find myself asking whether the bags are nice enough for gifts, or if they are meant more for eating yourself, putting in candy dishes, and stuffing stockings with. I suppose Ghirardelli is trying to fit itself for any of these purposes. Whichever you choose, the Pecan Pies do taste delicious.
