After enjoying Ghirardelli’s Twilight Delight, I just had to seek out the Midnight Reverie, at an additional 14% cacao content and a few hours past Twilight. Now that’s more my style.
Despite the “New” stripe in the corner, my memory would beg to differ. Just how long can something be called new, anyway? A year, maybe? Well, Ghirardelli, it you say this bar is new, I guess that makes it new
Chocolate in the ’80’s tends to have a progression of flavors, but this one delivers a more constant, fluid taste. At the moment I’m really not tasting the bitter, but it did give an obvious bitter hit before, as compared with the 72%. I’m getting warm, baked chocolate notes. I can’t always identify my chocolate fruits, so I’ll stick to the description for that part: “hints of dark cherries, dried plums.” Rich-tasting foods, fitting for a dark chocolate. Midnight Reverie reminds me of eating a cake, frosting and all. A nice cake, mind you, not a boring box or grocery store variety.
Ghirardelli is great at making an appeal to the average person, getting just the right depth for a practical palate experience. the darkness of this bar, for instance, is the cozy kind you can sink comfortably into like bath water. The bitterness is more a pattering across the sides of your mouth, with the high percentage thickening the flavor and enveloping you.
I had a very tiny piece of the Twilight Delight while Midnight’s taste was still in my mouth. Oh, sugar! A piece of sugar in my mouth! Wasn’t expecting that. It must be, then, that the biggest difference between the two is sweetness. Keep in mind that I wouldn’t have noticed without the brief experiment. But consider yourselves warmed: Twilight is casual depth with sweetness, Midnight is casual depth with much less sweetness.
When it comes to football and sponsorship, I suppose anything goes. Even chocolate is not immune.
When it comes to football and me, I couldn’t care less. A bunch of big burly blokes running around assaulting each other for a couple of hours. Pfft.
When it comes to football, although I don’t care – it DOES have to by Aussie Rules. None of that namby pamby bum-sniffing rubgy stuff that they play all over the rest of the world, and which they mistakenly call “football”. That’s not football. Football is played with an elongated ball, and you have to leap around and catch it. In your hands. But not hold onto it – that would be all wrong. And the blokes who play it need to be called “Dazza” and “Cornsey”.
And when it comes to Aussie Rules football, the Mighty Adelaide Crows made it into the finals. So it seems only appropriate to check out the official sponsorship-logo emblazoned Chocolate Crows, complete with colours on the pack and a mean-looking sort of crows-like chap.
On the inside, the results are kind of different to the build up.
OK, these are chocolate covered jelly-like things. But I can’t for the life of me see a crow resemblance in the shape. Can you? They must have been cut to this shape after a night at the footy and a few too many celebratory tinnies.
Being loose in a bag, they get all knocked around so there are white marks as well…
But hey – this is cheap-n-cheerful land after all – supporting the team and all that. Rah. Rah. These really seem to be a clone of the Choccy Froggies I tried before. Nothing exceptional, in fact, pretty ordinary. If you planned on spending an evening at the footy, though, these would be a perfect accompaniment.
Go the Crows!
Two more offerings from the cornucopia which was the AOC Awards goodybag. This innocuous looking bag turned out to be home to a couple of the most brightly adorned chocolates I have seen in a while.
This brace of brightly painted chocolates heralded another new name in chocolate – well, to me at least. Lauden make very pretty chocolates and it was a fairly straightforward process identifying my two samples from the selections offered on the Lauden website.
My first was the Salted Caramel, and it was an absolute delight. Deep, molasses-like burnt sugars from the caramel, that tang of salt, and wrapped in a wafer thin dark chocolate shell. A really excellent salted caramel which delivered bags of taste.
The Single Origin Madagascan Trinitario chocolate delivered light, fruity top notes characteristic of Trinitario. Soft, full flavoured cocoa with no bitterness at all and an easy, almost citrus finish. Thoroughly enjoyable chocolate, and very much in the ‘posh choc’ mould. A light, crisp chocolate shell concealing a flavour packed, whisper light centre. Lovely stuff.
I enjoyed these enough to want to try more of Lauden’s chocolates. A company making fine chocolate in Yorkshire is unusual in itself (and warrants further attention methinks) and based on this showing I hav high hopes for some of the other flavours Lauden offer.
Watch this space.
M&Ms always keep me on my toes. No, not because I’m overly sugared up and high as a kite on cocoa, but because they like to release new flavours with very little fanfare: normally they’re only spotted when one is trawling up the confectionery aisle at the supermarket.
This is how I’ve found the previously reviewed the delightfully welcome M&Ms dark (which are becoming a rare sighting), the equally nice M&Ms Mint (virtually extinct, so maybe I was the only person who enjoyed them) and the execrable M&Ms Mint Crispy (advertised by Pamela Anderson, who was inexplicably flown out here) which have most deservedly been dropped.
Lo and behold, I spotted a bright orange packet:
As with Ashleigh and Ginger, Kath and Orange go together like, well Kath and Orange – I love the combination. Whittaker’s do a gorgeous dark chocolate and orange block, as do Lindt and they both feature regularly on my ‘to eat and enjoy’ list. M&Ms are your classic snack chocolates that are great plain, peanut-ted and crisped and, when obtainable, peanut butter-ed. M&Ms have told me previously that they don’t have the equipment to make peanut butter M&Ms down under but clearly they can inject their plain ones with a bit of flavour and do that instead.
So how did these orange ones taste?
Delicious. Crackly crunchy on the outside before releasing a zing of orange chocolate that dissolved before the next handful of whites and orange discs were thrown in. They even had a pleasant orange odour when the seal was ripped into and with the chocolate being a minimum of 28% cocoa solids, it paired up extremely well. Hint to M&Ms – maybe this would go well in a dark chocolate M&M as well?
At the bottom of the bag, it cutely says, “No oranges were harmed in the making of this product,” but this is less cute when the ingredients are read at the back. The actual orange taste is via the emulsifier which is soy lecithin, flavour and salt. Oh. In the 200 gram bag I sampled, it listed each serving as 25 grams, but who are we kidding? My serving is 100 grams, but if we assume that you readers are far more controlled, let’s say a 50 gram serving (ie quarter of the bag) is more your style. If so, you’ll be taking in 10.4 grams of fat of which 6.6 grams of it is saturated. Not so good for cholesteroliacs like myself, but OK for those unaware or with good blood test results. As for the overal fat content, it’s actually nowhere near as bad as some chocolates (yes, Lindt lindor balls, I’m looking at you).
I hope this flavour sticks around, because they’re a good addition to the M&M stable. Just don’t fly out a perma-tanned Paris Hilton to launch them here in Australia, okay?
