This is something I picked up ages ago whilst on my travels. It’s a 60% bittersweet chocolate with lemon and ginger (as you can see) and it’s a companion bar to the range I reviewed earlier this year- most of which I was quite complimentary about, as I recall.
Unlike many of the Dolfin bars I’ve tasted, this one contains ‘bits’. Seven percent lemon ‘bits’ to be precise. As the dark, tangy chocolate begins to melt, these tiny fragments of lemon are released onto your palate and begin adding their flavour to the mix. Lemon in chocolate isn’t something I’ve encountered too often, and based on the taste of this, I’ll be happy to try any other lemon/chocolate combination.
The addition of a subtle ginger warmth is a pleasant touch too, putting me in mind of a wintertime tea drink . The zingy, citrussy flavour compliments the dark chocolate very well indeed.
My only gripe with this bar is that the lemon pieces are plentiful and quite hard and ‘bitty’, leaving you with a mouthful of little hard lumps to tackle. They do eventually soften and break down, but after enjoying the flavours of the chocolate I personally found the mouthful of bits a little offputting. I’m used to Dolfin blending their ingredients to give a totally smooth mouthfeel, and a mouthful of fragments was mildly annoying.
Not the best Dolfin bar I’ve tasted.
Inside this 200 gram cardboard hexagonal prism lurk many delights.
Sixteen of them in fact. That’s a lot of delights… and this is what they look like when released from their container…
But what exactly are “Amicelli”? Well the box says…
“Uncover these delicious GALAXY® fusions of light wafer, filled with hazelnut praline, gently rolled in smooth and creamy milk chocolate”
…which, roughly translated into English means “Kinder Bueno Rip-Off”.
Thankfully though, Mars/Masterfoods/Galaxy (or whatever they like to call themselves) have done a pretty good of “borrowing” ideas from other people.
As you can see, they’re much thinner than a Bueno and not divided into chunks. They’re small enough (12.5 grams each) that they don’t need to be.
But just like the Bueno, they’re creamy, crispy and utterly delicious. They’re quite sweet, but unless you plan on eating all sixteen bars at once, that’s not really a problem.
The chocolate is fairly thick considering the size of the bar, and you can clearly taste that smooth Galaxy flavour. The overall result is a delicious little chocolate snack that goes great with a cup of tea of coffee.
If you’re a Bueno fan, or the type of person that likes something like a KitKat with your morning coffee, then you should really pick up a box of these. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Here we have another Fairtrade bar, and this one also happens to be organic as well. I picked this up in a health food shop in London – one which incidentally stocked a fair few of Emma Jackman’s Chocster-winning Conscious Bars. At 55% cocoa it wasn’t going to be very dark, but it was the prospect of sinking my teeth into more yummy little cocoa nibs meant I just had to have this one.
Blakes is an Irish company but the chocolate bar itself is made in Switzerland, and contains two sugar products, Syramena and Sucramat, which are apparently raw and refined organic products. There are certainly hints of caramel and rich dark sugars in this chocolate. I’d place it on the dark side of milk rather than really dark chocolate, and as such I think it would appeal to a lot of people. Too much at one sitting can be a little TOO sweet, but if you’re in a sharing mood this one could earn you a few new friends.
This chocolate has a superbly soft mouthfeel. Soft, sweet, creamy chocolate with a generous sprinkling of crisp,This chocolate has a superbly soft mouthfeel. Soft, sweet, creamy chocolate with a generous sprinkling of crisp, nutty cocoa nibs which are packed full of rich cocoa flavours, and are a personal favourite of mine.
This is a ‘nibbling’ bar – something to eat slowly while savouring the flavours. It’s so rich that more than a couple of chunks at one sitting can turn the whole taste experience from pure pleasure into mild ‘overdose’ queasiness. I really enjoyed the overall flavour combination of cocoa, sugar and nibs, and of course extra points are scored for organic/Fairtrade credentials.
Apparently Blakes have secured a distribution deal with John Lewis, so UK readers should have little problem locating this (and the other bars in the range), and I’d say it was well worth seeking out.
Dagoba is clearly a chocolate company with worthy ideals and ethics behind it. This US company was founded relatively recently in 2001 by Frederick Schilling. He had the novel idea of aligning the cocoa bean turning into chocolate with alchemy and has travelled the world to find the right type of cocoa beans grown organically and sustainably.
Dagoba’s beans are sourced from Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru and Madagascar and Schilling ensures that they are farmed organically, sustainably and a fair price paid to the farmers and invested in their communities. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Well, ethics or not, the chance to eat some chocolate laced with hemp seeds was too good to miss. The 68% cocoa content wasn’t too shabby either and we all know that pumpkin and sunflower seeds are immensely good for you.
Other ingredients include evaporated cane juice (instead of sugar), Balinese salt (for ethical reasons) and, in their words, “love”. Awwww, bless their sweet little hearts.
Now comes the really un-fun part of this job. This is where I’m going to be considered mean-spirited evil and anti-organic, anti-fairtrade and anti sustainable industry when in actual fact I’m none of those things. It is just that this bar tasted like, well, nothing, actually. Sure, there were crunchy seeds and a nice little salt kick but the actual chocolate was utterly and totally indistinguishable.
I even sat there, on a 29C day outside, waiting patiently to enable each segment to soften a bit so that the flavours of the chocolate could more fully emerge and reveal themselves but nope. There was literally no discernible chocolate taste – it might as well have been (now brace yourselves) carob. Yes, carob – it felt like chocolate and clearly help bind the assorted seeds together but there was no cocoa-ey taste.
Then I tried putting it straight on the tongue and hoping it would dissolve into the taste buds directly but it just didn’t. This was proving to be very, very puzzling and disappointing. Therefore, my suggestion is that you can buy this bar in order to try nibbling on some hemp seeds and for good intentions but do not kid yourself for one second that the actual chocolate is going to be anything other than an invisible let down. Sorry.
