Last week I reviewed Hotel Chocolat’s Halloween Minislabs and found them to be just a little too good to give away to trick-or-treaters. This week I have something a little more managable – individually wrapped Halloween-themed milk chocolates.
In case you can’t work out what they all are, from top-left going clockwise, we have a “Gorgeous Ghost”, “Scrummy Skull”, “Bewitching Bat”, “Fiendish Finger”, “Creamy Cat” (!!??) and “Tasty Tombstone”.
I have to say the thought of eating a creamy cat concerns me slightly, but given that I’m also eating a bat, a skull, a finger and a gravestone, I guess that says more about me than the chocolates.
There are a total of 16 chocolates in this 180g box. Each sits in a little plastic tray and is wrapped in clear plastic. These are clearly designed to be shared out, and I wouldn’t feel nearly as bad giving these away as I would the mini slabs.
The chocolate itself is excellent, as you’d expect. It’s a sweet and creamy 40% milk chocolate and you can actually taste the cocoa flavours coming through. And when chocolate tastes this good, I can quickly forget that I’m eating a representation of someone’s cat.
And while some may argue that biting the heads off kittens and replacing them with human skulls is a step too far, I prefer to call it “art”…
I found these a few weeks ago and they appealed because they looked, well, cute.
Anthon Berg is a Danish chocolate company that’s been around since 1884 even has the Royal Danish Court seal of approval. I’ve seen their liqueur-filled chocolates around at Christmas time and are aware that they’re often chosen as posh gifts but have never tried them. Until now – except these ones don’t have any alcohol in them, which is either a plus or a minus depending on your needs.
Shaped like large take-out coffee cups, they’re rather elegantly wrapped and come in four flavours – Espresso, Cappuccino, Toffee Macchiato and Vanilla Frappe. Coffee and chocolate are two strong delights that have always complemented each other but I’ve mostly seen coffee as a creamy, pale filling and was eager to see what Anthon Berg was going to make of them.
Unpeeled, they don’t look as attractive – sturdy bullets instead of funky cups but I was more concerned with what was inside the shell. I started with the mildest – Vanilla Frappe and was pleasantly surprised at the noticeable vanilla crème flavour inside the runny dark filling. Toffee Macchiato also had a lovely burnt sugar flavour that emerged through the rich coffee overtones.
Capppuccino was also very nice, but I’d be struggling to differentiate between it and the Vanilla Frappe if blindfolded; but that’s not really a complaint. The Espresso was my favourite – strong syrupy coffee that burst out of the good quality 55% dark chocolate. It was comforting to read that ground coffee beans, vanilla and coffee concentrate were among the usual list of ingredients.
These would make nice gift to give a coffee-and-chocolate lover or to serve with your own brew to your guests after dinner. Or, as I did, on my lonesome with a glass of cold milk or iced coffee. I had these little beauties at 11:30pm and was grateful that they didn’t keep me awake for too long afterwards.
This is another in Stainer’s ‘spice’ selection, and probably the one that had me the most intrigued when I read what the ‘Marrakech Mixture’ constituted.
This is a 70% dark chocolate bar with a mixture of Green Tea, Nanah Mint, Wormwood and Shiba added to it. No I’m no stranger to Green Tea in chocolate, and I’ve had my share of Moroccan mint tea, but Wormwood? Isn’t that what they used to put in Absinthe? Doesn’t it make you go crazy?
Well, apparently not. According to Wikipedia:
“It is an ingredient in the liquor absinthe, and also used for flavouring in some other spirits and wines, including bitters, vermouth and pelinkovac. It is also used medically as a tonic, stomachic, antiseptic, antispasmodic, carminative, cholagogue, febrifuge and anthelmintic. In the Middle Ages it was used to spice mead.”
But when I looked up Shiba, I was informed that
“Shiba, or absinthe is illegal in some countries because of its stimulative drug properties. However, in Morocco it is a popular repacement for mint in tea during the winter when mint is out of season.”
So this chocolate apparently contains two of the herbal ingredients used in absinthe. Luckily for me it tastes nothing like Venchi’s Absinthe Bar. Quite the contrary in fact.
I would have been surprised not to have tasted mint when I popped a square of this into my mouth, but it isn’t “minty” mint like the Skelligs Mint Brittle. This is a softer, more subtle herbal mint tempered with the other ingredients. It’s a gentle, almost palate-warming sensation with woody, darker overtones and a distinctly floral end taste. It’s an intriguing set of flavours, at one point quite minty, at others almost like elderflower, but always contained within the dark cocoa and vanilla of the 70% cocoa chocolate.
I really like this bar. It has none of the taste connotations of some other unusual bars. It doesn’t come across as a wacky idea put out for sale as a novelty item, and it doesn’t taste like anything I’ve had before. This is (to date) the bar that makes me wish there was a Stainer franchise in the UK, so I could buy it for my friends and fellow chocolate lovers.
If you see this one, grab it. I know I’ll be buying more if I ever see it again.
To me, nothing says “expensive gimmick” quite like chocolate bought from John Lewis. The Brent Cross store where I purchased this has a small but constantly changing chocolate gift section that’s crammed with shiny packages containing overpriced confections of questionable quality.
This little plastic box, for instance, contains 210g of chocolate and set me back a whopping £7.
But of course you’re not meant to buy these for yourself, they’re meant to be a gift. Hence the label that looks (vaguely) like a prescription and the large cross embossed onto the chocolate itself.
So a nice concept, but unfortunately the chocolate isn’t that great. It’s 53.5% cocoa solids and contains milk powder, but doesn’t describe itself as either milk chocolate or dark chocolate. In fact, there isn’t a huge amount of information on the box at all. There’s a link to a web site which features a range of similar, but slightly different products, but no mention of this particular box that I can find.
The taste is somewhat akin to Cadbury Bournville. It’s not particularly bad, but it’s way too sweet for me. I think if they removed about half the sugar, I would have quite enjoyed this, but as it was I couldn’t manage more than one of the 7 bars.
So definitely a gimmick – and a horribly overpriced one too. If you’re looking to buy a chocolate gift, do yourself a favour and go for a simple, quality bar of chocolate instead.
