Late last year one of my small chocolate-loving people had a school trip to Germany, and so I handed over €20 and said “Bring me back something unusual, and make sure it’s chocolate.” Well, sure enough my faith was rewarded, and this was one of the bars I was given.
A quick look at the Leysieffer site reveals that they also produce coffee, teas, biscuits and jams as well as an astonishing selection of chocolate and marzipan bars. For you non-German speaker, this bar is 56% cocoa chocolate with extract of Elderflower – something i have never seen before. Being rather partial to a glass of elderflower cordial and sparkling water, I was quite pleased to be given this, and when I tasted it for the first time I began to wish I had a supply of them.
When I popped the first square of this chocolate into my mouth, the sweetness of the elderflower was almost immediately released, causing my salival glands to go into overdrive.
This is seriously mouthwatering stuff. The initial sweet hit of the elderflower is soon tempered by the chocolate melting, and as the flavours combine you get a wonderful citrussy/chocolate mouthful with hints of lychee and lemon. This really is quite remarkable chocolate, but unfortunately Leysieffer’s site is entirely in German and as far as I can tell they don’t distribute to the UK which is a huge shame. I think this has to be one of the tastiest bars of chocolate I have eaten of late. It’s a little sweet for everyday consumption but as a special treat it really is worth tracking down.
It’s at times like this I wish Chocablog had some sort of taste/smell interface, as I would love to share this one with our readers. It’s THAT good.
I would like to know if any other chocolate companies make an elderflower variety, and if not then might I suggest that someone in the UK gives it a go very soon?
When I first left California for foreign climes, I knew I’d miss the food I’d grown up with: tortilla chips and refried beans, hamburgers with avocado and monterey jack. What I didn’t expect was the desperate desire for candy. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were not something I particularly thought of as a favorite food but I would pick them up occassionally as a quick snack when there was no time for lunch. After I’d been away from home for a year, however, the desire for them became overwhelming. Those peanut butter cups became my heart’s desire, a taste of home, representative of all the junk food I had left behind.
I tried filling the cravings in a high-class manner. I bought a pound of peanuts which I ground into a natural peanut butter and then dipped thick chunks of dark Belgian chocolate into it. Although it was quite an interesting combination, I realised that the ground peanuts were only tangentially related to the filling of the peanut butter cup. I eventually found real peanut-butter (by which I mean ground peanuts with added sugar and preservatives and god knows what else) and took the time to make my own cups in a mini-muffin pan. They were quite tasty and made for a decent after-dinner snack but I never quite achieved that Reese’s flavor. In the end, I wrote a frenzied letter to my parents, asking them to please send me a care package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. To their credit, I received a small box of the candies via air mail within the month, no questions asked.
So what is it about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and why couldn’t I re-create the experience? A quick look at the ingredient list gave me the answer.
The bulk of the peanut butter cup is milk chocolate but their milk chocolate is sweeter than anything you could ever eat as a bar. The primary ingredient of their chocolate is sugar, nosing ahead of the cocoa butter and cocoa mass and milk. The next ingredient of the cup is peanuts but the third is, again, sugar.
This would be so sweet as to be unpalatable but the fifth ingredient in this most unhealthy snack (I used to eat this for lunch?!) is salt, adding a much needed tang against the cloying sweetness. It’s the salt which upgrades the peanut butter center from diabetic nightmare to grainy addiction. Each peanut-sugar-and-salt bite ends with the sweetened milk-chocolate washing away the tingle of the salt and leaving you longing for a bit more to cut through the syrupy residue left in your mouth. Even if you ignore the E-numbers and seven-syllable ingredients that sound straight out of a chemistry lab, the combination is a bit scary: Sugar, chocolate, peanuts, sugar and salt.
Obviously, these simply can not be compared to the standardly reviewed items on Chocablog and I remain partial to champagne truffles. But recently I walked into a wonderful delicatessen and shop which sells all sorts of intriguing food, much of which is imported by the proprieter. Among the dried herbs and specialist rice and dried mushrooms, he has a box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. His prices are exorbitant but they do come in packs of three cups, rather than the two I remember from my childhood. I think it’s important to stay in touch with my roots and so I bought all his remaining stock. I just want to have them on stand-by, to alleviate the rare feelings of homesickness that sometimes creep up on me.
Besides, he said he’d get a new batch in by Monday.
Update: This competition is now closed.
Here’s a little story to bring a little drool to the mouth of any chocaholic.
You may not know this, but if you’re an event organiser, it’s often quite easy to get freebies from companies who would like to be associated with the product launch/party/event you’re organising, even more so if the event might have some celebrity connection.
Now I’m not sure why, but someone decided that a party in a nightclub would benefit from a little chocolate – Lindt Lindor Milk Balls to be precise. Of course, the manufacturers can afford to be very generous with their product, and (as is so often the case) on this occasion they provided far more chocolate than a bunch of people getting drunk in a club might want.
As a good friend of mine would say “It’s all about timing and positioning”. I volunteered to help hide the excess chocs in exchange for a ‘box’ of the goodies. Job accomplished, I hoisted a cardboard box and took it home, only to discover that it didn’t contain the small boxes of four Lindor Balls at all – oh no, this one was full of the loose product. Hundreds of the little blighters.
Naturally I was suddenly very popular.
What makes this tale even more fantastic/ridiculous is that when I returned later that night there was another box left behind!
Your chance to win some!
So, dear readers, I would like to offer Chocablog subscribers the chance to win some Lindor Balls of your own.
To win 5 boxes of Lindor balls (boxes of 4, not boxes containing hundreds of them – sorry) simply subscribe to the email version of Chocablog then use this form to let us know how many Lindor Balls are in the picture above.
Rules
- To enter, you must be subscribed to our email updates service and use the same email address in the entry form. Thus entry is a 2 stage process – first subscribe, then fill in the entry form. If you’re not a registered subscriber on the closing date, your entry can’t be counted.
- The winner will be the person who correctly guesses the number of Lindt Lindor balls in the photo above. In the event of nobody guessing the correct number, the closest guess will win. In the event of multiple correct (or equally close) guesses, a single winner will be randomly picked from those entries.
- One entry per person only.
- Chocablog staff writers may not enter. You have enough chocolate already.
- The exact quantity of the prize is subject to change, depending on how hungry we get between now and the closing date.
- The competition is open to readers of all ages. UK residents only this time – sorry!
- Competition closes on Monday 3rd March, 2008.
- The judges decision is final.
- Rules are subject to change without notice (if we’ve forgotten something because we’re a bit slow)
Every now and then a ‘freebie’ arrives – this time via an apology from our grocery delivery service, but more often it’s a Kris Kringle or unexpected gift – and I realise just what a choco-snob I’ve become.
Newman’s have been around for years but have never troubled my taste buds or wallet, and have never visited either my fridge or pantry.
Perhaps the picture explains why. Yes, we’ve all been told not to judge a book by its cover, but when the supermarket shelves are groaning with established and credible brands such as Cadbury, Nestlé and Lindt, anything ordinary or significantly cheaper is likely to be ignored or treated with suspicion.
I suspect that his has happened with Newman’s. My guess is that grannies and folk on strict budgets often purchase them as gifts because of the price and packaging alone and they then disappear into the dodgy darkness of appliance cupboards or are willingly donated to end of year Christmas fund-raising hampers. To my chagrin, I’ve now discovered what a shame that is. I hope that Newman’s do too – their current packaging isn’t doing them any favours – if they can be bothered wrapping up each six gram mint chocolate individually, they can do a bit more work in improving the outside packaging instead.
Despite their plain appearance, these dark chocolates filled with a runny peppermint fondant are actually very good. The pack tells me that the chocolate has a minimum of 45% cocoa solids and none of the other ingredients even remotely point to ‘cheap’, ‘tacky’ or – dare I say this: ‘compounded’ confectionary in the slightest.
Hubby Love Chunks isn’t a huge peppermint fan, but, always the giver; he was bravely prepared to have at least one taste. This led to several more of the packets being torn open and consumed as we sat on the lounge watching ‘Scrubs’ after dinner. “Mmmm, these are quite nice,” he murmured in surprise. “Are they new?”
No, just stuck in uninspired packaging and therefore doomed to be unseen by most self-confessed Aussie choco-snobs, including myself. My efforts in trying to find out more about this Melbourne-based manufacturer were in vain also – no website and no mentions-in-passing in any Foodie or Choccie-slanted articles about Melbourne. Perhaps Newman’s near-invisibility is intentional, kind of like Wonder Woman’s aeroplane?
This foray into ‘no frills’ chocolate choices has made me a bit more prepared to step out of the snob-sphere and try other brands that are prepared to list their cocoa content. Especially if they’re free…..
