It’s been a while since I’ve been to Cacao; too long in fact.  But again I went to their tiny stall in the GPO on Bourke Street as I was in too much of a rush to travel out to the main store.  Maybe next time.

I came home with the chocolate that is the favourite of the girl who served me – Nougatine bars- and grabbed one dark and milk block to nibble on as well.

I first tried nougatines at Lizzy’s Chocolate Creations but they were in a leaf shape and compellingly addictive.  Cacao’s are in elegant rectangles that reminded me a bit of the Red Tulip After Dinner Mints that were so sophisticated in the 1970s.

Studded with tiny pieces of caramelised almonds, these are delicate, delicious and more-ish.

All the kinds of chocolate ‘go’ with the crunchy filling – white, milk and dark, but the milk edges out other two as my ultimate preference.

Love Chunks agreed. “These are delicious and there’s no way you could just eat one of each flavour,” he said, reaching for more.

I didn’t share the blocks with him, reasoning that at only 50 grams each (despite the back saying it is two serves), they’d be too small to divide up.  And boy, even out of their box but still in the foil they looked pretty:

….and prettier still when completely unwrapped and ready to be eaten:

Their website says that they use ‘only the finest Belgian chocolate’ which, unless corrected, I’m going to assume is Callebaut.

The dark chocolate contains around 53.8% cocoa solids and tastes well-rounded and strong but still sweet enough to enjoy without too much serious analysis.  The milk block (or bar, seeing as it’s only 50 grams) has a very respectable 33.6% cocoa solids and, as with the nougatines, is the one I preferred out of the two.  There’s the sweet creaminess you want from a good quality milk chocolate but with the added cocoa taste that emerges triumphant. 

These are all very nice but it’s only whetted my appetite for more…

Having ‘berry fruit’ in it, I decided to make myself  cup of girlie raspberry and vanilla herbal tea and try this block out in front of the box.

I have vague memories that aren’t successfully repressed of their ‘Desserts’ range featuring a Berry Shortcake flavour that was similar to pressed excrement but somehow my hopes for this new one were still high.

The block is 190 grams, which tends to be Cadbury’s way of avoiding passing on a price increase by reducing the size instead, so I’ll assume that using real ingredients for their ‘berry fruit’ such as cranberry, natural strawberry flavour and elderberry juice concentrate doesn’t come cheap.

The little bubbly bits on the back are the vanilla shortcake crumbs.  Unfortunately the wee sods contain ‘vegetable oil’ so you can draw your own conclusion as to whether it is palm oil or has palm oil as part of the mix.

The block is 82% Dairy Milk chocolate (containing 26% cocoa solids), 9% berry fruit and 9% vanilla shortcake so either we can forgive Cadbury for using palm oil or berate them for being so stingy and unenvironmental for still having to include it in such a small ingredient.

I forgot to take a photo of the front of the block but it consists of the flatter and bigger squares that are also in the Black Forest and Rocky Road blocks to accommodate chunkier fillings.

And, dammit, it tastes delicious. Like a snack for when you’re hungry and have eaten enough fruit or yoghurt for the day and really want to stuff your face in front of 3 episodes of ‘30 Rock’ back-to-back. The berry is a slightly more natural and chewy jelly consistency and the vanilla shortcake (or what to me seems like a nice crunchy butter biscuit) pairs up pretty decently with the dairy milk chocolate.

Love Chunks had a row (three squares out of eighteen), said it was enough for him and left the room to work on the computer.

I confess – I ate the rest, finishing off the entire block. Naughty, Choc Goddess, naughty!

In addition to the groovy and unique Daintree truffles, Wild Chocolate also make ‘bark’ or what really are more generously sized blocks in a bright package.

When Sapphire saw it she said, “Oh Mum, that’s your ideal handbag, isn’t it?” Yes, indeedy dear child, it is.

The ‘four bark box’ contains Lemon myrtle, Quandong, Wild lime and Honey Macadamia. I couldn’t decide which one to try first, so decided to try all four at once. For the good of the blog, you understand…….

First up – the honey roasted macadamia nut block. No cocoa percentages were listed, so I’ll hazard a guess that this sits in the high twenties/early thirties - serious, but still milk which always goes well when paired with the buttery macadamia nut. Add a bit of ‘honey’ toffee-crunchy stuff and it’s a winner.

The milk has an added ‘tang’ to it that reminds me a bit of yoghurt. No, it’s not ‘off’ but has a zinginess that matches the crunchy whole nuts, nut pieces (inside the block) and honey shards particularly well.

A second block was in the ‘two bark box’ and was shared the next day with my friend Sigrid, over for a flying visit from Canberra. It disappeared before our cups of tea did and she left with the wrapper, keen to find some more on her way home.

The Dark Chocolate and Lemon Myrtle block contains lemon myrtle oil and what they intriguingly call ‘yellow chocolate chunks’ which we can only assume is white chocolate coloured to remind us of the yellow myrtle flavour. Whatever works, I guess.

The chocolate tastes as though it has around 50% cocoa solids and is therefore very sweet – but not bitter – and dominates the taste buds before the lemon myrtle flavours emerge. There’ll be some fans who’ll want the chocolate to edge up to 70% and those – myself included – who want the lemon myrtle to be a bit more dominant. Only a minor quibble though. 

Third to taste is the Milk Chocolate and Glaced Quandong block.

Again, the chocolate has a ‘tangy yoghurt’ flavour to it and the quandong is fruity and chewy but I couldn’t really detect any distinct quandong flavour – they might as well have been apricots or sultanas for all I knew.

Last but not least, the White Chocolate and Glaced Wild Lime.

2010 is proving to be the year that I’m constantly surprised by how much I’m enjoying white chocolate* and this bar is no exception.

The chocolate tastes of fresh cream with a particularly light texture not normally associated with what a friend of mine calls ‘yak fat’ chocolate (ie white). The green bits drizzled in the block are flavoured with lime that enhances the actual wild fruits studded throughout the block. They taste of chewy,candied citrus pieces that have had a flirtation with currants; so you get my drift that it’s a very subtle flavour done extremely well.

Overall, I’m a bit surprised that it’s the white block and a milk block (macadamia) that are my top two flavours but all of them deserve a spot in the ‘handbag’.

* I used to think that only traitors and mental pgymies would consider the white stuff ‘chocolate’ but there’s some pretty good stuff available these days.

And finally onto the last four blocks of the eleven Ritter Sport flavours available in Australia.

From the top left (clockwise) we have Yoghurt, then Dark with whole hazelnuts (das Germans liebe their hazelnuts), Butter biscuit and Whole Almonds.

All of the milk chocolate contains 30% cocoa solids with a ‘Cadbury Dairy Milk’ feel about it, which isn’t a bad thing and I suspect that Ritter Sport is the Deutschland equivalent. As you can see, these too have survived export, storage and transit far better than my original three review blocks did.

My notes for these four flavours are about the briefest I’ve ever done.

Reasons were partly due to greed, lack of time before ‘Modern Family’ started and trying to slap away Love  Chunks’ hands in order to get my fair share.

Here’s what I wrote:

Yoghurt – Delicious !!  Sweetly creamy with an added tang.

Dark Whole hazelnuts – OK, nothing startling.

Whole Almonds – Also OK but they go well with the milk chocolate.

Butter Biscuit – Yum!  This is like a snack food rather than just chocolate, with a bit of praline to fill in the gaps between the biscuit and the chocolate.

In the cold light of day, the praline in the Butter Biscuit block is actually – according to the wrapper – ‘fine cocoa cream’ and when conducting a second tasting session with time to spare (ie on my own with a morning coffee the following day) finds that it reminds me of the filling inside a Tim Tam, so it’s a big tick for this one.

Ultimately, the Yoghurt and Butter Biscuits are winners for me because they offer something different. And scrumptious.

THESE are the kind of building blocks I like to play with!

Alrighty then, the Taste of Melbourne event….. The tickets that Green and Black’s sent me to give away to GoneChocco readers were won within twenty minutes of posting and I was lucky enough to attend the opening night on Thursday and take Sapphire with me on Saturday.

….. to be honest, I was also looking forward to having a gander inside the lovely old Exhibition Building which looks rather ominous here due to the spitting rain but didn’t seem to stop a guy posing joyously for a photo (see bottom right) with his arms akimbo like Maria from ‘The Sound of Music’.

Ironically, there was a delay in opening the doors because the cooking inside had set off the fire alarms and three fire trucks turned up to investigate.

You’re going to find this almost impossible to believe, but once inside, my first thoughts weren’t on chocolate.

The interiors of the building were beautiful enough to divert my attention for a moment …..

…… before heading over to the Green and Black’s stall to check out their chocolate fountain

…… and sample their delicious cheesecake (made from Maya Gold) and their Tiffin slices before they were eagerly inhaled by other visitors…..  Sarah said that they deliberately didn’t hand out paper recipes in order to be environmentally aware, but she did promise me that she’d email me the PDFs of the recipes that, if you ask me nicely, I could share with you all.

Back to the roof – so pretty!  Wait a minute – who’s the topless sheila being fanned by angel? Is she the Taste of Melbourne Goddess? Does enough heat rise to the roof so that she can flash her boobies in such wintry Melbourne weather?

No matter. It was time to have a chocolate fudge ice-cream from Ben and Jerry’s combi van and sneak a few chocolate shards from Sisko (who use Belgian Callebaut, French Valrhona or Spanish Chocovic in theri creations) and guess the weight of the solid chocolate Eiffel tower…….

….try some Della Mano (hand made) chocolate fudge brownies from Brissie and some gorgeous looking truffles and chocolates from the more local (Preston) The Chocolate Master (yes, I bought boxes from both stalls)

……. and a double choc icecream sandwich from Pat and Stick’s homemade for me and a choc-chip cookie and strawberry one for Sapphire. I’ve stolen the pictures from their website, because the photos I took on the day featured some rather ’strange-looking’ punters nearby that I was unable to edit out and was also unable to publish in case they frightened you (no Pat, it wasn’t you).

Rather selfishly, stall holders SMEG weren’t handing out any free samples, even though I fell in love with their candy-influenced fridge and freezer combo:

On both occasions I returned home jubilant, tired and ever-so-slightly ill, because apart from the chocolate stalls, I also sampled various versions of smoked salmon, grain fed beef, organic dukkah and olive oils, cheeses, meringues, vodka(s), biscuits, spice mixes, ginger cordial, turkish meatballs, pesto ravioli and lemon liqueur. 

I’ll be back with bells on for next year though.

Time to change that because, even after two years in Melbourne, I only just found out that there’s an ALDI a stone’s throw from the Queen Vic Market. The day I went there was a fire drill in the adjoining building, with half the staff wondering if they should congregate at Mac’s pub (est 1853) next door.

It was a challenge for me not to gawp inside ALDI as I struggled to hold my purchases (note to self: always carry a green shopping bag) in my arms and try hard not to be too obviously amused at the sight of a burly bloke trying on a motorbike helmet for sale right alongside box after box of bargain tampons.

Part of my stash was the dodgily-named Choceur blocks. They’re made in Germany, but I guess ‘Deutsche Gemacht’ isn’t as catchy.

The Coffee and Cream looked pretty darn nice when undressed though. No posh ‘thock’ snapping sound, but it was glossy and had a rather nice cream and coffee aroma wafting out of the gold wrapping.

It contains 33% cocoa solids in the milk chocolate part and 28% in the white bits – yep, my technical descriptions are on fire today. The ‘flavour’ is in the milk chocolate which makes up three-fifths of the block and the white is just white (no additional flavour), comprising the other two thirds.

There’s no scary ingredients, but no real coffee either, just the vague sounding ‘flavour.’

Despite this, it tasted delicious. Melts in the mouth instantly, gives a nice coffee hit (thanks to ‘flavour’) and goes down perfectly with a hot cup of tea.

Yes, it’s saliva-suckingly sweet but you expect that with a white and milk combo that lists ’sugar’ as the first ingredient followed by cocoa butter and cream powder.

I’d highly recommend this for a cheap thrill - not a dinner party ‘bring along’ or gift, but most appropriately enjoyed in the privacy of your own home.

Onto the Peanut & Flakes. This one has a completely different configuration when ‘nude’, presumably to accommodate the more nobbly bits inside:

Sweet old Uncle Abraham on an untested Unicycle…….. this was utterly more-ish, delish, scrummy and crunchy-sweet-crunchy! Described as 75% milk chocolate (containing a very unshabby 32% cocoa solids), 20% peanuts (the second ingredient behind sugar) and 5% cornflakes (which Choceur assure us contain ‘95% corn minimum’), these all roll in together to create a chocolate that eats like a really satisfying snack bar. The nuts or flakes taste as though they’re sugar or toffee-coated or else they’re just super crunchy and hum along nicely to the sweet chocolate.

There’s seven ‘rows’ in this 200 gram block and I’d eaten three before even putting my lense cap back on. I’m going back to ALDI for a few more of these bad boys – this time with my own shopping bag!

The lovely ladies featured on each block are retro-gorgeous, aren’t they? Today I’m reviewing three – Caramel milk chocolate with pecan, Orange dark chocolate with roasted almonds and dark chocolate, apricot and rosemary. It’s a tough gig, I know and I can’t help if I’m smiling as I type this – I’m livin’ the dream, baby!

I was at my friend Amy’s place for a cuppa and decided to bring along the top lady, far right – Caramel Milk Chocolate with Pecan.

Whole pecans are gently dropped into the block of 31% cocoa solids milk chocolate and we were keen to get into it. Amy is from Georgia, USA, home of pecans and a local delicacy known as ‘Turtles’ because of their shape – clusters of pecans and gooey caramel covered in milk chocolate. Expectations for this block were high.

Unfortunately there was no ‘caramel’ in this chocolate – not even on the nuts, so presumably it refers to the ‘caramelised sugar’ in the ingredients? If so, it wasn’t discernible to our uneducated palates and we both agreed that this block would be better described as ‘Milk Chocolate with Pecans’ to avoid any disappointments. That said, we polished the block off before our cups of tea went cold….

A couple of days later I was at my friend Helen’s house for a bowl of her incredible silky artichoke and potato soup. Dessert was these two ladies: Orange dark chocolate & roasted almonds and Dark chocolate, apricot and rosemary.

This time I had the sense to photograph the top of the blocks before flipping them over:

…. and it’s clear which one has almonds in it and which one contains apricot pieces:

We both agreed that the dark chocolate (53% cocoa solids, presumably Callebaut) orange and almonds was ‘nice’.  It’s a perfectly acceptable rendition of two classic flavours but nothing unusual, outstanding or offensive. Just ‘nice’.

In contrast, the dark chocolate, apricot and rosemary was a revelation – “Oh my Godfffmph,” Helen mumbled, her mouth full – “This is amazingffffmph.”  The apricot isn’t your usual sun-dried and chewy number, but a freeze dried, paler version that is crisper in texture. The rosemary isn’t overly dominant but just right, permeating the bittersweetness of the chocolate and the tanginess of the apricots.  The overall effect is a savoury, sweet, satisfying and intriguing little dance on the tongue. 

Who’d have thought of such a flavour pairing in chocolate? But I’m glad that someone did……….

And the tickets to the Taste of Melbourne event have already gone, folks! I was regaled with tales of long-distance love, humorous quotations, chocoholicism and simply hoping that they were first in, best dressed.

Thanks to Green and Black’s chocolate, I’ve got eight tickets to give away to GoneChocco readers who live in Melbourne and are free to attend either the Thursday night opening of the ‘Taste of Melbourne’  (5.30 – 9.30pm; just in time for din-dins and nibblies after work) or the two sessions on Friday 27th August.

Worth $30 each at the door, save yourself sixty bucks by taking yourself and a friend along courtesy of GoneChocco and Green and Black’s. There’ll be meals done by some of Melbourne’s most respected and innovative restaurants; heaps of stalls by dedicated wine makers, cheese importers, chocolate makers, gourmet tastings a-plenty and cooking demonstrations.

Simply send an email to kath@gonechocco.com with your name and telephone contact details by no later than lunchtime on Wednesday 25th.  First four emails that make me smile get to go. Unfortunately, this offer is only available to people who can make their own way to Melbourne……

There are eleven varieties of Ritter Sport available in Australia imported by Rosco Foods and today I thought I’d sink my choppers into the four blocks that feature hazelnuts.

I’ve pondered before how European chocolatiers (and purchasers, obviously) lurrrvve their hazelnuts, so it’s no surprise that Ritter feature them so heavily.

We’ve got Raisins & Hazelnuts, Praline, White Chocolate with Whole Hazelnuts and Whole Hazelnuts. This’ll be a bit of a test for me because whilst I don’t mind hazelnuts, I don’t love them.

Here’s what I call my chocolate ‘porn’ shot, when their clothes are off.

For blocks that have travelled in a container ship, stored in a warehouse, posted to me and then taken out and admired a few times, they’ve stood up pretty well with a nice sheen, especially on the praline block.

The Raisins & Hazelnuts block is more-ish. Particularly so when it’s morning tea time and the stomach is rumbling. Containing 17% raisins and 7% hazelnut pieces, it’s fruity and crunchy which is just what you expect. And want.

The white chocolate block doesn’t have info on cocoa content (the milk blocks all contain 30%) but it does have a few rice crispies thrown in amongst the super sweet creaminess of the chocolate and the crunch of the nuts which adds another dimension. Again, like the whole ‘we love hazelnut’ thing, I’ll say again that white chocolate (esp when coating something or with another ingredient) isn’t the evil desecration I used to think it was.

Whole hazelnut block is, I’m guessing, one of Ritter Sport’s biggest sellers. It’s what the average European punter wants – milk chocolate and hazelnuts. Ritter Sport delivers; no surprises, no fancy bits, just an honest block and fair enough.

Finally, the praline. Praline in this instance is a smooth hazelnut paste filling that I found immensely sweet (and therefore only managed two squares compared to four of the other three types) but Sapphire adored it. “It’s creamy and goes well with the chocolate so that you can’t tell where the praline ends and the milk begins,” she said. Hmmm, I think she’s starting to give me a run for my money!

I’ve seen these sitting on the shelves at Target and some supermarkets, read that they were made in China and put them back on the shelf.

Perhaps a few other punters have done so as well, because they’ve since been heavily discounted. Even so, I could only bring myself to buy their tiny 50 gram box.

Reading the back shows that they’re made in China from Australian-grown macadamias coated in Belgian chocolate. 8th Sin therefore seems to be a brand owned by Suncoast Gold, based in Gympie, Qld. Despite this, there’s no mention of ‘8th Sin’ on their website so it either needs updating or they’re taking a ‘wait and see if these kick off’ approach first.

What they do tell us is that they’re “the leading flavoured macadamia nut supplier in Australia. We process, value add and supply the finest quality macadamia nuts throughout the world…….. Our head office and processing facility are in Gympie, a thriving gold mining town on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia. The Gympie region is the centre of the original habitat of the native macadamia tree.

Macadamia nut shells, when combusted, yield an enormous amount of energy. In 2003, Suncoast Gold Macadamias, in co-operation with Ergon Energy, installed a state of the art power plant which uses previously discarded macadamia shells to generate enough ‘green electricity’ to power around 1,200 Queensland homes every year. This in turn reduces greenhouse gases by 9,500 tonnes annually, which is equivalent to taking more than 2,000 cars off the road every year.”

That’s pretty worthy, right?  And yet they’re happy to send their nuts overseas to a Chinese firm presumably to save money on coating their nuts in chocolate and popping them into pretty boxes….. Hmmm, will the real Suncoast Gold stand up?

Fifty grams gives you four rather nice looking chocolates – two mostly milk, one mostly dark and the other one mostly white.  They’ve survived the boat trip from China surprisingly well and it is reassuring to note that there are no scary ingredients listed on the back of the box.

The macadamias are small (maybe sliced in half?) but taste super crunchy with what tastes like a tiny layer of toffee around them, and they in turn sit in a ganache filling underneath the chocolate layer. The chocolate – all three types – is rather nice and I’m guessing it’s Barry Callebaut’s Asian-made version that still cheekily calls itself ‘Belgian’ chocolate solely because it’s owned by a Belgian company.*

So, I’m in a bind. They’re clearly made OS to save money but use Australian grown macadamias that are sent overseas and  back here for us to buy.  That’s a lot of food miles……. whatever green house gases they’ve saved in Australia from combusting maca shells must surely be eaten up (and more) from factory processes and shipping from China? Actually I’m not in a bind at all – I won’t be buying these again because there are many local chocolatiers in Australia who’d quite happily coat these nuts and make it an entirely Australian product.

What do you think?  Three different nations (China, Belgium and Australia) involved in a cheap and rather nice-tasting treat for us to enjoy down under or a cynical rip off that costs us in jobs and environmental impacts instead?

* I’m more than happy to post a correction to this assumption if someone can provide me with more accurate information.

On a more light-hearted note my review on the new New Lindt Swiss Gold White with Almond included a comment on how LOLcats are taking over the world. This got the attention of the Online Education organisation, who told me that they have developed a pictorial history of LOLcats that’s worth a look (it’s bigger and more detailed than the picture on the left).