Gone Chocco

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).

 

Having two Lindt Cafes in Melbourne now means that there are two other avenues to sniff out the blocks and varieties of Lindt that we KNOW are found freely in Europe but, cruelly, can be rarer than chicken lips here.

I found this little stunner at Chadstone:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tiramisu is one of my favourite desserts to eat and to make (I might one day be persuaded to share my never-fail, always-impressive recipe with you if you ask – nay, beg – nicely) and I even like the Cadbury Desserts version.

But Lindt always manage to find that extra ‘oomph’ when it comes to their chocolates and this is no exception. Plus, it’s 150 grams instead of the excellence-sized 100 grams so I was already excited.

The smell of coffee and cream hits the nostrils as soon as the foil was torn open and the lovely embossed segments always look so inviting. And dammit it all, Love Chunks and Sapphire were hovering (they spring to life at the sound of the first tearing of the cardboard flap at the back of the Lindt pack like our dog does when we plonk her dinner bowl on the sink), so I had to share.

Still, fifty grams of sweet milk chocolate filled with a thin but flavoursome layer of dark truffle, coffee cream and biscuit pieces (presumably instead of soaked sponge) was divine. We all agreed; and this was obvious when all that was uttered was a slightly-less-than-eloquent “Mmmm, mmm” instead of real words or critiques.  Each square was nibbled delicately to make it last longer when what I really longed to do was snatch the block and inhale it all myself.

The ingredients show that the milk chocolate has a respectable 30% minimum cocoa solids and – what a shame – no fat, saturated or sugar or any nutritional information at all is included, so we’ll eat without fear or guilt.

Unfortunately, the biscuit component of the block contains palm oil. Yes, the biscuit only makes up one percent of the whole block and it the oil is only a percentage of that one percent but it begs the question as to whether it is really needed and, with environmental and conservation issues now raging about the Orangutans in South East Asia, can’t they get rid of it and get rid of it SOON?

 

Who doesn’t like receiving a present in the mail, especially when it reveals a parcel as pretty as this?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside, I found two boxes of Waterthins Chocolate Selection biscuits. The box on the left are ‘Creme Delights’ and what looks like caramel oozing out is actually ‘cocoa nut creme’. The box on the right are Wafer Straws.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They were opened just in time for Mrs Krups to make my morning coffee and they had a delicious burnt-sugar- toffee smell that wafted up as I was leaning in to take a photograph.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Firstly, the Creme Delight. It has a pretty generously-thick disc of milk chocolate on the top (with a not-so-shabby 32% cocoa solids), covering their version of the creamy Tim Tam filling (also on par) and a fine-crumb base (hence the powdery stuff on the top of the chocolate) that is one of the best factory-made biccies I’ve eaten in a long time. Om nom nom, two biscuits down……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Onto the Wafer Straws. I’ll be honest right out and say that wafer has never really rocked my world. If I had to take ‘em or leave ‘em, I tend to walk off and not look back. As for these fellas, they were pretty wide to be a straw until I took a bite and realised that they were hollow – a couple of minutes earlier I could have tried slurping my coffee through one! The wafer in this is delightfully crisp and somehow holds up against the thickness of the chocolate and there’s a hint of hazelnut flavour lurking in the background as well. These are many many notches above your standard crap-wafer-and-thin-chocolate-gunk that’s normally available. Om nom nom, three more down…..

Okay, so I’ve established that I *love* the way they taste and have since seen them on the top shelf in the chocolate biscuit aisle at Woolworths (Tim Tams are at eye-level, so Waterthins are kind of hidden), so what’s the catch?  A couple, actually. Some of the ingredients don’t make for happy reading – there’s no hazelnut, it’s peanut paste; vegetable fat is in both biscuits and they’re made in Poland.

This is where, as a chocolate reviewer who wakes up every single morning with the first thought, “I want chocolate” before her face has even unfolded or her bladder emptied, I find myself in a dilemma. Utterly delicious and addictive vs vege fat and Poland.

Thoughts anyone?

…and while you’re thinking, click on the link below, complete a survey and be in the running to win a years’ supply of Belgian chocolate.