Gone Chocco

 

Camille Bloch are famous not only for their Ragusa and Torino blocks but also their liqueur chocolates. Now liqueur and chocolate seems to divide people as much as ginger and chocolate does, but I’ve always loved the combination ever since the first time I tried a cherry liqueur from a Red Tulip assorted box in the 1970s. I coughed ’til I blushed but I like ‘em like I do my men: Long, Cool and Strong. Still do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, to have these imported into Australia by Premier Food and Beverages just in time for Easter (or anytime really; who am I kidding), was a total bonus.

And the inviting smell as I opened the packets….!

Alrighty; let’s get their gear off…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now nude, they were smelling even more inviting…..

….so I started off with the Cognac. The actual liqueur is 11% of the total 20 gram egg, so I’d keep these away from the kids (and maybe even nanna if she’s not to be trusted) and eat them yourself.

The Cognac is a confidently hefty partner to the sweetness of the milk chocolate (no cocoa percentages given).

The next – my all-time boozy favourite – was the cherry liqueur, comprising 12% of the chocolate. This is certainly enough to make its presence felt and make the taster (ie me) realise that the humble fruit can pack quite a punch when left to ferment awhile. The chocolate then calmly soothes the taste buds after the stringency of the liqueur has temporarily flattened them.

Finally, the Williams – a pear liqueur. This is the only egg that needs the sugar crust between the chocolate and the alcohol to prevent leakage. And for once, I didn’t mind, because the pear is STRONG. Eye-wateringly strong, so a bit of sugar does a lot to add an extra dimension to the fun-but-fullsome flavour-fest dancing wildly in my mouth.

These three are the Holy Trinity of naughty chocolates and if anyone wants to dare (and fund) me to see how many I can eat before the floor comes up to meet my face, just let me know!

 

We all know about the popularity of Easter Bilbies in Australia and how they made us aware of the need to help preserve their endangered species. These days there are also chocolate pandas, Murray cod, koalas and frogs of various shapes and sizes available with the same intentions. I don’t think the wombat is endangered but it’s out as an Easter treat and looked rather cute.  

Pink Lady chocolates have made Easter bilbies for years and their beautifully wrapped bright green tree frogs have often just ‘found themselves’ by my cup of coffee whenever I’m in a cafe, but this year I think it’s time to give their wombat a try.

For some reason, I think the wombat is a ’she’ and she’s looking a bit apprehensive as I snap greedily away at her face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve often likened my chocolate reviewing and photography to being ‘porn’ in that it involves an unskilled camera person (ie me), backyard operations (ie my house) and a requirement to get completely naked (ie the wombat)……

 

 

 

 

 

 

……. and be prepared to be photographed ala Nudey Rudey for the chocolate world to see. In all it’s decadently delicious, salivatingly salacious glory. See, just like porn.

This wombat is deceptively large because it looks smaller than the Bilby that Pink Lady also make or when lined up next to some of the foiled rabbits out there but it weighs 100 grams and has a very nice thick shell.

The chocolate has 27% minimum cocoa solids and at first bite/chew/suck/melt has a muddy and slightly gluggy feel which, despite the use of those words, isn’t a bad thing. This strength counteracts the sugar (which is almost half of the ingredients) and allows the strong condensed milk-like creaminess to slowly come through as the chocolate warms up and starts to flow across the tongue.

I had poor Ms Wombat’s rump section with a glass of freshly-made iced coffee and the bitterness of the drink was a good partner to the sticky caramel-ish fun of the chocolate.

A lot of bang for your buck, or, in wombat terms, Mucho Marsupial for minimal Moolah.

 

With only days – or hours, if you’re counting down like I am – dear, sweet Oliver from Premier Food and Beverages sent me these babies just in time. 

Ragusa is made by Camille Bloch and happens to be Switzerland’s most popular chocolate, so the 25g bundles these bunnies are carrying would make a lovely little gift.

But wait, there’s more:

Ragusa is also made into 20 gram easter eggs! Available in bags of six, I was eager to get into one. Or six:

Two halves mean that there’s a bigger taste of the dark, sweet and oily chocolate before tasting the creamy praline centre that is studded with tiny (and superbly crunchy) pieces of hazelnut.

The traditional block looks more a ’slice’ arrangement with a very thin layer of chocolate (harking back to cocoa shortages during WW2 that were necessary but also serendipitously produced the Swiss classic still loved today) so the eggs give you a big percentage of chocolate to filling which I prefer. Purists – or sentimental and homesick Swiss folk – may disagree.

Ragusa’s baby brother, the Torino, is also released in Easter egg form:

In my excitement and delight I forgot (blush blush) to take a photo of a Torino egg ala nude before scoffing it.

You’ll just have to trust that it too is in two halves but the chocolate is lighter and milkier (neither version reveals the percentage of cocoa solids) and the centre is a hazelnut creme with the texture of a Lindor ball. No crunchy bits; just all soft and richly buttery. 

These are available in most The Chocolate Box shops, some selected IGAs, The Sweet Shop, Sweet Success, Rita’s Coffee and Nuts and several fine food merchants. Otherwise, contact Premier Food and Beverages direct. These eggs are most definitely worth tracking down.

 

I haven’t seen too much seasonal stuff from Mars – their Christmas offerings were just plain M&Ms with the two characters in Christmas outfits on the front, but these eggs looked tempting when I was shopping at lunchtime and feeling hungry.

And when partnered up with a glass of home made iced coffee* it looked like the perfect lunch for a Choc Goddess.

The flavours include mini Mars, maltesers, milky way, strawberry-flavoured milky way and some kind of vaguely brownish-fudge milky way. No culinary delights here but there’s variety and perhaps 0.01% of the total fat and calories is burnt off just by trying to find the tiny fiddly little thin foil seam of each egg  in order to unwrap them.

There’s 25% minimum cocoa solids in the chocolate but it’s scary-swweeeeeeet. So sweet my fillings started to reverberate and then I gulped my iced coffee too quickly and got a sharp little brain freeze to force me back into reality.

The back of the pack tells me that these little eggs were made in Belgium. Perhaps, like Mars’ Confectionery’s peanut M&Ms, the Australian factories don’t have the equipment to crush up maltesers and pump little blobs of flavoured filling into tiny eggs. 

These are a naughty little treat, depending on how many of them you eat. I wouldn’t give them to anyone as a gift (not anyone I was particularly fond of, anyway), but to unload a bag or two into a bowl and share them in front of a movie during the Easter weekend would be perfectly acceptable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* It’s only homemade because I. Just. Can’t. drink Big M iced coffee. Farmer’s Union has made its way over the border, but there’s no Feel Good Iced Coffee.  Hence, my own made with freshly ground and brewed coffee beans, skinny milk and left to sit in the freezer for an hour before dumping a few ice cubes in.

 

So. Much. Easter. Chocolate….

So little time left to review it!

Now for regular readers who are a bit confused, there are two branches of Heritage chocolate. One is the prestige range developed by the award-winning Andy Van den Broeck that includes the sensational dark chocolate coffee block, and the other is their cheaper seasonal range, such as these bunnies.

As you can see, you’re certainly not paying for fancy packaging so regardless of the quality of the chocolate, if you want to impress someone with these take them out of the bag, pronto.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See, they look better already, don’t they? Insanely happy smiles and irrepressible cheeriness which means they’re ready to strip naked and eat!

But wait, wait…. let’s read the back, shall we? Sigh, yes, the dreaded vegetable fat is included, but it is in fifth place behind sugar, full cream milk, cocoa mass and cocoa butter, so let’s choose not to be too negative. Plus, the milk chocolate has 24% minimum cocoa solids (are you listening, Cadbury? Oh ye of only 21 percent?).

And they taste eerily similar to the afore-panned Cadbury Dairy Milk. Very, very similar. But much cheaper.

The choice is yours – cheaper but made in China, or more expensive and made in Australia. Over to you.

 

My husband – fondly known to my regular readers as ‘Love Chunks’ – adores Cadbury Caramello family blocks of chocolate.  This is why Sapphire decided to buy him a four pack of their Caramello Creme Eggs as a treat.  Or maybe it was a bribe, I’m not sure.

I was therefore assuming that he might save me one to photograph and review.  Alas, scarcely 48 hours after he received the bag, I opened up the cupboard under our sink and found this:

Oh.  So no self control or sharing then. I’d just have to go and find my own:

Now I’ll be honest and admit that I enjoy a Caramello Koala occasionally but never reach for the family block when it’s on sale (Old Gold, Berry Pannacotta and Creme Brulee are another matter), so I wasn’t too excited about trying these.  I had a cup of green tea on hand to counteract what I anticipated was going to be a huge sugar hit leaving my mouth feeling drier than a camel’s clacker.

They’re clearly modelled on the original Creme Egg, one of my all time favourite and enduring naughty chocolates, even as far as the star design thingy in the middle.

I left the Caramello egg out of the fridge so that the chocolate would go all soft and sticky before cutting it.  Oh who am I kidding… I bit into it!

Because it was impossible to peel off the foil neatly enough to read any of the ingredients listed, I’m going to assume that the caramel inside is exactly the same as that found in the koalas and family blocks.  It is sweet of course, but thankfully not eye-poppingly so and being ‘freer’ in terms of less chocolate around it made it easier to taste the caramel on its own.  It was darker and deeper somehow; with more discernible toffee and treacle notes.  Pretty poncy observations for a caramello egg but I couldn’t get over how much I enjoyed it.

This is the best form in which to enjoy the caramello filling as a star on its own.  Still even I could only eat one egg in one sitting (and I’ve been known to eat four Creme eggs in a single afternoon), so maybe the $1.45 per egg price is good value in that the 39 grams it whallops your taste buds and stomach with is absolutely enough.

 

I’ve seen ‘Go Natural’ products in the health food and meusli bar aisles of the supermarket before, but these Easter Bunnies were shyly hiding amongst the glitzier Lindt, Hillier’s, Chocolatier, Cadbury, Nestle, Red Tulip and Ferrero offerings.

Lactos- free would be fairly simple because most ’serious’ dark chocolate has no milk powder is included but the No Added Sugar bunny intrigued me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheerful little critters, aren’t they?  No prizes for guessing that the lactose-free is the dark one on the right.

As is traditional for eating Easter bunnies, I bit their ears off first. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This didn’t affect their cheery manner one bit!

First up: the lactose-free one.  It has a ‘fresh’ taste that reminds me a bit of raw chocolate (which tastes like a heap of tiny particles pressed together, rather than melted and blended). There were hints of coffee and vanilla and a slightly gritty texture.  At first I assumed that the grit was due to the high cocoa solids content but the ingredients reveal that it only has 20% cocoa solids.  This is very puzzling considering that Cadbury Dairy Milk has at least 21%.  However, on my second mouthful I realised just how sweet it is.  Incredibly so.  So sweet that a glass of water was needed and, sure enough, it’s first on the list of ingredients which might also explain why the cocoa content is so low.  Maybe too, the ‘flavour’ (listed last) adds a depth to the chocolate that the cocoa solids don’t.  This is probably going to be far too sweet for any real dark chocolate aficionados out there but could certainly satisfy someone who needs to avoid lactose but pines for the sweet milk chocolate they’re no longer allowed to have.

Second: the No Added Sugar bunny.  Fear not, this fella is also sweet – but not as saliva-suckingly-so as the lactose-free bunny because the first ingredient is Maltitol.  

Wikipedia defines Maltitol as: a sugar alcohol (a polyol) used as a sugar substitute. It has 75-90% of the sweetness of sucrose (table sugar) and nearly identical properties, except for browning. It is used to replace table sugar because it has fewer calories, does not promote tooth decay and has a somewhat lesser effect on blood glucose. …..Maltitol does not brown and caramelize after liquifying by exposure to intense heat. It is not metabolized by oral bacteria, so it does not promote tooth decay. It is somewhat more slowly absorbed than sucrose which makes it somewhat more suitable for people with diabetes than sucrose.’  That doesn’t sound too alarming to me, but the Go Natural website still has a FAQ section where it seems like the bunny used to have aspartame in it.  Either that’s now out of date or it’s another rabbit they’re talking about….?

Anyhow, I’ll take my lab coat off and get back into the chocolate.  Cocoa butter and milk powder are the next ingredients and these are certainly evident in the way the chocolate tastes – very buttery and thick, with strong hints of fresh cream.  There’s no mention of the cocoa percentage though, so I suspect it is lower than the ‘lactose free’ amount of 20%.  This one – let’s just call it milk chocolate – is perfectly nice, but if you’re able to eat sugar, then continue to do so, because the warning on the back of this box says: ‘Excess consumption of this food may have a laxative effect.’   I’m sure you’d have to eat about a hundred of them before there’s any need to dash to the dunny but they taste fine and would be a nice gift for anyone who can’t have sugar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, after the end of my review, the bunnies were no longer laughing.

 

Receiving an egg that is roughly the same size as a Sherrin football is always a good thing and my two guest taste testers – Carly and Amelie – were very impressed.

After a hard day at school, who doesn’t want to get stuck into 300 grams of milk chocolate studded with smashed honeycomb pieces?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plus, the thrill of ’smashing’ an egg this size is not to be underestimated:

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today, however, it had been unseasonally warm and sticky, so the egg just sort of sighed and sagged instead of splitting open with a theatrical SMACKing sound.

But how does the Newman’s Honeycomb Crunch egg taste?

“Yeah, it’s……okay,” Carly ventures.  “It’s nice and milky and very sugary and the crunchy bits could be bigger so that I can really taste them.”

Six year old Amelie was less forthright, choosing simply to shrug her shoulders. 

The chocolate contains 29% cocoa solids, with sugar and milk powder ahead of cocoa mass in the ingredients list and comprises 95% of the egg.  The honeycomb is therefore only 5% of the egg (’Math’ and ‘Kath’ are rarely friends) and felt ever-so-slightly soggy.  I’m prepared to concede that the humidity on tasting day would not have helped matters but Newman’s could perhaps consider adding some crunchier pieces and more flavoursome honeycomb so that it’s more like a Bertie Beetle on steroids than a struggle to work out if it’s honeycomb or just some tiny pieces of indistinguishable nut hidden in the chocolate.

The day after tasting, I – as is my craving at morning tea time – had another try. The remains of the egg had been in the fridge and the honeycomb was distinctly crunchier and ultimately easier to reach in for another segment, another cracked bit there, a rounded bit there…….  I still think the honeycomb pieces could be bigger, but if this egg stays refridgerated it’s awfully easy to enjoy in large quantities.

 

I have always enjoyed Newman’s ‘treat’ bars – especially their ginger ones – and always snap them up when they appear at my beloved and cluttered little corner shop.  I’d never tried their Cherry Coconut Treat (read: version of Cherry Ripe) but it looked inviting when there were two of them sitting alongside an Easter Egg.

It’s a bit of shame, therefore, that when I turned the box over to get the goodies out, the largest chunk of text was the ingredients.  If you don’t count the colours and flavour numbers separately, you’re still looking at twenty seven different ingredients for the bar filling and the actual dark chocolate.

Granted, around half of those are just for the glace cherries and the imitation cherries, but who knew that it’d be so complicated?

Eating just one fifty gram bar will give you 10.5 grams of fat which – when compared to what other similar-sized chocolate bars can dish out – isn’t so bad….

….and I do like cherries….

….and their Arabica bean egg the other day was a sensation….

….and when the egg is finally unwrapped and I’ve had that first, tentative bite into the bar and sampled the moist and sweet cherry filling….

….and you can actually taste and see the coconut and cherries and then appreciate the dark chocolate on the outside….

….so all is forgiven.

The chocolate egg (60g) and the coating of the bars contain a minimum of 53% cocoa solids and it is not as sickly sweet as you’d assume.  I think that Newman’s have wisely let the cherries and coconut provide the sugar hit which then allows the chocolate to have an earthier, thicker flavour that provides a nice counter balance.

As such, the  first ingredient in the actual chocolate is not sugar, but cocoa mass, with no other weird ingredients to be concerned about.   If marketed correctly, this bar – and the dark chocolate – should give Cherry Ripe and Cadbury’s Old Gold a run for their money.

 

I have loved Chocolatier’s unfoiled eggs since first laying eyes on them around 1996. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To me, they’ve always epitomised elegance by simply allowing the chocolate itself to be the decoration.

The six pack of their beautiful Easter Eggs is Chocolatier’s biggest selling Easter product – they make around 900,000 of these eggs every year but I wouldn’t be surprised if they crack the million mark in 2011.

Speaking of ‘cracking’, it’s exactly what I don’t feel like doing to these six little lovelies.  It feels like I’d be behaving like a disrespectful and mindless vandal, destroying these:

 

 

 

 

 

I take longer than I need to arranging them and photographing them, delaying the inevitable.  I feel mean: what have they done to deserve being smacked flat? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have, from left to right – Abstract Orange, Strawberries & Cream, Pure Dark, Toffee Crunch, Pure White and Abstract Heaven (milk chocolate).  Still exercising a holier-than-thou attitude and self control, I read the back of the box and note that the white chocolate contains a minimum of 28% cocoa solids, the milk has 34% and the dark has a respectable 53%.

Time to put my reservations aside and BITE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Toffee Crunch got the chomp first.  Lovely creamy Belgian milk chocolate with tiny crunchy pieces of toffee to suck and nibble as the chocolate melts…..  Then the Abstract Orange with its own version of sweet orange-flavoured crunchy bits that enhance the chocolate and make me reach for the Pure Dark, revelling its strong and cocoa-intense, uncomplicated flavour.  I save the Strawberries & Cream for Sapphire (having already enjoyed the larger version), and the Pure White and reach for the Abstract Heaven to finish off with another (pretty looking) hit of milky brilliance.

I should have behaved like a Kalahari bushman and thanked the eggs for the joy they were about to provide before I inhaled them, but I, um, forgot.  THANK YOU, my pretties!