Vosges Haute Chocolat - Barcelona Bar

Oh Vosges - how I love your exotic chocolate bars...
The Barcelona Bar is a favourite of mine - I have gotten it many times before.

It lures me in with the grey sea salt and hickory smoked almonds and makes me forget that it is not actually dark chocolate but deep milk chocolate.

When I notice this little detail, I sometime hesitate and debate getting another bar, a higher percentage, but then inevitably I give in and buy this one. And every time, I am reminded of how much I love this bar. Vosges' deep milk is so deep that it can almost make you forget that it is milk at all, but then, the incredibly melty smooth creamy chocolate dissolves in your mouth, leaving you with tiny nuggets of almond, minute crunchy crystals of salt and little doubt that this is indeed a milk chocolate.

I love this bar and it may be my favourite of the Vosges Exotic Candy bar collection, but then again, I have yet to try them all.

Cacao power: 4.5 beans Meltiness: 5 beans Flavour Complexity: 5 beans

Schoc Chocolates - Sweet Basil in Rich Dark Chocate

Well, with a name like that, how could I not be intrigued? This was the second of my set of three Schoc chocolate bars from Raymundo and Kiwi and it definitely lived up to my expectations.

The word that caught my eye on the cover (which was identical to the last one, but different days see different things, I guess): trinitario. Now, my first search result on this word really confused me, but I guess I shouldn't expect the urban dictionary help me with my chocolate decoding. A better result found it to be a type of cacao, developed in Trinidad.

This chocolate was excellent! The dark chocolate Schoc uses is 53% cacao mass, and melts so smoothly! The sweet basil is an excellent flavour combination with the chocolate, and hints every so subtly at the liquorice that basil sometimes has. It was the perfect after dinner chocolate, sweet without being too sweet, complex, smooth and overall just plain delicious.

Schoc describes this bar as such:

Sweet Basil...for all of the reasons that you do fresh basil

Cacao power: 4.5 Meltiness: 4.5 beans Flavour Complexity: 5 beans

Oh how I wish that I could try their Olive bar... *sigh*

Schoc Chocolates - Lemon White

One of the best rewards from owning an I.B.O.C.* is that friends visiting from far away remember this and often bring treats to restock it. My latest discovery came from Raymundo and Kiwi Kate, who were back visiting from New Zealand and brought us not one but three fabulous chocolate bars from a brand I'd never heard of: Schoc Chocolates - Real chocolate for real people.

The three bars were all intriguing flavours, two of them in a dark chocolate base, one in white chocolate. I'll describe the other two once I've gotten around to tasting them but today's review is Lemon White. This normally wouldn't have been the first one I would taste, because while white chocolate was a favourite of mine when I was much much younger, these days I lean more towards the darkest. But Big E chose this one to taste first and I was very pleasantly surprised.

But first things first: the tablets come in pouches covered in a variety of chocolate-related words, such as Mayan, Xocolatl, sensuous and... physio-physiology. Huh?
I'd seen the pouches before on Dolfin Chocolat tablets, and am quite fond of that particular style of packaging. Why? I'm not sure. There's something satisfying about the smoothness of the exteriour and how well it reseals once a piece or two are taken.

The flavour was excellent! Unlike other lemon chocolates I'd had before (which tend to use lemon rind and lemon oil for flavouring) this one uses bits of dried lemon. This makes for a surprising and very pleasing tartness that is the perfect contrast to the sweet rich creaminess of the white chocolate.

Schoc describes this flavour thusly:

Lemon...our own dried lemon in creamy white chocolate

The Cacao Power category is a tough one for white chocolate, so I'm going to make it not apply. That is not to say that this tablet wasn't packed with delicious cocoa butter... it's just different. However, dreamy creamy meltiness is much more easily achieved with the white chocolate. Lastly, the surprise factor of the real lemon makes the flavour do well in the complexity category, though I'd imagine that their lemon and cracked black pepper in dark chocolate is even more complex.

I look forward to trying the next two tablets, as well as hopefully many more visits from Ray and Kate...


Cacao power: n/a Meltiness: 5 beans Flavour Complexity: 4 beans


*International Basket (or Bowl or Box) of Chocolate

Chipotle Bar - Byrne & Carlson

The discovery of this chocolate (a week or so ago, during my first visit to Fog City News) has led me to create this new category for Le Fabuleux Destin: Chocolate reviews. I've always loved chocolate and had already been taking lovely little trips to Bittersweet and Café Cacao with some friends, but this chocolate is the first I've had that made me want to share it with the world! (The news that the chocolate, not the chocolate itself... I want to keep that to myself.)

The Chipotle Bar is described thusly:

Garnished with Sea Salt - 70 percent cacao. A robust bittersweet Venezuelan chocolate spiced with chipotle pepper and sprinkled with Welsh sea salt.

At first bite, I wasn't so sure I'd love it: it was quite hard and seemed dry but it quickly began a perfect, smooth slow melting. The sea salt on the top is delicate, not overwhelming and completely tantalizing. The chipotle is very subtle but definitely intriguing. I've tried my fair share of spicy chocolate, and this is by far the best I've had.

I now have to figure out how to categorize these chocolates. I have difficulty giving overall grades, so I think I'll break it down into characteristics I look for.

Cacao power: Intensity of the cacao. (I tend to like them dark and intense, so in general, higher percentage of cacao would rate higher)
Meltiness: This isn't always a factor of amount of cocoa butter used or cream... and sometimes darker chocolates can be meltier than milk chocolates.
Flavour Complexity: Not necessarily what spices are used... a lovely dark chocolate piece that has no additional spices can often be more complex than a multi-ingredient extravaganza.

So for this bar:
Cacao power: 5 beans Meltiness: 4.5 beans Flavour Complexity: 5 beans