Valentine Chocolate

Now that we've all had a chance to heal after Valentine's Day, I think it's time to reflect back on what was good about that week. Ok, ok, I realize that not all of you despise the holiday. Actually, my February 14th wasn't so bad either, because I chose that day to go pick out my new iPhone. My V-Day, was, in fact, awesome.

In any case, earlier that week I got a box of chocolates from Google Earth Evangelist's sister, SOGEE (Thank you!). It wasn't actually a Valentine gift, but it was definitely a nice gift. I've written about B.T. McElrath chocolates before and they are still truly wonderful.

This dark chocolate lemon cream was no exception. The passionfruit ones are still my favorite, though, and I intend to order several boxes of them someday.

I did get a Valentine gift from my Most Faithful Reader. Dark chocolate covered orange peel, particularly Leonidas, is my favorite candy and if I'm not careful, I can get carried away with eating it.

This may not seem shocking to many readers, but I'm the sort of person who can eat just one small piece of candy a day even if I'm sitting next to a entire bucket of it, as is the case at work. I don't generally eat snacks. I just don't even think of it. This may be related to its rarely occuring to me to take an analgesic when I have a headache. I'm hungry. You mean I can do something about that?

Dark chocolate covered orange peel, however, isn't too strong, too sweet or too rich. It's just right.

Matthew's Chocolates

I knew immediately that Matthew's Chocolates was my kind of store as soon as I got in the door. All of the chocolate in the display case was dark chocolate. It's a tiny shop, sandwiched between the Wooden Nickel and Gulf Rim Cafe, but it's "choc" full of flavor. In addition to chocolate, he sells coffee and iced tea.

After we finally decided which kinds we wanted to try first and the candies were weighed, Matthew put the chocolate in these nifty baggies.

These are some of Matthew's signature chocolates, berry cremes. These beautiful chocolates were very good. That's an understatement.

I chose "mendiants", which are chocolate discs, each with a piece of dried fruit on top. We also bought a few pieces of chocolate covered orange peel and chocolate covered ginger. There were many other kinds of chocolate available, some of which had already sold out for the day. There were several different kinds of nut-filled barks that looked delicious.

Here you can see the ginger, which was extremely juicy, soft, mild in flavor and covered in a thick layer of chocolate. Matthew's Chocolates opened about five months ago and I'm so glad it did. You wouldn't believe how excited I am about the new and wonderful shops, restaurants and other exciting destinations that have recently opened and are about to open in downtown Hillsborough, just five minutes from my house.

B.T. McElrath Artisan Chocolates

Sister Of Google Earth Evangelist (SOGEE) just got back from Minneapolis and she brought back some B.T. McElrath artisan chocolates for me.

According to their website, they are trying to "create a WOW! experience" every time you taste one. I think they've achieved that. Their truffles are extremely interesting and very good.

This one combines passion fruit mousse with layers of white and 60% dark chocolate. It's amazing. I could eat half a dozen in minutes with no problem. It tastes ten times as good as it looks and it's very pretty.
I haven't tried this one yet, but it's a kaffir lime truffle with coconut and ginger.

This is certainly the cutest truffle and it has a very unusual and delicious taste. It's dark chocolate with a soft chocolate center, flavored with zinfandel and aged balsamic (vinegar?).

It's all I can do to keep myself from finding out what the remaining three taste like, but this will give me something to look forward to, tomorrow night.

Thank you, SOGEE!

Vosges Caramel Toffee

For the next installment of Vosges Haut-Chocolate, I opened the box of caramel toffee. It comes in this nice purple heart box. Perhaps this is a good choice if you've wounded your valentine?

The toffee is in a plastic bag, tied with more purple ribbon.

The large pieces of toffee are made from roasted pecans, walnuts, sweet butter toffee, pink Himalayan sea salt and milk chocolate. It tastes great. Do watch your teeth if they or your fillings are at all fragile.

The hot chocolate will have to wait until this weekend, because it will keep me awake if I drink it on a weeknight. I'll definitely be looking forward to it.

Library of Chocolate

For our next exploration of Vosges Haut-Chocolat, it's time to try the "An Aphrodisiac Library of Chocolate Love Spells". In other words, this is a sampler pack of half ounce chocolate bars. Note that each bar is 1/6 of the weight of a full-sized bar.

The chocolate bars are terribly cute and are basically miniature versions of their full-sized bars. There are five different kinds and four duplicates.

The five kinds of bars:

• Barcelona - 41% cacao with hickory smoked almonds, grey sea salt and deep milk chocolate. This was probably the one I liked the least, but I did like it. It was just the saltiest.
• Black Pearl - 55% cacao with ginger, wasabi, black sesame seeds and dark chocolate. This was very good. The ginger and wasabi were very mild and the sesame seeds added a nice texture.
• Naga - 41% cacao with sweet Indian curry, fresh coconut and deep milk chocolate. I tried this last and it tasted very sweet after trying all of the others. The coconut and curry are great in this.
• Oaxaca - 75% cacao with guajillo and pasilla chillies and Tanzanian bittersweet chocolate. This was probably my favorite or at least tied for best. It was the spiciest and the chillies almost tasted slightly fruity to me. It left my tongue with a mild burn, which was pleasant. This was, by far, the best bar of any brand I've tried with such a high cacao content.
  
• Red Fire - 55% cacao with Mexican ancho and chipotle chillies, Ceylon cinnamon and dark chocolate. This has been my favorite bar for a long time, because I love the combination of the cinnamon and the peppers. It's the perfect level of spiciness.

All in all, I would highly recommend this as a Valentine's gift. It's not frou-frou and it will give your valentine informed choices, without their having to bite into a nightmarish cream-filled center unawares.

Flaming Heart

Here's the Vosges Haut-Chocolat "Flaming Heart". It's white chocolate with lemon zest and pink peppercorns. I am not normally a fan of white chocolate at all, but this is very good. The lemon zest is a nice touch and the peppercorns are great. It's pretty firm at room temperature. I put a third of my strength into breaking off a piece and the tip went flying across the room. The 30 second rule should definitely be enforced if it's chocolate.

Eating Chocolate for the Good of the Glob

I received another generous shipment of Vosges Haut-Chocolat samples in the mail today! As some of you will recall, PW sent me quantities of bacon chocolate back in October. In the days ahead, I will be reporting on the wide variety of chocolates shown above, including white chocolate with black pepper, caramel toffee, the bar sampler and three different types of hot chocolate. I will make sure you are prepared with knowledge you need for buying (yourself) chocolate for Valentine's Day. Believe me, I am looking forward to tasting all of these goodies for your benefit.

Vosges Haut-Chocolat: Mo's Bacon Bars!

Some of you may remember that I wrote, earlier in the summer, that Vosges Haut-Chocolat was offering a new line of bacon chocolate bars and that an employee of the company, PW, had read my blog post and was going to send me a sample.

Fortunately, she waited until this week to send me some, because it would have melted in the in the horribly hot weather that we had all summer. I was expecting a small sample. I would have been thrilled with half a bar, just to get a taste of what Mo's Bacon Bar was like. What I received was a treasure trove of exotic chocolates. She sent me four Mo's Bacon Bars, a box of exotic caramels and half a pound of Sweet Bapchi's Caramel Toffee! Wow!

The Mo's Bacon Bars are really quite good. They are a "deep milk chocolate" and are 41% cacao. The bacon flavor and lightly crunchy texture is not subtle, but it's not so strong to the point of being overwhelming. I really like it. I'm afraid I've already had several pieces. This is definitely the chocolate for those of you who like the combination of sweet and savory.

I took a nibble of the caramel toffee and that was excellent. I have to watch my teeth on those, though, because they are pretty hard. They are good sized pieces of sweet butter toffee, with pecans, walnuts, milk chocolate and pink Himalayan sea salt.

The box of exotic caramels contains each of the following:

• Argentine dulce de leche with cashews and milk chocolate caramel
• Canadian maple sugar, walnuts and dark chocolate caramel
• Blood orange, Campari, dark chocolate and hibiscus powder caramel
• Tupelo honey, milk chocolate and bee pollen caramel

So far, I tried a bite of the blood orange caramel. The citrus flavor is very mild, but caramel is wonderful. The hibiscus powder on top adds just a hint of tartness, which is a nice touch.

I definitely appreciate PW's sending this to me. Vosges's Red Fire bar may still be my favorite, but these new flavors are awesome. Yes, as I know some of you are wondering, I will be taking some to the office...

Showing Off My Impeccable Taste

As is probably hard not to notice, I've added a bunch of Amazon ads to my site. I've actually had loads of fun with this. If I'd been clueful enough to realize that one can put up ads the products of one's choosing, then I would have done this years ago. These are products that I use and like.

For example, I have an ad for Leonidas dark chocolate covered orange peel. I certainly don't care whether or not you buy it from Amazon. If you live near Durham, I strongly encourage you to support your local businesses and buy it from the chocolate counter in Parizade. That's what I do, unless I am shipping it to someone directly. The point is, if you like dark chocolate, please try this chocolate, because in my opinion it's the best dark chocolate covered orange peel available and I've tried a lot of different kinds.

Many of my readers can tell you that I can talk for a good twenty minutes about how I think that Duke's mayonnaise is the only mayo worth buying. Some people have never heard of it, but I have even craved it! Now you can see what the bottle looks like so you can try it out the next time you go to your local supermarket, because I'm assuming that you won't want to buy a whole gallon from Amazon.

In addition to adding a little more color to the site, it's fun showing off which music I think is the best. If they are compilations, they are the ones that I have and like the best or the ones that have the highest percentage of my favorite songs.

Objects in the Mirror...Wait.. What Mirror?

Ok, I have a lot of news to report!

First and foremost, I received actual e-mail from N. Todd. Wow. That may surpass my meeting Itzhak Perlman when I was 6.

A couple of days ago, I got e-mail from PW, at Vosges, who read my post about their new line of bacon chocolate, and is sending me a free sample! That's is very exciting, indeed. I will report as soon as I taste it, or perhaps even while I'm tasting it.


Last night I went to a new restaurant, Piazza Italia, in Brightleaf Square. I believe it's where the old CD store, Millenium Music, used to be. One of fine characteristics of the restaurant is that it's connected to their gelato store. The restaurant is also huge and nicely decorated. I ordered Mezzaluna Al Zafferano, which was effectively ravioli filled with shrimp and salmon mousse in a creamy saffron sauce. It was delicious. For dessert, we shared a serving of gelato with three flavors: green apple, pineapple and kiwi. The pineapple and the kiwi were the best and had the strongest flavors. The prices seemed reasonable and I look forward to going there again. Somehow I had completely missed that they have a spinach salad with "large chunks of lobster sautteed in a warm buttery garlic sauce" for only $11.


Today, when I left work, I was startled to see that my parking tag had fallen off. It took me several seconds to notice that my entire rear view mirror was also no longer there! My van has really good side mirrors and I didn't really miss it until I passed a bicyclist on 751 and looked up to see if I could see him him behind me. Oops.. Well, I didn't hear anything unusual.

Pirates III and Bacon Chocolate

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean III last night. It still wasn't as good as the first one, but it was much better than the second one. It still needs major editing. After two hours, I was wishing it would end. One interesting aspect is that I think Keith Richards looks less creepy as a pirate than he does normally.

Some of you will remember when I blogged about the bacon ice cream at Tayst, in Nashville. It was one of those "I am not making this up" blog posts. Thanks to the Amazon Daily blog, I discovered that Vosges is now making a bacon chocolate bar. Intriguing!

Music Appreciation

Today was a relatively good day.

First, HC brought in chocolates that AC made. They were truffles made with cayenne pepper, ginger and Grand Marinier. I ate two. I could have eaten many more and I usually only eat large quantities of dark chocolate covered orange peel. The truffles were my idea of a delicious and nutritious breakfast.

HC, CV, SM and I went to the Refectory for lunch, which was fun. I had black beans and rice, which is always good.

I went to my parents' for dinner and visited with FIFO. I swear he acts happier to see me every single time I go. Hopefully, the greeting ceremony won't get too much more dangerous. When I got back, I had a package from Amazon waiting for me. It was from my brother! That was very exciting, indeed. He got me four CDs from my wish list, Die Prinzen, Die Aertze, an Eagle's Greatest Hits and the Thompson Twins. The first two were ones that I listened to when I took German in college. I understood almost all of the lyrics back then. Now I can appreciate the actual music more.