The 6 oz chocolate that comes with a red bright box looks festive and ideal for gift giving. (Although I have no intention of giving it away to anybody.) I did, however, share them with a few friends who came over for dinner. It’s fun to see their expressions after biting into another chocolate covered cherry/ hazelnut. Oh yes, although there are 2 types of candies in the box, they look almost the same (see picture above), we have fun deciding if the one we were going to devour had cherry or hazelnut in it.

Taste wise, I would rate them 6.5/10. The dark chocolate isn’t as bitter as I would like my dark chocolate to be. One glimpse at the ingredient list on the box revealed that sugar is the main ingredient of the dark chocolate, instead of chocolate liquor.

Luckily the roasted hazelnuts and dried red sour cherries enrobed in the chocolate offer the crunch and slight tang to offset the sweetness of the chocolate. Overall, it’s a fun candy to have around the table, but it would have been nicer if the chocolate flavor was be more pronounced.

For more choices of Emily’s offerings, check out their website.

I love trying out artisan chocolates, so I was pretty excited when given the opportunity to review Lula’s “Assorted Chocolates” and “Aloha Rocky Road” not too long ago.

The assorted chocolates comes in an elegant brown box consisting of 12 different flavors, ranging from creme and nut clusters to caramel. Lula’s thoughtfully included a small note, which helped me to identify the chocolate I was about to devour.

I must say that it makes a very good first impresson on me. Unfortunately, that impression ended at the second I bit into the first piece of chocolate. According to the little note, it says Chocolate Creme. The flavor was flat and the overall impression can be summed up with a single word - Sweet! Just sweet. I tried another piece, namely the almond cluster. It was better with the dark chocolate and almond. But still too sweet for dark chocolate.

To be fair, the very thin layer of chocolate coating was smooth. I like the mouth feel when the chocolate hit my cavity. It exudes richness. But the second the chocolate melted, the sweetness of the fillings was overwhelming.  

Next, I embraced myself to try Lula’s Aloha Rocky Road. To my surprise, I actually liked the Aloha Rocky Road, which comes in two varieties: milk chocolate and dark chocolate. The one I tried was dark chocolate. It is the right size to hold in hand and munch away while reading on a cold day. I like the ingredients Lula selected in their Rocky Road bar. According to the wrapper, it’s handmade artisan marshmallows, Hawaiian house roasted macadamia nuts and premium chocolate. It is a much better experience than the overly sweet assorted chocolate box. The smoothness of the chocolate and the contrasting texture of soft marshmallow and crunchy macadamia nuts is addictive, and I certainly wouldn’t mind paying $5.95 for a bar of the Aloha Rocky Road.  

For other Lula’s offerings, see Joanna’s review on Lula’s Toffee on Sugar Savvy here.

And Rosa’s review on the milk chocolate Aloha Rocky Road here.

Last week, I had the pleasure sampling some interesting chocolates made by Chuao Chocolatier, a San Diego-based artisan chocolatier.

The concept, as written on the promotional pamphlet, is “to combine chocolate bar with bonbon, and offer a slim but satisfying chocolate decadence with less than 60 calories per serving”.

I was excited seeing the five little packets of exotic flavor combinations inside the square brown box. They did a good job in packaging as all the wrappers come with bright and cheerful color, pretty enticing to consumers like me, who are attracted to eye-catching packaging. I picked up the one with yellow wrapper for my first experience of ChocoPod. The flavor combination was banana brown sugar caramel in milk chocolate, aptly named Banana.

I must say that I was a bit disappointed after the initial excitement. Even though Chuao Chocolatier pride themselves with “using fresh and natural ingredients to create confections that arouse one’s senses with unusual, unexpected and delicious experiences,” I found the banana flavor in this ChocoPod to be more artificial than natural. And sure it’s unusual and unexpected, but certainly not in a positive way. It is really a tooth-aching-sweet experience.

The good news is, other than the Banana, the rest of the ChocoPods delivered what they promised.

The next ChocoPod I tried, Candela, was a dark chocolate with spicy macadamia praline. I liked the contrast of the silky smooth dark chocolate with the crunchy macadamia praline. The taste is pleasing - nutty and not too sweet. However, I didn’t detect even a faint hint of spiciness in the chocolate. Not really sure why they have to mention “spicy macadamia praline” on its wrapper at all.

Modena, which has strawberry and balsamic caramel in dark chocolate, tastes okay. It was certainly better than Banana, but I would have loved it more if they had packed in more strawberry flavor.

Passion is a dark chocolate with passion fruit caramel has a floral taste. It has nice constrast of sweet filling with bittersweet chocolate.

My favorite from the batch is Picante. It was a ChocoPod with spicy cabernet caramel in dark chocolate. The flavor is complex and unusual. And I like the spiciness that comes with it. Not overwhelming but enough to excite your senses. Also, it doesn’t have the kind of grainy texture one associates with chocolates with an alcohol-based filling.

To see other offerings from Chuao Chocolatier, go to their website at http://www.chuaochocolatier.com/.