Late Chocolate Friday!

Ok, I was totally ready for Chocolate Friday, I really was. But then I fell asleep on the sofa. Damn thing just sucked me in. So here I am this morning with Chocolate Friday, so clooooose your eyes and pretend its Friday….

Today (Friday) I have a really simple one. I was in the store walking through the candy aisle where all the Valentine’s Day stuff is out (like it was right after Christmas). And I found Hershey’s Kissables. Kissables? Yes, they are tiny little Hershey’s kisses coated with candy so they don’t get all melty in your hands.

I know you are thinking that they are just like M&M’s and somebody stole there idea and all, but remember that M&M’s and Hershey are forever linked in history. Back in the day, Forest Mars wanted to sell his candy idea (M&M’s) but needed equipment and chocolate (chocolate and sugar were being rationed for the war (WW II). So he went to R. Bruce Murray who was president of Hershey at the time to set up a deal to make M&M’s (M for Mars, M for Murray). There’s lot of funny details about their meeting but the net upshot is that Mars M&M’s Hershey chocolate in them until the 1960’s, and both companies were intimately involved in the manufacturing of them. Kinda funny I always thought.

So anyway, I saw these in the store and had to try them. They are similar to M&M’s in consistancy, but the coating is definately inferior. It has a very blotchy appearance and pieces are odd shaped sometimes. I guess its only a temporary product for Valentine’s day because I couldn’t see them keeping it on the markt.

Oh, and something funny I read about them was that one of the benefits of having them in little “bites” is that it makes you eat more. The chocolate in it is intentionally “light”, so that eating one is not satifying enough and you instinctively want more. Forrest had no idea of this, but his descendents did, and they even did studies where they put a pound of the stuff on people’s desks at Hershey to see which formulations made they do more “grazing”. Twisted but clever.

The next item was given to me by a friend (hey look, a friend that doesn’t have a blog!). Its Vintage Chocolate’s Plantation Arriba chocolate. Its made from Ecuadorian beans, and it is not for the weak minded. This is 90% cacao. 90%. 9-0 Percent. A little bit of sugar, no vanilla added, no lecithin. No added cocoa butter. And no nut traces for allergic folks.

So this is an EXTREMELY dark chocolate. I expected it to taste like Baker’s baking chocolate, but it doesn’t. It has this funky floral, perfumey kind of taste when you first taste it. Then its just wildly dark and bizarre. Its not something I could eat a giant bar of at once because it is so dark, but one square at a time is very satisfying. If you need a chocolate hit, this is like the baseball bat that you are looking for.

I kinda got lost in who owns what in this company. Is Vintage Chocolate the name and Plantations is the brand? They refence the echocolates.com website so go there and have a look at what they have to offer. Somehow they are tied to the Rainforest Alliance which helps to cultivate sustainable cocoa production, among other things.

Ok that’s it for this week. Hope the running is going well for everyone out there. I have a 9 miler today in the snow. Gotta go find the Yaktrax. :)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 10:01 am and is filed under Chocolate Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.