Lambertz Peanut Mountains

Chocolate is of course common in Germany, and they cover all kinds of nuts with it. It's rare to find chocolate-covered peanuts, though, with the exception of M&Ms. Imagine my luck when I found 2 different types at a nearby PLUS store. They weren't even a special offer, so I'm hoping the next time I crave peanuts, they'll still be in stock.

These chocolate "Peanut Mountains" from Lambertz are great! More free-form than the American equivalent, they are also made with a better chocolate.

Lambertz itself is a company from Aachen, claiming a history back to 1688. One of its more recent claims to fame is that Lambertz's chief executive and chief socialite, Dr. Hermann Bühlbecker, attended Elton John's White Tie and Tiara Ball this year to support the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Dr. Bühlbecker is locally known as the "Keks-König" or "Cookie King." Photos
of Dr. Bühlbecker with miscellaneous celebrities, including Beckham, Richard Branson, Elle McPherson, Judy Dench, and many others. Plenty of pictures here.

They have a broad product line, and my husband especially loves their Domino-steine, a petit-fours type of cake. These particular candies are a good dark chocolate, with enough sweetness to offset the nutty flavor of the peanut, yet not giving up on a good chocolate flavor. "Mountains" may be a bit of an ambitious term, but they're delicious nonetheless.

Reviewed: Lambertz Erdnuss Berge
Personality: Noisy. They kept calling out to us until they were all gone.
How to enjoy: Go to the store, buy a bag, enjoy it. Don't try to keep them in the house, you'll just keep eating them.

Lambertz also has a factory outlet in Aachen. Check the webpage for more info.

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Germany: PLUS markets, and you can order some products online
USA: Look for grocery items with the labels "European Cookies" or "German Cookies"

Chocolate Wars: Gross, Xiocrolata, Ghirardelli

With so much dark chocolate floating around, it's time for a choolate war, this time with 3 different high percentage bars:

• Ghirardelli Dark 60%
• Xiocrolata 72%
• J.D. Gross Kul-Kul 78%

Like my last chocolate war, I'm judging based on smell, color, smoothness and taste. An excellent dark chocolate should have a rich taste, with a distinct aftertaste that is not bitter, and be quite smooth.

Here's how they stack up.

Smell
J.D. Gross and Ghirardelli come out on top, smelling distinctly like chocolate. The
Xiocrolata is just too mild to score highly.

Color
Gross is the clear winner here, with a rich dark color, and a nice sheen to match.

Smoothness
Ghirardelli edges out Xiocrolata edges by a hair.

Taste
This is tough. I can see where I would prefer either J.D. Gross or the Ghirardelli at
different times. It all depends on how much sweetness I'm in the mood for.
Ghirardelli is a little too sweet for my preference, but it's still quite good.

Winner:
J.D. Gross by a nose. Ultimately I prefer J.D. Gross' smell and taste over
the Ghirardelli.

Ghirardelli Dark 60%

I'm really piling on the dark chocolate this week! It doesn't melt quite as fast as milk chocolate, and it's my preferred intensity anyway.

This bar is quite pleasant, with a rich dark flavor. Nicely fruity, it has an ever-so-slight powdery feel on the tongue. The aftertaste is mild, and doesn't leave much of a memory. It is also a bit sweeter than most of my German darks.

Reviewed: Ghirardelli Dark 60%
Personality: Friendly and quite eat-able
How to enjoy: anywhere, anytime

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy



Where to buy:
Germany: nowhere in Germany that I know of. I scored this bar from a buddy

arriving out of California
USA: Practically everywhere

xocriolata 72%

xocriolata 72% is a Swiss-made chocolate manufactured by the Chocolat Frey company, which also sells Swiss Delice. Xiocololate is branded specifically for PLUS supermarkets in Germany.

This 72% chocolate bar is smooth, with a slight bitter aftertaste. A good nibbling chocolate for a movie evening, but nothing special.

Reviewed: Xocriolata Supreme Chocolate 72%
Personality: your cheap cousin Lenny
How to enjoy: Try this one when you've had too many sweet flavors. This might improve the taste a bit

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Germany: PLUS Supermarkets
USA: Of all places, Frey Chocolate is sold at Target. Give it a try

J.D. Gross Kul-Kul Papua New Guinea

Back to Lidl for some more J.D. Gross chocolate, this time a 78% bar from a single plantation in New Guinea, Plantation Kul-Kul. I've developed a great opinion of Lidl chocolate. Even though I do prefer the fancier brands, Lidl is great for those everyday moments.

It's a great, rich chocolate, with a nice aftertaste, very much the way a very dark chocolate should taste. It's not quite as good as a Michel Cluizel dark, but it's a nice budget chocolate.

Check out a rough equivalent by Michel Cluizel here

Reviewed: J.D. Gross Kul-Jul Edel-Bitterschokolade Papua New Guinea
Personality: sophisticated on a cheeseburger budget
How to enjoy: cheap enough to enjoy every day, but a little intense to do it that often

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Aldi stores everywhere

Toblerone Milk: best with Zucchini

At work, I was in the mood for dessert, so I figured why not kill two birds with one stone, and try a piece of chocolate that I could later review. Looking around the candy case, the Toblerone bar raised its pointy little triangles at me and volunteered. I bought a nice 35 gram bar, not one of those legendary 1 pound monsters.

Not a bad little chocolate bar, even if it is rather sweet. The best way to get a bite of a Toblerone is to put your finger on the top of one triangle, and your thumb on top of another, and squeeze. One triangle will nicely break off, and you have a delicious bite of milk chocolate and honey nougat. The nougat reminds me of a Bit-O-Honey candy bar, but not quite as intense a flavor.

Just eating the Toblerone will leave lots of tiny nougat bits sticking to your teeth, so here are some alternative ways to enjoy your bar.

• Buy one each of the dark, white and milk versions, break them all to pieces, and nibble slowly, letting the nougat dissolve in your mouth


• Melt the bar with a couple of drops of cream, and use it for a dipping sauce. The honey flavor gives it a bit of a fudgy flavor, almost like a hot fudge sauce

My favorite things to dip into a Toblerone sauce:

• Leibniz cookies
• Graham crackers
• Apples
• Zucchini

Yes, zucchini. Don't knock it til you've tried it. The crisp juicy zucchini contrasts nicely with the otherwise overly sweet Tobler.

Reviewed: Toblerone milk
Personality: Like apricots in honey, a little too sweet
How to enjoy: enjoy with fresh raw zucchini

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend, and see which veggies they prefer
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Germany: grocery stores
UK and USA: Amazon and groceries

Breuninger Confiserie Cassis

Breuningerland is the only mall of any size around these parts. A department store chain as well as a mall company, they control tightly what gets sold in their mall. You can buy a Bree handbag at several different stores in the mall, for example, but at each store they are exactly the same price. Every store accepts the Breuninger credit card as well. And no other credit card - it's Breuninger, cash card, or cash.

The restaurants at the mall are also controlled by Breuninger, and my favorite place to have a cappucino and a piece of cake is the Breuninger Confiserie. My favorite piece is the chocolate truffle mousse cake. I bought one of those for my daughter's birthday cake this year.

Breuninger also sells teas, and at my last visit, I bought a lovely pekoe tea with bits of orange. With that, I bought a bar of hand-crafted chocolate, decorated wtih a layer of cassis-flavored chocolate.

This is one fine bar. The chocolate is not too sweet, which is good, because the cassis sugar is very sweet. But the cassis flavor is strong, which balances everything out. The chocolate afternote is strong and pleasant, and very smooth.

Reviewed: Breuninger Cassis Dark Chocolate
Personality: Smooth talking sweetheart
How to enjoy: Goes great with a cup of tea

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Germany: Only at Breuninger itself.

Schwermer Honigmelone

Schwermer Confiserie has been around since 1894, and has a long, respected tradition in Prussia. The company founders learned their trade at Berlin's famouse Cafe Kranzler. Now located near Munich, the factory and cafe is in the Allgäu in Bad Wörishofen.

When choosing the candy I would sample from their collection, I could not resist a flavor new to me: Honigmelone, or Honeydew melon.

Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? It's a dark chocolate, 50% minimum cocoa solids, melon pulp, and even a touch of alcohol and prosecco, an Italian wine.

The single long bar is 50 grams, plenty to share with another person or two.

This is a tasty chocolate, with a reasonable honeydew flavor, which is nicely complemented by the dark chocolate. In general, though, it's a little too sweet and the chocolate is a little too ordinary to be a great chocolate. Granted, honeydew isn't named "honey" for nothing, but it's still a little too much.

A nice trick: they've made a little mound of chocolate right in the middle of each piece, so you get a slightly larger proportion of chocolate to melon. Clever.

Reviewed: Schwermer Honigmelone
Personality: Smooth and a little different
How to enjoy: This is a great dessert chocolate, or good with afternoon tea

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Germany: grocery stores

Moser-Roth Almond Orange Dark Chocolate

This bar surprises from the moment you unwrap the bar from its high quality gold paper cover. A burst of orange scent comes out of the package, and you know you're in for a treat.

This bar, like other Moser Roth chocolate bars, is packaged in a cardboard box, and the chocolate is wrapped in the above-mentioned golden paper. But the bar also comes packed with a thin sheet of corrugated cardboard, which I suspect has more to do with making the chocolate look bigger than it has to do with preventing the bar from breaking.

Anyway, it does no harm to the taste.

This bar has tiny slivers of almond accompanying the deep dark chocolate with orange bits. Actually there are also tiny bits of apple and pineapple mixed in. My guess is the pineapple, apple and orange are blended together to make the "orange" bits.

All in all, very nice. The thinness of the bar means that you can break off a whole square and enjoy it without feeling stuffed too quickly. OK, maybe you'll eat two squares.

DH thinks it's a little on the sweet side, but I think the sweetness is perfect for this good solid quality of chocolate. But he really likes it, judging by his comment, "If you get a second piece, I get a second piece," after which he snatched the bar away from me. I suspect that by the time we've watched funny videos on TV, there won't be much left.

(A moment later) Oh, man-o-man, I'm in trouble now. DH has just figured out that he didn't get to try the last Moser-Roth bar I reviewed, the Macadamia Milk chocolate. Oopsie. (Hee-hee) Win some, lose some.

Reviewed: Moser Roth Edel Zartbitter Mandel Orange
Personality: a sophisticated workhorse, you can count on this chocolate to give you a good time
How to enjoy: enjoy this chocolate with a strong espresso or coffee

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Worldwide: Aldi

Sarotti Grand Chocolat Pekan-nuss

I love pecans. They are a real treasure of the nut world, similar to walnuts, but sweeter. I looked forward to this bar, because pecans are rare in Germany, with hazelnuts and almonds being the most used nuts instead.

The dark chocolate and the pecans did not work well together. Sarotti tried to pep
things up a bit by caramelizing the pecans, but it didn't help. I detected crunchiness, but no caramel flavor. The nuts were overwhelmed by the chocolate, which made it just a bar that was so-so.

All in all, I'm finding that Sarotti isn't a standout among budget chocolates.


Reviewed: Sarotti Grand Chocolat Pekan-nuss
Personality: solid and dull
How to enjoy: It's just ok, so eat it whenever

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Germany: grocery stores

White Bagging it with Ritter Sport Cappucino Bruch

Sometimes brown-bagging it just ain't enough, and only the white bag will do. Ritter Sport has a factory outlet, as I've mentioned before, and I do happen to live within a half-hour's drive of it. Nyaah, nyaah.

When I go, I check out the "bruch" chocolate. That's the chocolate that is either of second quality, or a test run, or has some other flaw. No rats, of course. How could you even think such a thing?

Once that chocolate comes off the line, the white gloved hands of the workers pack the second quality bars in little white bags, 4 bars to a bag. And they sell it. Cheap.

When you peek in the bag, you never know what you'll find, at least in the way the chocolate looks. This bag had one bar with a big lump. Oh my!
My ever intrepid husband dared to crack open the mysterious lump, and we found... chocolate. C'mon, what did you expect from German foodstuffs? Probably was nothing except a little burp at the end of the chocolate flow.

A yummy lump it was, too. The cappucino flavor is there, delicious and good coffee flavor.

Reviewed: Ritter Sport Cappucino
Personality: Just like your great-uncle Mike who seems to find everything that has "just fallen off the truck:" friendly, outgoing, but you wonder just a little bit how it all happened.
How to enjoy: This is guilt-free delight! Superior quality chocolate at bargain basement prices. Eat it anytime, anywhere.

Rating:
1: Better than sex
2: Little bites of slightly bruised heaven
3: Share with your best friend
4: Will do in a pinch
5: Halloween candy

Where to buy:
Germany: Only at the Ritter Sport factory