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Chocomize Dark Chocolate with Cayenne and Mini Chipotle Peppers

Chris Urban — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:46:04 +0000

Hats off to the folks over at chocomize.com: they’ve developed an online chocolate ordering tool to allow customers to create custom made chocolate bars. And they’re local too, located just across the river in Cherry Hill.
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to visit Hersheypark and try out their custom-making chocolate mini assembly line, then you have an idea of how this works. Start with a chocolate base, and add ingredients before, during or after adding molten chocolate, before it soldifies. There are drawbacks however, with this process, and we’ll get to those in a minute.
More important, fellow chocolate aficionado, is what this online chocolate ordering system means for us. It means that our dear friends will think of us, and function as enablers and order us custom-made chocolate bars for us to enjoy and thank our dear friends for.

2 Chicks with Chocolate – Cocoa Tiles and Chocolate Pops

Chris Urban — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:42:02 +0000

As regular readers are probably aware by now, I’m on a simple quest to try and find the best spicy chocolates I can find. Dark, milk, whatever, as long as it’s gots some of dat heat!So, I spent the last weekend in Atlantic City at the Food & Wine show, surrounded by free samples of crabcakes, beer, wine, more wine, more beer, spicy barbecue sauces, more wine, and, (wait for it) chocolate.
Down the back aisle from my booth, were a group of chocolate ladies handing out free samples, led by an awesome chick named Elyissia. When asked if I would like to try some chocolate, I responded by asking if they had anything spicy. One of the girls handed me a milk chocolate pop – a truffle-sized chocolate on a stick, with beautiful red and gold flecks. One bite, and twenty seconds later, I’m overcome with a blissful sensation of creamy milk chocolate interspersed with cinnamon and cloves, a playful bite of ginger and the warm reassurance of cayenne. Then, to smooth things out, there’s the sensation of sea salt.
Let me tell you, these little suckers are simply awesome. But wait! There’s more! (inside joke…)
The chicks at 2 Chicks with Chocolate, from northern New Jersey – yes, that is their name, and they are awesome – make the same chocolate in an even more convenient and addictive bar size – packed in a box called, unobtrusively and deceptively simply, Cocoa Tiles. Intrigued? you can visit them online.
While they are not as visually stunning as the flecks on the pops, you get all the flavors, and get to enjoy them a little longer than the pops. And, a minor correction: the spicy chocolates are in fact called Spicy Tiles.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I’m partial to darker chocolates; I think they’re best at around 60%. But these are milk, at 38% cocoa. But in this case, I think the creamy milk fares better, especially with the sea salt on the finish. I’d be really interested to try a similar mix with darker chocolate – it’d be more austere, more earthy, and I think it’d have a wider spectrum of flavors…
I also managed to get a Signature Collection box, full of yummy chocolates, but my true favorites were the spicy tiles and pops!
I hope I run into these ladies again at the next food-oriented show!

Lake Champlain Organic Bars: Dark Spicy Aztec

Chris Urban — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:24:49 +0000

Let’s begin with the reviews from the harshest critics we know – first from the four-year-old: “Darker brown, kind of little bit spicy, like it a tiny bit. When I try to bite it, it’s alittle hard – can I have some water?” Two-year-old: “More, more, good!”

So this bar is real reason we’re here – our never-ending quest in search of a spicy, chili-pepper laced dark chocolate, the Aztec fountain of youth. From Lake Champlain Chocolates in Vermont comes a nearly-perfect bar of it. Starting with a dark, but not too dark, chocolate bar, add cayenne, cinnamon and, are you ready for this? pumpkin seeds, an interesting New World ingredient. On one hand, it’s an interesting component for texture and taste, but then enjoying the smooth dark chocolate seems modestly interrupted by the seeds. The seeds are whole, intact, and when you break the bar into scored pieces, you may see a seed peeking out. The flavor is nice, and we wonder how it might be if the seeds were broken or ground – would their flavor impart differently? Or is it the intended effect, similar to the effect of the pockets of salt in the Milk Sea Salt bar?

But, we freely admit, we are nit (or nut?) picking – this is still an overwhelmingly wonderful bar. We reviewed the spicy hot chocolate mix from Lake Champlain, and we made note of the selection of cayenne, that we felt there might be benefit in adding ancho or chipotle peppers. This argument still stands for this bar – the pumpkin seeds and cinnamon are nice, lighter, higher notes, but it wouldn’t it be nice if there were some lower, ancho bass notes to add to this Aztec chorus?