One of the great new products I picked up in San Francisco last weekend was the new Akoma Extra Semisweet Chocolate Chips from Guittard. They’re Fair Trade certified from beans sourced from West Africa (one of the hotspots of poor working and wage conditions for plantation workers).

Unlike the standard Guittard semisweet chips, these are 55% cacao ... just a smidge darker than the usual chips. They come in a sassy metallic pink package instead of the also-easy-to-spot gold package for regular Guittard Dark Chocolate Chips.

The chips have a nice rounded chocolate flavor. Some strong berry notes, a little light smokiness and a good creamy melt. They maintain their shape when baked, as all good chips do. The ingredients are pretty simple as well: cacao beans (fair trade certified), sugar, soy lecithin and real vanilla.

I haven’t seen them in stores in Southern California yet, but you can definitely buy them at Chocosphere for the same price as their regular chips. So good fuzzy feelings for Fair Trade and still a decent price.

My choice to make something with these for Thanksgiving was a Cardamom, Orange & Chocolate Bread Pudding.

Dice the peel of the orange and place in a microwave safe cup with 1 cup of milk with five crushed cardamom pods. Microwave until warm, stir and let sit for 30 minutes, then stir again and heat again. This can be done a day ahead of time and refrigerated (this will make the orange peel especially soft).

In a sauce pan put the 1 cup of pre-made milk mix (dig out the cardamom pods) along with the other 3 cups of milk, sugar and the loosely beaten eggs. Clean and crush the cardamom in a mortar & pestle. Add to the mix, warm over low heat.

Put half of the bread into the bottom of the baking pan. Add half of the milk/egg mixture to the pan. Stir to combine and get the bread soaked. Take half of the chips and cover the egg/bread mixture. Then put the rest of the bread into the saucepan to get it completely wet. Add that to the top of the baking pan. Sprinkle more chips on top.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 40 minutes. The pudding will pull away from the sides when done and the center won’t move. It’s a pretty dry bread pudding, so try it warm with a little milk or perhaps some ice cream or whipped cream.

Related Candies

1. Mary Jane’s Bread Pudding
2. Elvis Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Cup
3. Chocolate Hellfire Chip Cookies
4. Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews
5. Panda Bars

It’s odd how different caramel can be and still be called caramel. I’m pretty keen on the firm and chewy stuff, I really like a pure emulsified texture as well. I voted for that one.

I was outvoted. That’s okay any soft and flowing kind is good too, if it has a nice burnt sugar and butter flavor. I’ll even eat something so hard and tacky that it threatens dental work (Sugar Daddy).

It’s amazing that something so simple can be so tasty!

A little belated Thanksgiving to all my readers. I’m so pleased that you come by and visit and leave such great comments. I enjoy sharing my candy and I’m thankful that I’m not alone with my passion.

Last week I had the opportunity to share lots of my candy with some wonderful and dedicated writers who spent part of National Novel Writing Month raising money on our behalf. Though I missed my fundraising targets, I’m so happy that everyone else was able to hit theirs. I hope I more than made up for it with a super-duper-deluxe Candy Buffet.

I took about 100 pounds of candy with me (though not all of it was on display) and put it in a variety of vases and glass containers I’ve gathered over the years. The individual candies included: Brach’s Orange Slices, Brach’s Butter Toffee, A&W Root Beer Barrels, Butterscotch Disks, Ice Blue Mints, Cinnamon Disks, Filled Strawberries, Milk Maid Caramels & Milk Maid Royals, Brach’s Salt Water Taffy, Koppers Chocolate Covered Almond Jewels, White Chocolate Pearlescent Almonds, Koppers Milkies and Koppers Mint Lentils and finally some mini Gummi Bears (the most popular of all).

It’s an odd relief to get rid of so much candy all at once. Especially to folks who actually want it.

I’ll have more, probably in the New Year, about what I’ve learned about candy buffets, including how to present them, ideas for packaging and design and how to figure out how much candy you’ll need.

While I’d love to go on about the trip or do a review today, it’s late and I’ve been visiting with family and friends from out of town (and still trying to get back in the game on my novel).

So here’s the week in review, short as it was:

Monday: Brach’s Soda Poppers (6 out of 10)

Tuesday: Ice Cubes (5 out of 10)

Wednesday: Hotel Chocolat Crostini Fruit & Nut Slab (7 out of 10)

Thursday: Licorice Assortment (7 out of 10)

Average for the week: 6 with 25% chocolate content.

On my recent trip to San Francisco I was excited to check out the licorice assortments at both Miette Patissiere and The Candy Store, as both were known for their large variety for sale. I wasn’t disappointed at all! (The only sad part was that they were $12 a pound.)

Fruit Filled Rockies - these are gorgeous little nibbles. The dark licorice tube is filled with a firm fondant-style fruit creme. Not quite sweet, they do have a salty bite through and through. There are two different pinks there, one raspberry and the lighter one is, as far as I can tell, orange. The brown one is more smoky, with a strong salty component. 6 out of 10

Schoolkrijt by Venco (Netherlands) is a very common licorice in Europe, kind of like our Good & Plenty but much milder. It’s much like the Rockies, in that it’s a tube of licorice filled with a creme. Then the whole thing is panned with a crunchy mint shell.

The flavor combo is kind of medicinal, like a cough drop, but I rather like that. Peppermint, licorice and some molasses. I’ve had these a couple of times before, but this particular sampling was very fresh. The outside was crisp and the inside was soft and chewy.

UPDATE: Seems I couldn’t get these out of my mind and have bought at least two pounds (not at once) since this review for personal consumption. So the rating gets updated to a 9 out of 10

Griotten by Venco (Netherlands) were completely new to me. If I’ve seen these before I’ve completely blocked them out. They look like little raw sugar cubes, but pick one up and it’s too light for that. Why, it’s a little spongy too!

It’s like a cross between a marshmallow and a gummi. Soft and chewy, but not too dense or tacky.

The flavor is mild, with only a delicate hit of licorice and anise and not terribly sweet either with a mix of the grainy sugar coating and a little salt. 7 out of 10

Heksehyl Zoete are also something that I’ve never tried before. Kind of a baby step in the licorice world, they’re more of a molasses candy than a licorice one.

The smoky molasses is a good background for the light licorice flavor. No salt here, just a light coating of sugar to pull it all together. Very soft, very chewy. Kind of chocolatey. 7 out of 10

Kokindjes (Netherlands) were one of the few salty licorices I picked up.

The cute little buttons are nice and soft. While I like a hard glycerine-style licorice sometimes (Katjes), I really enjoy the chew of licorice as a feature. As a lightly salted licorice, it was very mild, but I was disappointed that it didn’t have a huge licorice kick.

There was a slight metallic tinge for me and a fleeting glimpse of damp cat-inhabited basements. 5 out of 10

Honey Tops (Netherlands) were the one piece that I thought was one that I’d had before, it didn’t look quite the same, not quite as amber and there is no bee on this hive. The flavor is a round with only the slightest honey tint, some mild licorice (no anise). They’re pretty firm. These and the Kokindjes were the last ones I finished. 5 out of 10

(I was guessing at the brands here based on who sells what. There could be other companies that make these same varieties.)

For at least a year I’ve been reading about Hotel Chocolat on Chocablog. The products seemed inventive, if a little over the top. But the company story, the fact that they’re bean to bar and pride themselves on sourcing their chocolate ethically is pretty compelling. While I love many of the fair trade chocolates that I try, I really want some chocolate candy sometimes.

Hotel Chocolat contacted me a couple of months ago with the news that they were opening a webstore in the US. So I could get my own taste of their product line. At first they offered to send me a sample package with their Peepsters, which were little slabs of chocolate with items mixed in. For some reason that wasn’t possible and they up and sent me the Crostini Fruit & Nut Slab and a bag of Macadamia Turtles. (Neither of these items are available on their website.)

The American website focuses on images of folks with great skin using chocolate as seduction (probably successfully since by the time you get to the Christmas chocolate there’s one image that shows the “couple” with a small child). Their products seem designed to entice with sensuality and abundance. Instead of teensy pieces with cute little images molded into them or imprinted on the top, Hotel Chocolat goes whole hog with clear plastic packages that show off vast real estate of chocolate. Images on the website reinforce this with couples sharing bites of bars of chocolate larger than their head.

While the marketing of their products doesn’t quite mesh with my demographic, I am certainly interested in quality and flavor/texture combinations. I also enjoy innovative styling and packaging.

The Slab of Chocolate comes in a black paper package with a clear plastic front and a carrying handle (though be aware that the package opens on the bottom ... so reseal it completely before swinging it around). A little longer than a size of A4 paper, this is a substantial piece of chocolate. Clocking in at 500 grams (17.5 ounces) the abundance is a selling point.

This beefy slab had some uneven distribution of the mix-ins. It includes: cranberries, sultanas, crunchy crostini, almonds and hazelnuts. (You can see in the photo that the corners are sadly lacking in inclusions. While this gives it an artisan quality, it also meant that sometimes I had to break off more pieces in order to get to the ones with the “stuff.”

At first I was disappointed that they sent me milk chocolate products, but this is pretty dark milk. According to the package it’s 50% cocoa solids and 20% milk. It has an authentic milkiness to it (none of that powdered dairy tastes). It’s middle of the road as chocolate flavors go, not terribly complex, just good chocolatey-chocolate. My candy dream! A nice melt, not too sweet and a good complement to the tangy sultanas & cranberries. The hazelnuts were great, the almond slivers were few and far between but the crostini were fun when I encountered them.

The retail on this product is $25 plus shipping. Not too bad for an upscale chocolate bar.

The other product they included was a bag of these cute little Macadamia Turtles. I love turtles! Caramel and nuts are a fantastic combination.

But wait a second ... these aren’t American-style turtles. There’s no caramel in there. Just a macadamia nut at the center and some crisps in the milk chocolate. The whole thing does look rather like a turtle though.

After I got over my resistance to them because of the name, they were fun. The same high cacao milk chocolate, a good bit of crunch and then the fresh macadamias. (I would probably opt for another nut in the future though.)

I’m certainly curious to give some of the other Hotel Chocolat items a try, their gift packages look especially interesting. (They’ve timed their launch for the winter Holidays.) I don’t know if I’d buy the slab though, it’s an awful lot of one thing and I gravitate more towards variety when trying a new brand. It’s certainly an impressive looking gift though! The shipping box was great, nicely packaged for the warmish weather, I have to mention that because some companies just don’t “get” how to ship chocolate products to Los Angeles.

The package says that the product is suitable for vegetarians and is alcohol free.

More on the Hotel Chocolat expansion into the US market here.

Related Candies

1. Charles Chocolates Bars
2. Chuao Chocolatier
3. Jacques Torres
4. MarieBelle Chocolates
5. Scharffen Berger - Cacao Nibs