Ghirardelli Dark & Orange

While I remain a purist and love my chocolate plain, orange chocolate is beginning to find some favour with me. And if the brand in question is a gourmet chocolate brand, orange chocolate seems particularly appealing. My first brush with Ghirardelli - Gourmet Milk - Coconut Rendezvous wasn't a great one, but one cannot help but give a reputed chocolate brand a second chance.

When the husband salvaged a few pieces from the American colleague stash and brought them home, I was more than happy to click it, eat it and review it. The Ghirardelli Dark & Orange chocolate was definitely better than their milk chocolate offering, but still did not manage to impress.

The chocolate scored again on a beautiful, rich aroma and fine, smooth texture, but fails again in the taste aspect. Instead of the usual orange-flavoured chocolate, the Ghirardelli Dark & Orange comes with a nice gooey centre filling. However, the taste of this orange filling isn't intense enough, and leaves you wanting. What I expect from orange or orange peel chocolates is a strong citrus flavour with just about enough tang that is countered and complemented by the sweetness of the chocolate. Ghirardelli failed me again on flavour, despite its impeccable quality of chocolate. Definitely not worth the almost 500 rupees you would have to shell out for a 100g bar.


RATING: 3/5

Unibic Choco Kiss Cookies

Everyone's riding the centre-filled cookie wave, and the latest brand to join the bandwagon is Unibic. This Australian brand has been in India since 2004, and today has a wide pan-Indian reach through a number of products distributed through supermarkets and local retail stores. Given the variety of products, I'm surprised this is turning out to be the first review of a Unibic product.

It is, however, no surprise that their centre-filled cookies, called Choco Kiss caught my eye since everyone is making these and the category seems to be doing really well. So far, I've reviewed Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Fills, Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Meltz, Parle's Golden Arcs Choco Filled Rolls. The Unibic Choco Kiss cookies resembles Sunfeast's primary offering in this category, Dark Fantasy Choco Fills more than any other.

It's a plain cookie filled with liquid chocolate in the centre and scores over Parle's product, which has a gooey, but not runny chocolate filling. While Unibic's chocolate filling doesn't score too high on taste, one has to give it points for a very crumbly cookie. However, Sunfeast trumps both in terms of an overall taste experience.

Unibic's Choco Kiss Cookies are individually packed and a 75g box comprises six cookies. Priced at INR 35, each cookie comes to about Rs. 5.80. This makes it the costliest product in the category as compared to Rs 5 apiece for Sunfeast's Choco Fills and Rs 3 apiece for Parle's Golden Arcs Choco Rolls. Sunfeast's Choco Meltz is a more premium product with a chocolate coating on the outside and is priced around Rs. 7 per piece. Unibic, therefore, needs to find another USP if it is to pose any real competition to the existing players. For now, though, they can be happy with one happy tiny customer.

RATING: 3/5

Sunfeast Dark Fantasy Choco Meltz

I'll have to admit that I'm quite partial to the ITC Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy brand. While their other food products have fared an average, they've cracked it with Dark Fantasy. I've reviewed their Chocolate Cream biscuits and centre-filled cookies, Choco Fills, before, and I've bought them over and over. They recently launched a variation of Choco Fills called Choco Meltz and it immediately went into my shopping cart.

Basically, Choco Meltz are a richer version of Choco Fills, because these cookies have chocolate not just on the inside, but outside as well. It might be one of the first indigenous product, inspired by the famous Tim Tam format. Tim Tams are chocolate-coated cookies that relatives from the US/UK brought you during their annual visits. But Tim Tams are now easily available here too. More about that later.

Choco Meltz basically are the chocolatiest biscuits there can be and are quite awesome. And here's what you do to make them awesome-er. Dunk them in hot chai or coffee to let the top layer of chocolate melt a little and go mmm...But frankly, it's a little overwhelming. As a product concept, I think I prefer Choco Fills to Choco Meltz, because the former has a crisp cookie shell that complements the filling. In the case of Choco Meltz, the outer coating of the chocolate dominates, and the inside filling is kinda lost. But hey, no one died of an occasional chocolate overdose, right?

A 120g pack costs INR 60 and has 6-7 individually packed cookies. Try it, I say.


RATING: 3.5/5

Ritter Sport Mini Bunte Vielfalt

Once you've tasted this popular German brand of chocolate, it is impossible to not keep going back to it. My first two 'encounters' with Ritter Sport were memorable with Marzipan scoring 3 and Whole Hazelnuts scoring 3.5 and I couldn't wait to taste the many other flavours the brand makes. This assorted pack called Bunte Vielfalt, which is 'colourful variety' in German was the perfect option.

The pack offers seven of their 25+ varieties and includes Fine Milk Chocolate, Butter Biscuit, Hazelnuts, Yogurt, Cornflakes, Praline and Marzipan and may I say they're all fantastic. What I like about is the brand is the complete lack of fuss and focus on quality. Their simple packaging design in bright colours and robust flavours underlines this.

Of the seven, I found the Yogurt flavoured chocolate the best with the slightly sour filling complementing the sweet milk chocolate oh-so-brilliantly. The next in line was the Butter Biscuit. Might I use Amul's line to describe this one? The biscuit was 'utterly butterly delicious'. Cornflakes came a close third with its perfect crunchiness. The Praline, Hazelnut, Marzipan, and Fine Milk chocolates fared similarly with no real surprises. However, the chocolate quality was ace for them all.

The 150g pack with nine pieces costs just INR 325, and is imported by Dugar Overseas. It is easily available at all fancy supermarkets and is a great buy.

RATING: 3.5/5

Nestle Alpino

By now most people will have seen the Alpino TVC, where a husband makes a big faux pas and then appeases the wife by offering her these chocolates. Mush seems to be the selling point of this new product from the Nestle stables. Also luxury. Nestle India makes its debut in the high end chocolate segment with the introduction of Alpino, which is a centre-filled wafer chocolate.

Also called bonbons, Alpino seems to me as the first real competition to the wildly popular Ferrero Rocher. Similarly packaged in golden colours, the product is meant to exude luxuriousness. Inside the plastic wrapper is a card tray printed with the words "mine" and "ours" upon which sit the two bonbons. On opening the gold foil wrapping, one can find 'love' messages printed on plastic strips.

My pack, as you can see, had these two extremely cheesy lines: "Two of us fit together like these two bonbons in the pack", and "Dogs are for you, cats are for me. This is for us." These remind me of fortune cookies or Dove chocolates (the Indian version is called Galaxy), which have similar messages inside their wrappers.

The chocolate itself is ho-hum. The texture is great, but as always, I find it disappointingly sweet. The sweetness of the milk chocolate overwhelms and takes away all finer points. The taste would have balanced so much better had the centre filling been dark. However, most Indian consumers will find it palatable. What they might not like is the price. Two bonbons, weighing 22 g in all, cost INR 25. But because the product is being positioned as a luxury one, people might just buy into it.

RATING: 3/5

Parle Golden Arcs Choco Filled Rolls

This curiously unbranded product has been in the market for a while now and thanks to its promoted page on Facebook, has a great fan following. What I want to know is why Parle doesn't want its name stated clearly on the packet. It may have to do with Parle's primary positioning as a 'affordable confectioneries' brand, and Golden Arcs doesn't exactly fall in that category. Although at INR 35 for a 150 g pack is cheap, it is definitely not in the Parle G category - a product most associated with Parle.

Golden Arcs obviously wants to compete with the chocolate-filled cookie category, which has become very popular lately, with products such as Sunfeast's Choco Fills entering the market. Golden Arcs is much more competitively priced and will offer stiff competition to high priced products in the segment. Not to forget, it offers a number of fruit flavoured varieties, as opposed to the competition that offers only chocolate.

As for quality, they aren't far behind, though the packaging is a little sloppy. The plastic tray inside my pack was breaking apart, as you can see in the picture above. But the pack is designed well and looks premium.

The product itself is also decent, shaped square with a crunchy and not-too-dense cookie exterior. The inside is filled with gooey chocolate, which is rather sweet to taste. But the biscuit and chocolate come together well and make for a decent enough product. While Parle's Golden Arcs aren't quite at par with Choco Fills, their pricing point is their winner. Chocosophy recommends!

RATING: 3/5

The Chocolate Room - truffles, pralines and dark chocolate

I went to The Chocolate Room, Ghatkopar the week before last, and I'm pretty sure I haven't yet burned off the calories I ingested there. At that mad excessive chocolaty session, I had had so many chocolate things that I had no space for these boxed lovelies. I needed a little break to come back to another The Chocolate Room experience, albeit at home this time. Franchise owner, Kapil Agarwal, had insisted that I try their truffles & pralines and plain dark chocolate and I finally got around to having them over the last couple of days.

I absolutely fell in love with the design of the box of the truffles & pralines. With its delightful colours, it would make for such a mood-lifting gift. A box contains nine pieces of assorted truffles and pralines with a variety of ingredients like hazelnut paste, orange powder, strawberry powder, orange oil, roasted coffee powder and lemon powder apart from the usual components.   

I was impressed by what I read on the box, but not so much by what was inside it. Firstly, all nine chocolates tasted the same to me. Yes, I eventually tasted all of them to see if any one was different from the other, but they all seemed to have a mixed kind of flavour in dark chocolate - most acutely coffee and orange. Either these were not assorted, or I had lost all sense of gustatory distinction. Then, the filling part of these so-called pralines and truffles was indiscernible from the body of the chocolate. I tried them straight out of the fridge and then at room temperature, but it all seemed like a mass all the same. 

All the pralines/truffles had some almonds in it, but that made little difference to the overall quality of the chocolate. Moreover, these have no cocoa butter in them, but vegetable fat. This not only renders the chocolate not-so-smooth but also leaves a weird aftertaste and coating on the roof of one's mouth. All in all, a rather disappointing experience for a box of chocolates that represents an international brand and costs INR 224. The Chocosopher does not recommend these.

RATING: 2/5

This plain dark chocolate bar, however, was the winner. Unpretentious in its name and packaging, it offered me a smooth taste experience - courtesy the cocoa butter in it, unlike the truffles and pralines. I was also enamoured enough by the unusual blue foil inside to take a picture of it and put it here. :)

The chocolate bar itself is plain-looking with no branding or etching on it. With 56% cocoa mass, it just makes the dark chocolate cut, is smooth and very pleasing to taste with vanilla undertones. While it tastes great, it is not exceptional and forking out INR 55 may feel like a little too much for people who can get pretty much the same quality from dark chocolates from home-grown brands at lower prices. Oddly enough, both chocolate boxes have no net weight information and The Chocolate Room India might want to consider doing something about it. 

RATING: 3.5/5

All said and done, The Chocolate Room, Ghatkopar is not somewhere you go to buy chocolates, but  to enjoy their vast and wonderful range of desserts, shakes, coffees and beverages.

You can check out their Facebook page for more information or follow them on Twitter.

Trumpf Schogetten Tiramisu

A Schogetten wasn't perhaps the best choice to start my tryst with German chocolate, but it wasn't half as bad as one would expect from Germany's biggest manufacturers of 'cheap chocolate'. Owned by German food manufacturers Kruger, the brand Trumpf  makes chocolates like Aero, Edle Tropfen, Edle Pralinen and Schogetten, but it is Schogetten that sells the most. The brand offers many interesting flavours like Marzipan, Cappuccino, Yoghurt Strawberry, and Milk Caramel Creme, but I chose Tiramisu.

Schogetten chocolates are famously portioned, which means the chocolate 'bar' isn't a bar at all. Pre-cut into individual squares, 18 pieces form a neat rectangle within the pack and make for easy eating. With 65% cocoa, it is easy on the palate too - not too sweet, not too bitter. The chocolate pieces are filled with 'Tiramisu'. While the filling is generous, one has to focus very hard to experience the flavour.  

It's worse when refrigerated, because then it just tastes like a piece of mediocre, dark chocolate - it could be Amul or something your enthusiastic neighbour made. Neither is the chocolate smooth, nor is it flavourful. But at just INR 99 for 100 g of imported dark chocolate, you can't expect too much.

RATING: 2.5/5