Canadian Treats
Name: Chocolates made with Icewine
Brand: Canada True
Place Purchased: Vancouver (gift)
Price: $4.95 (CDN)
Size: 1.4 oz
Calories per ounce: 143
Type: Chocolate (filled)
Name: Maple Chocolate Truffles
Brand: Canada True
Place Purchased: Vancouver (gift)
Price: $4.95 (CDN)
Size: 1.69 oz
Calories per ounce: 166
Type: Chocolate Truffle
My husband recently went to Vancouver and picked up these Canadian themed candies. The truffles are maple flavored and the Icewine chocolates are in the shape of maple leaves.
First, as far as I'm concerned a chocolate truffle is defined as the following: a soft chocolate made by combining good quality chocolate with cream and butter. It melts at a lower temperature than chocolate and is therefore extremely fatty and tasty. Chocolate truffles are usually covered in chocolate, so as to contain the melty insides (some places will just roll them in cocoa, but then they're prone to melting and sticking together).
It's hot right now in Los Angeles and at eighty degrees inside the house, the innards of these truffles should have been more yielding. As it was, they were more the solid consistency of say, a frango. Basically just another flavored and rather solid chocolate inside a chocolate shell.
That said, I think maple is a great flavor. It's woodsy and sweet and reminds me of, well, maple. There's not much else like maple. These were very mapley and extremely sweet. I think if I were inventing these I'd keep the center throat-searingly sweet but coat them in dark chocolate as a little respite. The chocolate was good quality but not excellent. As a gift from Canada, I think they were great, but it's not something I'll seek out next time I go up north.
Next up was a long box of chocolates with a tray of little maple leaf-shaped molded chocoaltes with a filling flavored with Icewine. I didn't know what icewine was so out to the internet I go (and by the way, the website listed on the box is um, bad). Turns out icewine is made from grapes left on the vine through the winter (so maybe it's really raisin wine?).
The idea of a cream center flavored with this sweet white wine is great. The chocolate shell was nice, a crisp milky chocolate. The center was not too large (sometimes a large center that's really sweet kind of ruins the ratio of chocolate to filling) and smelled vaguely of fruit. However, there was something a little off. I tasted the fruity wine notes distinctly, but I also tasted plastic. I'm not sure if it was the tray that they were packaged in or what, but they were a little off. I ate them anyway, but didn't find it a good combo.
Ratings - Chocolates made with Icewine - 5 out of 10
Maple Chocolate Truffles - 6 out of 10
3 Comments:
i appreciate so much that you review gourmet chocolates, since you mentioned in a past entry that it's not really your thing. because it's totally mine and you've given me some rad leads on some stuff.
if candyblog ever travels you should try the canadian candy that's made in the winter where you drizzle maple syrup in the snow and eat it like hard candy. i know for sure they let you make it at the ice hotel in quebec. (www.icehotel-canada.com )
and a note about ice wine, it's not kept on the vine throughout the WHOLE winter, only through the first real frost of winter, so the grapes freeze. if you let them wither, you couldnt get any juice out of them. you only get about one drop out of the frozen grapes as it is. it makes for a very very sweet wine, almost like a dessert wine. i love it. it's rather expensive though, as it's quite hard to make. cheers!
Haha, sorry about trivializing the icewine, I should have linked to www.icewine.com, which describes it pretty well.
I love the idea of the maple syrup and snow candy - I remember that passage in the Laura Ingalls Wilder book (I don't know if it was Little House on the Prairie) where they make maple sugar candy. I grew up in Ohio where they also make maple sugar candy and enjoyed it quite a bit as a kid (but I've never had it fresh).
Hi there - just found the blog and love it! I live in Japan and am also intrigued by the "men's" pocky...one of my favourites is the yogurt flavour. Keep up the great work!
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