Chocri is a German company that plans to open for business in the US in the new year. Their website allows you to design your own chocolate bars – white, dark, or milk, with your choice of additions, which range from the normal (nuts, fruit) to the more exotic (gold balls, gummy bears, spices).

When they asked if I’d like to order some sample bars to review, I was all “heck yeah,” but as I delved into the site, I began to realize that I am not exactly the ideal customer for this sort of thing. Because A, I have very strong opinions about what flavors go together, and B, I am overwhelmed by too many choices.

So, on the one hand the only things I would be sure I would like were the totally traditional choices like milk chocolate with crispy rice. On the other hand I knew that was totally not in the spirit of the thing. What would be the point of getting a combination that I could get anywhere?

Beyond that, I no longer remember exactly what went on in my mind as I clicked around the options on their site – so many that they claim that more than ten billion combinations are possible. So when the following bars arrived, I thought some crazy person had ordered them:

• White with red rice and mango cubes
• Milk with coconut shavings, candied rose petals and a marzipan rose
• Dark with pecans, sour cherries and orange pepper

Well, on the bright side, they sure aren’t anything you could walk into a store and buy, right?

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Aequare chocolates have an interesting story about the chef who started the company and how they’re single origin Ecuadorian chocolate and ingredients and blah blah. You can read their website for all that. What you came here to read is how they taste, right?

When asked if I wanted a sample of these to review, I checked them out and the answer was an immediate HECK YES. This is definitely my kind of thing. On the other hand, that means I’m a tough customer. Like, to start, I was not all that excited about the Dark Chocolate Cocoa Beans, because I don’t really see any reason to eat cocoa beans. I mean, there must be a reason that humanity invented the elaborate processes that turn them into chocolate, right?

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Taza to Go is a ready-to-drink chocolate extravagance from Valor, the renowned Spanish chocolatier founded in 1881. The name comes from getting chocolate “a la taza” in Spain, which means in a small white ceramic cup. It’s an amazing, thick, rich dark chocolate drink served hot. I would call it hot chocolate, but that’s like calling the Casa Milà in Barcelona an apartment. It’s only hot chocolate in the sense that it’s chocolate, which is hot. It’s more like a melted dark chocolate bar with just enough milk added to make it into a thick, drinkable liquid. It’s especially popular at breakfast, but also as a dessert treat.

Okay, great, but what will it taste like when it comes, not from a freshly melted chocolate bar and milk from your master chocolate barista, but from a premixed, imported pouch? Extremely delicious, if properly prepared.

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I’ve been on hiatus from the candy world ever since I relocated to Montana for graduate school. My days seem to be riddled with homework and the correcting of grammatical mistakes made by the students in the freshmen composition course that I teach. Have you ever tried reading 24 essays for split infinitives, misuse of appositives, and the lack of proper semicolon use? Let’s just say it makes for a very draining experience.

Luckily, the kind folks over at Bubble Chocolate knew just how to perk up my day by mailing me a sample of their chocolate. In what world is free chocolate not a good thing?

I had never heard of this company, which makes sense considering they are new and based on the East Coast. But I have heard of and consumed similar products. Aerated chocolate, the candy term for such a confection, is something I first discovered in New Zealand with Nestle’s Aero, but have seen in many forms since.

For those of you not familiar with aerated chocolate, my best equivalent is to compare crème fraiche to meringue: they are both similar in consistency and appearance, but the latter is much lighter. Bubble Chocolate comes in two varieties: milk and dark chocolate.

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It’s now three months since the All-Candy Expo, and I’m still getting reviews out of my dwindling candy stash. (It helps that I’m the kind of person who saves candy rather than scarfing it all down as fast as possible.) But the further I get from the expo, the more further removed I get from the context of these items, most just grabbed on a whim from a sample table and given no more thought.

Take these chocolate-covered blueberries and cranberries from Wolfgang Chocolates, for example. Anonymously wrapped in pink and blue foil pouches that totally disguised the contents, they could have been anything from Raisinet-style pieces to chunky clusters.

(It turns out that Wolfgang Candy has nothing to do with Wolfgang Puck, the first Wolfgang who comes to mind – the company was founded by the Wolfgang family from York County, Pennsylvania, who have been making candy since the early 20th century.)

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