It’s not often I find a candy maker in my neck of the woods. North Carolina isn’t exactly exactly the candy-making capital of the world. One of my wife’s co-workers found out about Candy Addict and convinced his friend, who has a business making chocolate truffles, to get a batch to me to review. This friend runs Azurelise.

The story of Azurelise is an interesting one and well worth a read at the Azurelise website. Basically, a tenured associate professor in Philosophy abandons teaching and decides to make chocolates (there’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics). What I have before me now are Azurelise chocolate truffles, made by this former Philosopy professor.

The truffles aren’t your ordinary fancy, embellished truffles. These look, in fact… ordinary. They are approximately 1.25″ x 1.25″ x 0.5″ - they have no fancy flowers on them or swirly-q or anything else. Just a simple plaid pattern and the word AZURELISE diagonally across them. I received five dark chocolate truffles and four milk chocolate truffles.

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How do you find your bliss? Hershey’s hopes we’ll all find it in their Bliss Chocolates, and they’re banking on three flavors to satiate our palates. I recently sampled all three - Milk Chocolate, Milk Chocolate Meltaway, and Dark Chocolate. I found that only one of the candies left me feeling blissful.

Each variety comes as individually wrapped foil squares in flavor-specific bags. They all have a nice, chocolaty smell, and the color choices for the foil are appealing. I can imagine a cute display of Bliss squares in a candy dish. Cute or not, I’m most interested in taste.

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Ferrero Rocher. Ferrero Rondnoir. Ferrero Garden Coco. They just sound fancy, don’t they? And make no mistake: they certainly are.

The Mercedes-Benz of drugstore candy, the Ferrero Rocher is a dreamy ball of chocolate-hazelnut bliss; a porcupine of deliciousness with a crunchy hazelnut heart and a gooey chocolate center, all wrapped up in a golden wrapper that says, “I am something very special.”

The golden wrapper signifies something very special, indeed. You have to be special to rock a golden wrapper. In fact, you can’t get away with wearing a golden wrapper unless you are:

a. Awesome
b. In a dance recital
c. Someone’s wacky Great-Aunt Helen on Christmas Eve
d. Ferrero Rocher

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Sucre is the kind of shop that I wish I had nearby. It’s a cute shop located in New Orleans that specializes in sweets, mostly of the chocolate variety. Sucre makes a large variety of bonbons, each one looking more tantalizing than the next. They kindly sent me a small sampling, and after opening the box, I didn’t know if I should eat them or just admire them: they’re so pretty!

Sucre’s bonbons are also tiny, so much so that I was reminded of toys and after taking my photos of them, I had an urge to play with them. That would have been a bad idea for several reasons, with the more obvious being that these are carefully crafted and are quite delicate. I had chipped one of the painted decorative tiles in just moving a bonbon from the box. Tucking my playful urges aside, I read the included flavor pamphlet and tried to identify my assortment. I had nine bonbons to decipher from a list of twenty four different types. On with the tasting!

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What’s not to love about a Hershey’s Kiss? It’s such a perfect little morsel of chocolatey goodness. I’d have to say the only problem I have with them is having enough patience to methodically unwrap each of the little guys when I am just anxious to shove a whole handful into my mouth. Well, I guess I’m burning half a calorie unwrapping, right?

Hershey’s has been coming out with a lot of limited edition flavors of Kisses lately like the Candy Addict favorite Cherry Cordial Kisses, Special Dark Strawberry Kisses, and even Candy Cane Kisses. Recently, I was lucky enough to find Hershey’s Special Dark Coffee Kisses. I love coffee, and I love coffee-flavored chocolate, so I had high hopes for these nuggets!

I think my hopes were a little too high. These Kisses aren’t bad, but they aren’t all that great, either. I’ve had the same bag for several weeks now, which is telling–if I really liked them, they would have been gone in a couple of days! The coffee flavor is sort of a sweet, syrupy coffee flavor, reminiscent of an artificial coffee flavoring. The coffee flavor, coupled with the dark chocolate, leaves a slight, somewhat sickly sweet aftertaste. I think I’ll stick with the regular Kisses and maybe try the peanut butter ones and, yes, I really need to try the Cherry Cordial Kisses to be a true Candy Addict, don’t I?

• Hershey’s Kisses

Buy Hershey’s Kisses online:

• at Candy Direct
• at Amazon.com

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One flavor combo I really love is the combination of strawberry and chocolate. That’s why I was particularly excited to find out that Hershey’s has released strawberry flavored dark chocolate Kisses. I knew they had to be mine.

The wrapper is a beautiful berry pink color and the tag proudly announces “strawberry” all over itself. The smell of the Kisses is noticeable right away when the bag is opened, with a very strong, sweet berry aroma. Once unwrapped, I was surprised to see the the shape of the kiss itself suggests it was formed in a mold rather than the press technique that makes kisses so unique. I was confused by this because it’s not of the “filled” Kiss variety, like the Caramel Kisses and Peanut Butter Kisses flavors. The chocolate was dark, shiny, smooth and had a good snap to it.

The taste is the same as the smell, having strong candy-like strawberry/fruity flavor. It’s hard for me to describe since it’s different from any other strawberry flavor I’ve tasted before. The dark chocolate is an “aftertaste”, so to speak. It doesn’t really hit you until the wall of strawberry flavor has subsided and the Kiss itself has somewhat melted on your tongue. The texture is nice and smooth with a little grain to it. Aside from the strange strawberry flavor and the lack of “chocolatey-ness”, I really enjoyed these Kisses. So much so that over half the bag is gone now and I only bought it a couple of days ago. Oops.

This leads me to wonder what the other possibilities that strawberry chocolate could have in the Kisses line. Strawberry and chocolate work so wonderfully together and I can easily see them mixing well with both milk and white chocolate. Why Hershey decided on dark chocolate is a bit perplexing to me. it must be due to the recent popularity of dark chocolate.

• Hershey Kisses Webpage

Buy Dark Strawberry Kisses online:

• on eBay

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(Mix and Match Malt balls)

I’ll have to admit, I had never heard of Madelaine Chocolate Novelties, Inc. before they contacted me and offered to send me some samples to review. It turns out they are quite the chocolate powerhouse with currently 449 products online, so you are sure to find something made with chocolate to satisfy your desires. Despite the term “Novelties”, these people are serious about their chocolates. What follows is a rundown and brief review of each item I received for review.

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