Brookside Dark Chocolate – Cherry & Tahitian Vanilla

I can’t be certain of how long Brookside has been around with their chocolate covered candies, but I do know that for as long as they’ve been around, they’ve been a hit in all my social circles. I’ve yet to find someone who doesn’t like them on any grounds beyond the typical “I’m on a diet” or “I’m allergic”. They are quite popular and it’s not hard to see why. Chocolate isn’t exactly a hard sell if you are of a certain quality, and fruit flavoured candies are a crowd pleaser. Put the two together in a nice compact form and you have a winner. Brookside has been releasing some interesting and fancy sounding combinations, but to be honest a lot of the flavours tend to taste very similar to me after a while, so I don’t go out of my way to chase any specific flavour. I sort of happened upon this one by chance, and figured I should give it a try since I haven’t tried any of their cherry flavours yet.

With chocolate covered anything, I like to look at things from three aspects, a) how the chocolate tastes, b) how the filling tastes, and c) how they taste together. The chocolate itself is 73% dark chocolate, which is nearing the range where I no longer consider it snacking dark chocolate. It’s dark and bitter enough that it will leave a bit of a residue in your mouth that keeps you from eating very much in any one sitting, which is good in it’s own way. It’s the kind of chocolate that I personally prefer to let melt in my mouth to give way to the filling. The filling in this case is the fruit candy piece that is a combination of cherry and vanilla. The fruit flavour is honestly kind of typical and what I expect from Brookside. It isn’t anything revolutionary by any means, but it’s good at what it’s trying to do, which is be cherry and vanilla. The vanilla is a little less present than the cherry, but it serves to even out the tail end of the flavour instead of becoming the overly artificial cherry flavour that I’ve come to associate with most fruit snacks. Like cold medicine, as my friend would call it. Eating the chocolate and candy together by chewing it right away helps to even out the sweetness of the cherry with the bitterness of the chocolate, but I still feel like with a chocolate this dark it’s better to let it melt on the mouth rather than chew it. But to each their own.

Something I’ve noticed with Brookside chocolates is that the pieces usually have a filling that is made by combining two semi-circle shaped pieces of candy. The two pieces are connected to each other by the flat end, giving it a small, flattish piece that is than covered in chocolate. Some pieces look bigger, and that’s cause they have three pieces clumped together, while some are smaller because they only have one. I bring this up because it affects the ratio of chocolate slightly, and in turn the texture. Biting into a typical piece that is the combination of two semi-circle pieces leads to a clean break in the centre, which gives a pretty decent ratio of candy to chocolate. Similar to your typical chocolate almond, the outer coating is what you would expect from any other chocolate covered snack – it has that shiny protective layer to keep the chocolate in it’s form and make it less melty, and quickly gives way to the candy. The candy is like a firm jelly consistency. It’s not exactly chewy, but it is firm enough to hold it’s own without melting away too quickly and has a puree quality to it. It has a bit of a grainy finish to it, which I kind of like, but I’m sure some people may not be as big a fan of it.

I like this variety because it has a darker chocolate to it than the typical varieties, and I prefer to let the chocolate melt away. The biggest con against this flavour is that it’s one of the less standard flavours, and doesn’t come in a big bag like the classic blueberry flavour. But if you’re not bothered by that and don’t mind having less for a higher price, these are worth a try.