Wilde Irish Chocolates: Hazelnut Duet

Just so everyone knows -- anyone who has ever doubted my technical capabilities -- I just learned enough HTML to put this image up WITHOUT use of the image button. Now that you know, let's get back on topic: Chocolates -- which ones have I known?

I bought this bar, pleasantly titled "Hazelnut Duet," in the gift shop at the Cliffs of Moher, in County Clare, Ireland. This is the height of artisan chocolate, people. Wilde Irish Chocolate's bars are entirely handmade, and they do it all right in County Clare! They even employ "decorators" who do things like sprinkle the hazelnut bits onto the chocolate bar. The company consists of but four full-time staff. We're lucky to have known their product.

Wilde Irish Chocolates: Hazelnut Duet

Cocoa content: 33%

Notable ingredients: chopped hazelnuts and hazelnut cream swirl

Origin: oddly, they won't say

So, as you can roughly make out, half of this bar was sprinkled with chopped roasted hazelnuts, and half was swirled with a hazelnutty cream, not unlike that found in the Kinder Bueno bar but perhaps a little paler. Let me tell you: I took immense pleasure in the chopped hazelnut half of the bar, and moderate pleasure in the other half.

Here's what I liked: the milk chocolate was extremely melty, so when I placed a square of the chopped hazelnut half of the bar in my mouth, the chocolate would melt and filter through the maze of hazelnut bits, which I would then savor. That was a delight heretofore unknown. The chocolate was good, but not out of this world. Frankly, a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar probably has better flavor and consistency. But the kind of hazelnut piece texture that I enjoyed here could never have been done by a machine in a Cadbury factory -- the pieces were literally dropped onto one side of the bar! Technology tries so hard to integrate ingredients with the distributive equality of a Jackson Pollock splatter painting. Maybe they're better left on the surface -- sometimes?

This bar's grade is slightly inflated for quaintness. B+.