Four International Cookies

Back in September, we had two chocolate "holidays" to celebrate, Sisters and Brothers.  World Chocolate Day on the 4th and then International Chocolate Day on the 13th.  While your Chocolate Priestess did not post for each of these, I did show a massive display of international chocolates I easily found in my local Kroger.  Today I'm going to look four cookies from that shopping excursion.

You have heard of Cadbury, right?  I should hope so.  This is a big food company in the UK that has a lot of different chocolate products to offer.  However they do not make everything that carries their label.  These "Cadbury Finger Dark/Noir" cookies are made by Burton's Foods Limited in the UK, in England specifically.  There are approximately 24 3 X 0.25 inch fingers in this 5.3oz box, or 4 servings of 6 fingers.  Each serving has 170 calories, 5g saturated fat, 55mg sodium, 11g sugars, 2g protein, 2% calcium and 4% iron.  These contain chocolate, cocoa butter, milk, wheat, soybeans, and artificial flavors.

These fingers have a definite dark chocolate scent to them as soon as I open the box.  They are packaged neatly in a plastic container inside this paper box and sadly the plastic does not have a recycle number on it.  The main flavors are dark chocolate and wheat, they aren't sweet at all but then compared to other cookies 11g sugars isn't so much in 6 pieces.  They are also very, very crunchy and everyone I gave one to really liked them.

Further east and into the Middle East hails the home of Streit's Wafer Rolls, Israel.  That means these are Kosher dairy products if that is important to you.   This box was imported by Aron Streit Inc in NYC.  Compared to some of the other products I'm looking at in today's review, this one was really wrapped solidly including a silvery foil over a plastic rack.

These 2.75 X 04 inch cylinders are wafers on the outside and chocolate cream on the inside as you can see here.  I didn't count all of these and the label doesn't list how many servings there are, but each serving is 3 wafer rolls of 103 calories made of 1g saturated fat, 23mg sodium, .3g fiber, 8g sugar, 1g protein and 2% of the daily iron an adult needs.  The ingredients are straightforward and contains no artificial flavors.  They are crunchy but not crumbly as I thought they might be with a strong brown sugar like sweetness but not much of a chocolate taste but then only cocoa powder is listed on the ingredients list. 

Have you heard of sugar wafers?  Mostly sugar and fat, they come in three flavors usually: vanilla, strawberry and chocolate.  Their ingredients can make them almost addictive for some people.  From Brazil I found these Bauducco wafers in chocolate.  This 5.82 oz sheaf has about 16 wafers of 4 wafers per serving.  This is a sheaf, a simply light foil wrapper around a rectangle of cookies which I didn't know until I opened them and the wafers threatened to fall out on my table cloth.

 Every four 3.5 X 0.75 X 0.5 inch wafers contains 180 calories made of 2.5g saturated fat, 40mg sodium, less than a gram of fiber, 15g sugars, 2g protein with 4% iron.  Each wafer is made of seven layers: four wafter proper layers and three chocolate.  Oddly it has no real smell, I tried very hard to get a good whiff of what I was about to put in my mouth.  That sort of describes the taste: very bland, not much chocolate, sugar or wheat.  Yet, it was good in a very simple way, a very toned-down version of the sugar wafers you can find everywhere in the USA.

Finally from Austria comes a very interesting cookie called the Casali Schoko-Orangen.    In a lot of ways this is more like a candy than a cookie because basically it is an orange jelly covered in chocolate.  This 5.29oz box had 16 pieces in side, each looking like a slice of orange very similiar to the picture on the box including a rather intense orange color.  Each serving is 3 pieces with 110 calories, 2g saturated fat, 10mg soidum, 17g sugars, 2% vitamin A and 1% vitamin C.

As soon as I opened the box just a touch, the smell of dark chocolate and orange hit my nose.  The pieces are just sitting in the box so some of them are a bit crushed on the edges though I choose the best for this picture.  The citrus taste is sharp but the chocolate is strong as well which makes for a great blending of flavors.  These include chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, nad orange juice as well as artificial flavors.  The first few ingredients are sugars so this is a very sugary bu very tasty food.

If the rest of the international chocolate goods I purchase that day back in September are as good as these four then my store offered great selections and we made good choices.  Of course this makes it harder for me to find different products next year but I'll put in the effort.

Sisters and Brothers, may you too take the time to slowly appreciate what the Divine and human ingenuity have offered you in chocolate.

Book Review: "Salty Sweets"

Finally, Sisters and Brothers, I get to write solid book review for you all.  It has taken your Chocolate Priestess some time because my personal rule for writing any type of cookbook is that I must try at least three recipes before writing anything about it.  This gives the book and it's author three opportunities to show they have written clear directions, have easy to find ingredients, and recipes that produce excellent tasting food.  Today I'm going to talk about Christie Matheson's "Salty Sweets: Delectable Desserts and Tempting Treats with a Sublime Kiss of Salt" from The Harvard Common Press, 2009.

This hardcover, 144 page, full of color photographs, book has nine chapter, three of which I tried recipes from.  It also has a section on measuring equivalents between U.S. and Metric which I found very helpful in our increasingly international world of cuisine.  While the hardcover provide protection it also repeated proved to be problematic for me while I was baking or cooking because it took up a fair amount of counter space.  I found myself placing it on the dinner room table and walking back and forth with the next line of instructions which while good exercise did get annoying.

The first recipe I tried is the one pictured on the front cover above, "dark chocolate fleur de sel cupcakes" (page 67) but without the recommended icing, I used the caramel chocolate European spread I mentioned a few weeks back instead. This recipe revealed the biggest problem with this cookbook: difficulty finding ingredients. Oh, grinder salts of all varieties, sea salts of all origins, those were easy to find, but this fleur de sel, no after visits to every grocery, whole foods, and international food store in my university town, no one had any. So I simply substituted Greek Sea Salt because I could use that in the other recipes I wanted to try in this book. The cupcakes turned out very well, wonderful balance of chocolate and salt plus the delightful spread I used on top.  Even the White Chocolate Acolyte who constantly claims he doesn't like other chocolates (but eats them anyway) loved these.

Cupcakes are no real challenge, I've made those from mixes and from scratch before so for the next recipe I tried something entirely new to me: Mousse, in this case "milk chocolate-peanut butter mousse" (page 92).  Mousse takes several steps and several pans and bowls to make plus a lot of time to let things cool between mixing and of course cool and set before consuming.  The balance here between chocolate, peanut butter, and salt was excellent, with each holding it's own on the taste buds.  I shared these with several people both in the dessert cups from Astor and simply in little plain bowls, everyone loved it.

Finally, just last night because I wanted to get this review done, I tried a mostly non-chocolate "butterscotch brownies" recipes though I took the "Sweet Idea!" found on sevearl of the recipes to add a bit of difference to the basic recipe, and put semi-sweet chips on one half with some grinder salt on the top -- in this case "Enjoy Life" chips which I'll review in the future.  This was the only recipe of the three where I thought the balance between salt and the rest of the treat was out of sync, it just tasted a bit too salty to me so if I make it in the future I'll cut the salt in the brownies down a bit to see if I can get a good balance.  In this case, the chocolate ones tasted more balanced but that might also be my bias toward the Divine Substance, Sisters and Brothers.  Also these had a texture more like cookies or bars than brownies and I followed the recipe very carefully.  When I think of brownies I think thick and chewy, these simply were not that nor were they light and fluffy as you want from a cake.  Other than a bit too much salt, they tasted fine and were a nice change from a chocolate centered treat.

The instructions in this cookbook were easy to follow, Matheson explains procedures and ingredients in a clear, straight forward fashion which is what you need in a cookbook.  She also has little vignettes about these recipes, how they were created, what her first sampling of them was like, as well as tips to change the recipes slightly for different tastes.  However, even in a large university town with no shortage of grocery and foodie shops, it was difficult to find some of the specific salts.  That required my substituting or simply foregoing trying some of the recipes.  Whether or not you like the final results will be a matter of indivudal tastes and skill in your kitchen.

If this sounds like a good book to you, Sisters and Brothers, please consider using these links for purchase.  This could be a good book for a gift, too, just make sure you give it to someone who doesn't have concerns about salt because even sea salt in too much quantity wouldn't be a great idea.  Look at my side bar  to find links to  Powell's Bookstore or Amazon.com to buy this book now.

Sisters and Brothers, may you too take the time to slowly appreciate what the Divine and human ingenuity have offered you in chocolate.

Why Chocolate Does Not A Good Diet Program Make

Not only do companies send your Chocolate Priestess products to reveal, I also buy some from time to time, and I get products, mostly books, through the AmazonVine program as well as directly from authors and publishers.  Some of what I receive is not about chocolate so you never see my opinions here.  When I do get something related to the Sacred Substance, I will always do a long review of it for you, Sisters and Brothers.

While my Amazon.com review of "The New Slim-Fast! 3 2 1 Plan: Nutty Chocolate Chew" bars will focus on taste, I want to look beyond that for you and talk about this diet plan the bars are supported to be part of.  Now, I am not a doctor nor a nutritionist though I have consulted with them in my own life, including regularly seeing a nutritionist for a few years when I lived in NYC.  Some basic common sense added to their guidance will inform my opinions today.

First lets talk the product itself.  The box contains 6 bars, each with 100 calories, 1g saturated fat, 80mg sodium, less than 1g fiber, 7g sugars, 1g protein and 10% of ten vitamins an adult needs daily.   They look like an open Snickers candy bar and that is pretty much what they taste like too though the hardness of the caramel layer varied greatly even in one box. Yes, there is cocoa listed here but the very first ingredients are two types of corn syrup and artificial chocolate flavor before the cocoa itself.  In terms of taste, for the Chocolate Cult this falls short of the mark.

These bars are just part of this "3 2 1 Plan" so let's look at what the box says you should do. 

First you have 3 "nourishing snacks a day" on one example is a 100 calories snack bar from Slim-Fast so I think it is fair to assume other choices should also be in that 100 calorie range.  That totals 300 calories.

Next  you replace two meals, breakfast and lunch, with a Slim-Fast 180-200 calorie bar.  Let's be generous and say you go for the 200 calorie choice so that brings you up to 700 calories.

Finally you have a "sensible 500 calorie meal" which takes us to 1200 calories, a full 800 calories below what the Federal guidelines say an adult woman should eat. 

This is the crux of my problem with this plan.  Most Americans at least eat far more than this recommended amount of calories and we often do not get our calories from the correct types of food and end up basically missing important vitamins, minerals, proteins, fiber, etc every day.  This year, before even embarking upon the Path I share with you all each day on The Chocolate Cult, I looked at my life and I tracked what I ate and what I fed my family.  We were consuming a lot more calories than we needed especially at dinner time.  Yes, I was making sure we filled in those pieces on the food chart but not in the best possible ways.  I did something simple: I followed the serving guidelines and the result is that I have continually but slowly lost weight this year.  Following the Chocolate Path has helped me fight cravings for sugar and chocolate both, improving the changes to my life along with giving me enough energy to exercise 5 days a week.

This Slim-Fast 3 2 1 Plan says nothing about getting the nutrition your body needs, the fiber, or even having enough energy to do your daily work let alone add some good exercise for your body, mind, and soul.  The plan completely ignores what people drink so they might choose simply water, my preferred drink personally, or high calorie drinks.  If you stick with just water, you are sticking to 1200 max a day, if you are a woman this is only 60% of the calories you may need; if you are a man it is much worst, giving you only  48% of the daily calories you may need.  The result will be that you feel tired and your body, not nearly as evolved as our technology, will react as though you are starving it, cutting your metabolism.

Sure, this plan will lose weight quickly at first but then I bet it only makes it harder for you to eat every day of your life like this, should you fall from the program, you'll pack on the pounds and find it more difficult next time.

As my old nutritionist used to teach me: Dieting isn't the answer, changing your life forever is.  I just don't think this plan is something you can healthily do for the rest of your life.

As I said, I'm not a doctor but these are my thoughts and fears this "Slim-Fast 3 2 1 Plan".  The bars are fine tasting the plan they are attached to I cannot get behind. 

The bars come in  five flavors all boosting of chocolate. I think that is an attempt to attract buyers.  But as we've seen time and again here in The Chocolate Cult, not all chocolate is equal and not everything claiming to be chocolate really is the Sacred Substance.  Never assume just because it says "Chocolate" or "Cocoa" that you are getting what you think and never assume that a diet or plan or program with "chocolate" as part of it will be the best choice for you.

See your doctor, get a nutritionist or simply start paying attention to what you eat and  how much you eat.  Don't follow an off-the-shelf plan.  You are more important than that to me, Sisters and Brothers.  Get professional help and plan how to live your life, don't rely on a diet program.

Sisters and Brothers, may you too take the time to slowly appreciate what the Divine and human ingenuity have offered you in chocolate.