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.

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