Make Your Valentine's a Fairytale Part 1

What kind of fairytale? Brownies and Cookies and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, of course! Today we are checking out the Valentine's Day gift box from Fairytale Brownies and if it sounds delicious to you, there is still time to order yours so follow our links. Because this gift box contained so many treats -- 26 pieces in total -- we're splitting our review of it into two feature articles to try and cut down on the amount of scrolling you need to do in order to read this article. In this first photo you can see what I saw when I opened up the box. Three types of treats -- Bars, Cookies, and Sprites -- wrapped in the regular Fairytale Brownies brown or clear and purple plastic. Today we'll cover the Bars and the Cookies along with just one of the Sprites. We were sent the Valentine Deluxe Bar, Sprite & Cookie Combo for free to test out and write about for our readers; no other form of compensation was received for our honest description of our experience with these treats.

There are six varieties of their Fairytale Bars. The four non-chocolate ones are Lemon Blondie, Cheesecake Swirl, Pecan Blondie, and Cinnamon Crumb. We're going to look at the two chocolate varieties -- Chocolate Chip Blondie and Raspberry White Chocolate. Each bar is big, measuring 3 X 3 X .75 inches.

We'll start with the Chocolate Chip Blondie Bar that would have been awesome for the fun food holiday, National Blonde Brownie Day, a couple of weeks back but hey, blondies can be wonderful any time, right? The chocolate chips are semi-sweet and made with chocolate liquor and cocoa butter. As you can see this has a lot of chocolate chips and they are spread throughout the blondie in a natural fashion as you'd see from hand mixing the dough and spreading it out before baking. From the bottom I can smell mostly brown sugar and flour but from the sides or top that semi-sweet chocolate scent is powerful. I take a bite and the blondie is soft, fluffy, sweet with that edge of brown sugar tanginess and buttery flavor as well. When I encounter a chip there is a crunch and a burst of sweet chocolate. The blondie and the chips are well balanced in terms of flavors and textures. I get eight bites out of this and each one is yummy!

I asked our Raspberry lover to help me with the Raspberry White Chocolate Bar. These are made with real white chocolate chips, just cocoa butter no added fats or oils. Our resident raspberry lover says: Oh this is light! It looks like parallel curves of raspberry on the top. I can smell the raspberry and a vanilla scent behind it, maybe maple? The texture is very brownie-like, clearly they are going for a blondie but soft and chewy with a little bit of crispiness. Every so often I bite into a crunchy thing that taste very sweet, that must be the white chocolate. If you like sweet you would like this because this is a very sweet bar. The sweetness overwhelms the raspberry flavor. I like it but I wish I could taste more raspberry.



There are eight Fairytale Cookies in the Valentine Deluxe Bar, Sprite & Cookie Combo. Of the six varieties, all include chocolate except for the Caramel Pecan one. The cookies are all approximately 3/8th of an inch thick and 3 inches in diameter so a nice palmful of cookie. They do vary a bit in size but this gives you a general idea of how big they are.

Let's look at the other five types one at a time starting with the Double Chocolate Cookie. This has semi-sweet chocolate chips made with chocolate liquor and cocoa butter as well as cocoa powder. As you can see the chips are visible and stand out just slightly from the cookie itself. This has a strong cocoa scent to it, with a tiny hint of vanilla. Taking a bite makes a soft crunch because the outside is just a touch crisp. Immediately I get a lot of cocoa flavor but not chips in this bite. A second bite has some of the chips in it and they provide little crunchy bursts of sweeter chocolate that becomes stronger with each chew. This is the sort of chocolate cookie you want milk or water with because the cocoa is so wonderfully dark that it also dries out your mouth a bit even though the cookie is soft yet dense inside. I love it!

Next we'll look at the Mint Chocolate Cookie. This has two types of chocolate in it as well. In the cookie dough there is cocoa powder but there are also semi-sweet chocolate chips made with chocolate liquor and cocoa butter. This seems like a Double Chocolate with added oil of peppermint, doesn't it? Over the top of this cookie is lot of closely spaced dark drizzle; the drizzle is close that I can barely see the cookie through it. This has a good strong cocoa fragrance but also a peppermint scent and essence that cools my nose and throat down when I breath it in. I take a bite and the cookie makes no noise. The drizzle melts on my fingertips as I take that bite. My mouth is flooded with cocoa and chocolate and then the mint kicks in and I get a rush of coolness that complements does not overwhelm the cocoa. This is wonderful! I highly recommend this one to all our mint loving readers.

While I was sent two of the Chocolate Chip Cookies I only need one to test out so I'll share the other with one of my sweethearts on Valentine's Day. The chocolate chips in this cookie are semi-sweet made with chocolate liquor and cocoa butter. The cookie is light colored, on the bottom is a bit of light browning but not over baked in any sense. I can see a few point of chocolate on the bottom but the chips are primary visible on the top and sides of the cookie. The cookie has a strong chocolate as well as sweet floury scent. The outside is slight crispy and makes soft crunch when I take a bite. The inside is soft but flakey, it has a sweet lightly brown sugar flavor that is quickly followed by chocolate even before I bit directly into a chip. There are a lot of chocolate chips in this one cookie; I could count ten before I took a bite and there are more inside the cookie which means every bite includes semi-sweet chocolate. This is delicious. If it is not the perfect chocolate chip cookie is close to perfect.

The Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookie looks a lot like the previous. It also has the semi-sweet chocolate chips as well as toffee pieces made with almonds roasted in cocoa butter and/or sunflower oil. Why the "and/or"? Prices of cocoa butter can shoot up so it is good to have a back-up or to add something else to it when you aren't using it to make chocolate. In fact, that Fairytale Brownies would use cocoa butter at all for anything other than their chocolate is amazing to me and just raised them higher in my esteem. The chips are visible on the top and sides and there are shadows of them on the bottom of this cookie. I can also see the darker areas that are likely toffee pieces. This has a dark sugary sweet scent but I'm not getting the chocolate fragrance. The first bite is slightly crunchy because of the crispy outside of the cookie and because I immediately encounter some of the toffee but no chocolate chips in the soft inside. My second bite includes the chocolate chip but that immediate flavor fades under the toffee flavor.

One of the Cookies I needed assistance with was the Coconut Walnut but I was unable to meet up with our coconut expert so our Mocha Acolyte helped me out when she came to help me with a couple of the Fairytale Sprites, the Espresso Nib snack-sized brownies.

The Coconut Walnut Cookie is also a chocolate cookie as you can clearly see in our photo. The form of our Sacred Substance is in the cocoa powder but the cookie also  has coconut flakes, coconut chips, and walnuts. Our Acolyte reports: You can smell the coconut in that! I love this brand but I haven't had these flavors before. When you cut into it you can see the walnuts and flakes of coconut. Appropriate cookie texture, not too hard, not too soft, just right. The coconut scent overwhelms the chocolate but you can smell it. I may have to at to eat the whole cookie before I can give you a report. The coconut flavor overwhelms the walnuts but not in an unpleasant way. The chocolate flavor is a good chocolate but it is underwhelmed, it is overwhelmed by the coconut and walnut so it is not the dominant taste. If I let the cookie just set in my mouth, the chocolate comes out more. It is a very satisfying cookie.

The Espresso Nib Sprite is snack sized chocolate brownie made with unsweetened Belgian chocolate as well as cocoa nibs. The coffee comes from organic coffee extract so let's see if our Mocha Acolyte thinks there is enough coffee to justify the title of this treat. Exactly what I would expect a chocolate and espresso to smell like. Nice and balanced, not too much coffee or chocolate. I love their brownies. The nibs are only on top, that is the only disappointing thing, they are not mixed into the batter only thrown on top. If you knew you didn't like the espresso nibs, just cut the off and the brownie would taste the same as the Original which is sad. The brownie is chewy and fudgy inside, the top is crispy. Without the nibs it still has the dark chocolate fudginess to it. The top section with the nips, this is how the entire brownie should have tasted because now I can really taste the espresso and the chocolate intensifying each other. The same hold true for the smell when you cut off the top.

We're going to take a break in this feature and come back in a few days to share the rest of this huge Valentine Deluxe Bar, Sprite & Cookie Combo box from Fairytale Brownies.