Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen

Back to Candy Expo!  I had to stop by the Palmer booth and tell them I thought they were the Michelangelo's of chocolate.  They seemed unimpressed.

I've never seen any of these in the stores - Palmer peanut butter cups and candy bars:

Look at these - remind you of anything?  Looks like they're trying to imitate Lindt's Lindor truffles:

These are Palmer's Twists - brown is double chocolate, red is peanut butter, and aqua is white chocolate:

Well - they are about as you would expect - that waxy, too sugary Palmer chocolate.  But once again, there is something about their peanut butter that I really like.  It's good and salty.  But these ain't got nuthin' on Lindt!

At the entrance to the Expo, Lindt had their giant golden bunny - I love this guy!

At their booth, they had one of their master chocolatiers and she hosted a chocolate tasting.

We got to try a 90% dark bar from their Excellence line - designed with a thin profile to melt in your mouth.  It was good - but WAY too bitter for me.  I much preferred the 47% dark with roasted almonds.  Very good. 

See the little bags to the right of the picture - near the bunny?  That's their new little three truffle bag.  Here's a display of them:

The bars we got to try:

We also sampled their new hazelnut truffle:

This is one fabulous truffle - delicious creamy milk chocolate and crunchy hazelnut - YUM!  A+++

Now just to compare some Lindor Truffles with those Palmer things:

 

Really, Palmer?  Why even go here? 

Can you see just from the picture how much more fabulous these truffles are?  Creamy, awesome chocolate - that's Lindt's dark truffle on the left, peanut butter in the middle.  So amazing!!

This is a Whisper Bon Bon from Arcor and all I have to say is bleech:

That wafer layer around the peanut butter tasted stale and the peanut butter and chocolate were lame.

This is the Madelaine Chocolate Company booth - look at all these colors of malted milk balls!!

This is what they look like in when packaged:

But these these are the really exciting things!!  Duets double-filled chocolate truffles!!  I'm not sure where to get these - I've found Madelaine's chocolate in Kohl's before.

They come in four flavors:

Peanut butter and raspberry:

This is pretty damn good - I mean you can even tell just from looking at the picture!  What a great idea!! 

 

This is milk truffle and white truffle:

This one I didn't like - there was a weird aftertaste of some kind.  And why buy this one anyway when you can have peanut butter and raspberry?

Here's raspberry and white truffle:

This one was good, if a little too sweet for me.  I liked it, but I liked the peanut butter combo better.  But damn, this raspberry filling is GOOD!

Ah - this one is peanut butter and caramel:

Whoa - this one was pretty damn good too.  I still like the peanut butter and raspberry best, but this was a close second.  Overall these Duets are very good and very different from anything else out there.  Yum!!

The two halves aren't divided by chocolate, but they stay separate - very cool.

Now here's something about them that kind of makes we want to puke - they are aimed at female consumers ages 25 to 50 (no problem there).  But their VP of sales and marketing said that Duets hold special appeal for those involved in planning bridal and baby showers because "such events are about bringing two things together, much like Duets."  Oh dear God, you have GOT to be kidding me! 

Since when has peanut butter and jelly represented man and wife, mother and child, or anything other than just two damn good flavors together? 

But they are so good, I'll forgive a weird stretch from the Madelaine marketing department.  Yay for truffles!!