I’ve always loved chocolate. It’s one of my favorite things. When Mom Central informed me that a few bloggers were going to get a chance to try a new line of chocolates I turned on my caps lock and switched to 48 point font and replied “pick me please” in what had to be a new time record for email replies. I mean seriously, who wouldn’t want to try new chocolate?

From the website - “New Ghirardelli LUXE MILK chocolates deliver the ultimate milk chocolate experience with rich and creamy Ghirardelli milk chocolate using simply delicious, all natural ingredients. As with all of our premium chocolate products, we hand select the world’s finest cocoa beans to create our proprietary bean blend and roast them to perfection. Then we slow-blend in the purest ingredients such as real cocoa butter and natural vanilla, to achieve our distinctively intense chocolate.”

The Ghiarardelli LUXE MILK line consists of 5 flavors – Milk, Crisp, Duet, Hazelnut and Almond. The Milk, Crisp and Duet are pictured above in their wrappers.  Stores that currently sell LUXE MILK chocolates include Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Borders and Linens & Things. Target, Blockbuster and Cost Plus will be added to that list in the near future. Suggested retail is $2.29.

When I think of chocolate I think there are two kinds – regular chocolate and good chocolate. I find that most chocolate falls into the regular chocolate category. I was forced to move Dove, my favorite until now, over to the regular category after tasting the Ghiarardelli LUXE MILK.  The new LUXE MILK is good chocolate. (Actually, it’s is really, really good chocolate.) The milk bar was the first I tried. The texture wasn’t coarse or gritty, it was really fine and smooth and just about melted in my mouth. The next one I tried was the Crisp. This is nothing like a Nestle Crunch bar, in case you’re wondering. What I really liked about this is that the taste was consistent through the whole bar, because the rice seemed a little smaller and was distributed in a layer of tiny pieces of crisped rice along the entire bottom of the bar. Here’s a picture of an unwrapped Crisp bar, showing how many little pieces of rice there were.

Not being a big fan of nuts, I let hubby help me try the Hazelnut and the Almond. RB enjoyed both varieties but loved the Almond. He described it as having a good ratio of chocolate to nuts and thought it was better then Godiva. The two of us shared the Duet (seemed appropriate to me). The combination of the dark chocolate and the milk chocolate was terrific! I’ve never had the two together in one bite before. I attempted to get a picture of the layers but it didn’t come out as well as I would have liked. If you look at the picture below the dark chocolate is the layer on the top side of the bar in the picture.

I recommend the Ghirardelli LUXE MILK chocolate line wholeheartedly! Four high fives from me and RB! He’d like to see Ghirardelli keep the bar the same size but to divide it into 16 pieces instead of 8 so that the pieces could break off neatly and fit into your mouth. I’d love to see these also turned into the small snack size pieces of chocolate because that would make it a perfect fix for a sweet tooth. (It’d also look a lot more ladylike if I was eating small pieces rather gobbling down a whole bar myself. Yeah, they’re that good that you’ll want to finish a whole bar. ) So. I’d love to hear if you’ve tried any of these and what your favorite kind of chocolate is. Mine’s Ghiarardelli!

Posted in Food, Reviews |