Cocoa Parlor Simple Pleasure

When it comes to reviews, I don't like giving bad ones. Unfortunately, because honesty is a concern of mine, rotten tomato critiques are a must sometimes. Such is the case with one of the Simple Pleasure bars by Cocoa Parlor I tried recently.

It's always a disappointment when you select a bar, pay more than $4.00 and end up not liking it. It's worse when it goes beyond merely not liking to the "this is icky" stage, complete with yuck noises and a wrinkling of the nose upon first taste. Fortunately, I bought two flavors from this company, so at least one was edible.

Milk chocolate with nibs

Without carefully reading the mostly bland looking label that has only a splash of color in the cutesy drawing of a girl on it, I picked the Crushed Velvet bar, thinking it was a dark chocolate with crushed cacao nibs. It turns out it's milk chocolate, but since I'm one of the few who likes both milk and dark chocolate I wasn't disappointed when I took a closer look. I thought the combination of milk chocolate with nibs might even be better than the typical dark with nibs bars found on so many shelves these days, a good contrast of flavors. The letdown came later when I put a square of the chocolate in my mouth.

WHAT IS THIS?!?!

The company claims:

This milk chocolate has a higher cacao content then most milk chocolates 

giving it a very rich chocolate flavor.

Well, that's not exactly true about the flavor. In fact, there's not much resembling chocolate in this bar except the color. Even the first bite had me questioning what I was putting in my mouth. There wasn't even a hint of true cocoa flavor.

More than chocolate, it tastes like poo. Well, it tastes how I imagine poo tastes. I don't actually know that particular flavor, but I know that it's rare that I want to spit out a mouthful of chocolate. Sadly, I went back to it several times thinking maybe I was too harsh in my initial analysis. Could it be that bad? Yes, it could. Each time I took a nibble, my taste buds were offended. On one occasion, I did detect a single note of chocolate somewhere in the mess of other confusing flavors, but otherwise the flavor was overwhelmingly foreign.

I can only guess, but it seems that whatever nibs were used were probably burnt. Also, the milk in the chocolate may have been sour. Whatever's going on in this chocolate, the end result is a bitter, acrid, sour and slightly sweet combination of flavors. The aftertaste is terrible and lingers painfully long. It tastes unnatural. I needed a real chocolate chaser and was glad I had some of the L'Amourette chocolate left with which to cleanse my palate. Sadly, I think I'm going to have to toss what I have left of this one.

With the toasted hazelnut and salt in dark chocolate bar, the big plus is that the hazelnuts are fresh. Yahoo! That's a very good thing. I have to drop into lecture mode, though, because following trends doesn't always pay off, and in this case, adding a generous dose of salt to the mix is unnecessary. Hazelnuts have a strong flavor, and the classic combination with chocolate doesn't need additional competing flavors. If you're going to add an ingredient, make sure that it serves a legitimate purpose. Here, all the salt does is become a distraction.

Hazelnuts and salt in dark chocolate

Even in this bar there's an occasional sour note. It makes me think something sinister is going on in the cacao bean roasting process. Either that or the beans are not being picked at the optimal time or stored properly. Whatever the case may be, the chocolate, despite the quality of its combined ingredients and the nice hazelnut flavor that occasionally shines through, comes of as average at best. The chocolate is only memorable in that it has a strange flavor, one that adding or subtracting sugar or other ingredients to probably can't fix.

Now for the good.

The good thing about chocolate is that it's a little bit like art. Maybe coffee is a better metaphor in this case. What one person loves, another might strongly dislike, and a third person might find mediocre. Just because I wasn't impressed with the flavors doesn't mean someone else won't find these bars great. I should add too that there are some very nice qualities about these bars that include the following:

1. They are soy free, gluten free, fair trade and organic.
2. The dark chocolate bars are vegan.
3. The products are GMO free.

I noticed that the company makes hand-made truffles too. Their website can be found here.