Meet my edible fossil.
It looks like one doesn’t it? What with all those strange embedded pebble-like pieces stuck in it, right?
In reality, it’s a custom chocolate bar decked out like some eerie moonscape with my own chosen ingredients. In this case, a white chocolate bar strewn with an eclectic mix of orange pepper, Rice Crispies, dried orange, gold flakes and a few rather bulbous wasabi peanuts.
German chocolate start-up, Chocri, has just expanded to the U.S. market to let chocoholics design their own white, milk and dark chocolate bars with more than 100 different toppings. Yes, we’re talking everything from bacon to cheese-curry cashews to paradise grains to plum bits to organic mint leaves. Apparently, more than 10 billion combinations are possible. I’ll let you do the math.
The bars are made of organic, Fair Trade chocolate from Belgium, and many of the ingredient options are organic.
Chocri reps invited me to try three complimentary bars recently. The step-by-step design process on the Web site is straight-forward. You choose your base bar, then go to town on the toppings, choosing up to five for each 6-by-3-inch bar. You can even give your bar a name, too.
It takes about two weeks to receive your chocolate bars, which are shipped from Germany. They’re not necessarily inexpensive — my three bars were valued at a total cost of $35. One percent of every purchase is donated to DIV Kinder, an organization that supports children on the Ivory Coast, the largest exporter of cocoa beans in the world. To date, Chocri donations have helped build a well, buy refrigerators and build an orphanage there.
As with custom-burger restaurants, if you hate the end product, you have no one but yourself to blame for choosing the toppings that you did. But it sure is fun to get inventive.
I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers to critique my own creations, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money†far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some†middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth†supreme ranking.
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