Considering the recent Easter holiday, I decided this was a perfect excuse to eat far too much chocolate, for the educational benefit of my readers. So, I embarked upon a mission wherein I rated a wide variety of confectionaries from six chocolatiers in Victoria: Roger’s, Cococo, Chocolat & Co., Chocolats Favoris, Pure Lovin’, and Purdy’s.
Beginning with Roger’s Chocolates, I first tried their icewine truffle. The cognac and icewine are apparent in the aftertaste, but not particularly enjoyable. The lavender bliss chocolate has such an overpowering flavour that you’ll barely taste anything other than lavender. The filling in their vanilla cream truffle is so overwhelmingly sweet it reminds me of a cheap Halloween candy; certainly not luxurious or decadent. Their 54% dark chocolate bar is much too sweet but very smooth, and their 33% milk chocolate is surprisingly excellent.
Cococo Chocolatiers has a dark chocolate mango peppercorn truffle which is heavy on the pepper, but I couldn’t taste any mango. Their Earl Grey tea truffle contains honey, praline, and tea, and was okay, but I couldn’t taste the tea at all. The mochaccino praline truffle is delicious, and the coffee bean on top gives a great flavour and fantastic crunch. Their 65% dark chocolate was average at best, and their milk chocolate tasted like it belonged in a department-store advent calendar.
Chocolat & Co. serve what they call Terrible Truffles, which were, ironically, the best of the lot. I tried their caramel, earl grey tea, buttercream, orange brandy, and hazelnut flavours, but their most impressive feature is the creamy, rich, melty ganache they put in most of their truffles. Their 43% milk chocolate had an odd aftertaste, and their 57% dark chocolate was also oddly sweet.
Chocolats Favoris, on the contrary, was almost entirely disgusting, with truffles tasting like corner-store candy, with waxy, cheap-tasting chocolate. The best explanation is that they tasted mass produced, not decadent. However, their 35% milk chocolate was very good, and their 60% dark was quite sweet, but smooth. It’s bizarre that the quality of the chocolate seemed to differ between the bars and the truffles.
Pure Lovin’ chocolates are all vegan, but are weirdly inconsistent. Their toasted coconut caramel bar doesn’t represent caramel, with a weird liquidy texture, but is certainly coconutty. I thought that being made vegan affected its consistency but found later in my journey that that’s not necessarily the case. A standout for them was their peanut butter cup, which tastes like a high-quality Reese’s cup would, with luxurious chocolate, and natural, low-sugar peanut butter. Their milk chocolate tasted a bit off, probably because of the vegan oils used, but it’s still enjoyable. Their dark chocolate was the best of the bunch, because the cocoa content was quite high, and had that strong, bitter flavour that I prefer in dark chocolate.
Purdy’s Chocolates is a bit inconsistent, with their best truffle being their Hawaiian black salt caramel, which is vegan, chewy, and delicious, which invalidates the thought that maybe vegan caramel just has to suck. Their hazelnut truffle was decent, but some of their white chocolate blended truffles tasted more like cheap confectionaries than proper chocolate. Their 70% dark and 38% milk tasted awful, with the milk far too sweet and the dark tasting like dollar-store chocolate.
Overall, the best truffles were Terrible, with decadent ganache, and the worst were Chocolats Favoris. The best milk chocolate was made by Roger’s, and the best dark by Pure Lovin’, while the worst of both of these was Purdy’s.