Which Sweets for Your Sweet?

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Although giving chocolates might not be the most novel way to play Cupid, we found six confections exploding with so much fresh flavor and melt-in-your-mouth goodness that your beloved is certain to forgive any lack of originality on your part. But these bonbons, truffles, and pralines, as beautiful as they are delicious, don’t come cheap, and you won’t find them at your local drugstore. The chocolates from across the U.S. and around the world that earned an excellent Rating from our trained sensory panelists range from $40 to $83 a box (most weighed around a pound) or about $2.50 to $5 per serving. Key among our findings:

Smaller brands were the clear winners. Norman Love, Candinas, John & Kira’s, La Maison du Chocolat, Moonstruck, and Jacques Torres made the most irresistible chocolates based on our blind taste tests. Those are the same brands that ranked highest in 2005 with one exception, Martine’s, which slipped into the very good category because the chocolate wasn’t quite as tasty and quality was inconsistent from piece to piece.

The best products were as different as night and day. Yet all wowed our panelists with incredible freshness; smooth, even-melting chocolate; hints of real cream, butter, and vanilla; and pieces that contained fruit or herbal flavors that tasted like the real thing, not imitation. No two products were alike. The boxes varied from John & Kira’s simple dark-chocolate squares with fillings such as mint, raspberry, or pistachio cream to Norman Love’s hand-painted white-chocolate pieces almost too pretty to eat, with fillings like pineapple-upside-down cake, apple pie, and passion fruit. Given the differences, it’s a good idea to know whether the recipient prefers dark, milk, or white chocolate, or has a favorite type of filling, before ordering.

Price and quality usually go hand in hand. You’d expect a $40 or $50 box of chocolates made in small batches with high-quality ingredients to taste better than mass-produced sweets, and our tests confirmed that. But even expensive chocolates from Fran’s, Martine’s, and MarieBelle didn’t make the top tier. Nor did Godiva’s flagship Gold Ballotin or fancier Platinum Collection. The shocker was the middling quality of the “Intense” assortment from Parisian chocolatier Les Petits Richart, which, at about $8 per ounce, cost at least 40 percent more than most other products. The knock against Richart: Many of the fillings weren’t easy to identify, and others were an odd collection of floral, herbal, and citrus flavors that tended to be sour, bitter, or astringent.

The biggest names come up short. If you’re looking for a familiar name among the best in our tests, you’re out of luck. None of the mass-produced sweets we tested were close in quality. The three lowest-rated assortments--Hershey’s, Russell Stover, and Whitman’s--were the cheapest, costing less than $10 a box. Although they might satisfy an occasional craving, none would make great gifts. Various pieces lacked chocolate intensity, were extremely sweet, felt somewhat gritty, tasted artificial, or suffered from staleness.

Newcomers ranged from so-so to very good. The six newcomers were a mixed lot. There was the disappointing showing by Les Petit Richart, judged merely good, along with Fannie May (a Chicago institution), Esther Price (well known in Ohio and the Midwest), and Switzerland-based Lindt. Fannie May and Esther Price were intensely sweet, and some of the pieces in the Lindt assortment were slightly stale or had a fatty, lardlike filling. Testers rated Godiva’s new Platinum Collection and its Gold Ballotin equal in quality, though the Platinum costs more.

Chocolate 101

All chocolate traces its ingredients to the cocoa tree, whose scientific name, Theobroma cacao, means food of the gods. Seeds from the two main species of trees--the more flavorful “criollo” and higher-yielding “forastero”--are roasted and shelled; their insides are ground and heated until they turn into a paste called chocolate liquor. The liquor is pressed to extract the cocoa butter. Dark chocolate is made by mixing chocolate liquor with cocoa butter, vanilla, and a sweetener. Milk chocolate is made by combining chocolate liquor with cocoa butter, sweetener, and milk solids or powder. White chocolate is made with cocoa butter but no liquor.

To create the final product, candy makers may pour chocolate into molds or “enrobe” (coat on all sides) nuts and other fillings. Some of the more common pieces and fillings are truffles, combining melted chocolate, butter or cream, sugar, and various flavorings, which, when cooled, are rolled into balls and typically coated with cocoa powder or dipped into melted chocolate; pralines, a confection made of nuts and carmelized sugar; ganache, a rich mixture of chocolate and heavy cream; nougat, a chewy or firm confection made from sugar or honey, roasted nuts, and egg whites; and marzipan, a sweet, pliable mixture of almond paste, sugar, and sometimes egg whites that’s often tinted with food coloring and molded into fruit shapes.

What about nutrition?

Even a little chocolate packs plenty of fat (those we tested contained 8 to 16 grams) and calories (around 200) per serving. And that’s if you nibble only a few pieces. But there’s some sweet news about solid chocolate: Stearic acid, one type of fat in chocolate, doesn’t appear to increase LDL (the “bad” cholesterol) levels, and a single 1.4-ounce portion (the government’s recommended serving size) contains about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of decaffeinated coffee. In addition, chocolate contains ample amounts of beneficial compounds known as polyphenols. Preliminary research suggests that a few ounces of dark chocolate might actually reduce blood pressure slightly in hypertensive adults. Studies have also shown that dark chocolate can expand the arteries and increase blood flow, which might offer protection from cardiovascular disease.

A word about shipping

If you want an outstanding box of chocolates, you’ll need to order online or by telephone, since the companies behind the highest-rated products have only a handful of retail outlets. (Contact information is in the Ratings.) And since these chocolates are perishable, they demand careful handling. Next-day or two-day delivery is recommended; overnight service may be required for fresh creams or warm-weather destinations. Express service can double or triple the freight. Some companies base their fees on the dollar amount of your order; the more you buy, the more you pay. And to ensure that your gift arrives on time, you may need to place your order a few weeks ahead of Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

See Consumer Report's Chocolate Ratings.

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