At the end of the traveling chocolate exhibit, which the fam and I experienced at the Indiana State Museum, there is a chocolate store. The exhibition is extremely well designed for its target audience of school groups. It may also assume that the average American has the reading comprehension of an eighth grader. That's not a bad idea, but a party that's familiar with grown-up museum shows is going to be a shade disappointed with sound-bite-sized pieces of information and whirly things that are designed to hold the attention span of someone who is normally occupied with a PSP. That said, the most impressive aspect of the show was its political sensitivity: everything was presented in both English and Spanish, there was a fairly substantive discussion of enslaved peoples' role in early chocolate production (and they used the term enslaved people rather than slaves), and a pretty legit mention of the instability of world chocolate prices. It turns out that Cadbury was among the early British chocolate makers to boycott the use of slave labor on cacao plantations, which makes up for how mediocre his product is ;) Given all that it was a little weird that the early presentation of the Spanish conquest of the Azetcs was presented with an Aztec painting of the event and a Spanish one, and no interpretation of which one might be more accurate (one guess...). Anyhow, the day culminates in an orgy of spending as only something which has been leading you through various chocolate preparations can. There was even a sale on the day we were there. Some of the brands I knew well, like Vosges and Veritas, and was loathe to spend six dollars a bar.
When you're surrounded by serious pretension a classy paper wrapper
stands out. The website describes it as "chic sober packaging" which
is quite possibly my new favorite description. It was a Cafe Tasse Noir Praline, a combination that I'd never seen before and I thought held real promise. It's a relief to experience real Belgian chocolate not made by jerks who brag about not using organic ingredients. They don't seem to use them, but they aren't crowing about it. So how does it taste, you ask? The chocolate is only 54% so it's quite sweet, with a strong fruity initial presentation and an almost palm-oil-like smoothness from the creamy hazelnut filling. The finish is nutty and the aftertaste is dry. Cafe Tasse also makes bars with coffee, orange, nougat, whole hazlenuts and lemon.
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