Grand Belgian Milk Chocolate Twigs

Technically this box was in the Christmas section, so technically I am rather late in coming to it. But I decided that lateness would be alright since chocolate twigs don't feel very necessarily Christmasy. If they were designed specifically for Christmas, I suppose chocolate twigs might go along with a yule log cake. Christmas or non, I had to choose these chocolates: although I usually try and avoid chocolate labeled as Belgian (on the belief that it is generally cheap chocolate marketed to Americans who have never been, nor will ever go, to Belgium and will never taste chocolate there), I do love trees. So I was all for a chocolate and tree combination.

The twigs come in a box the size of a small box, which would suggest a large quantity of chocolate. However, the total is only 125 grams; a large chocolate bar is about 100 grams. So it can be either a personal chocolate box or something to share, a gift or a stocking stuffer or dessert. The twigs are around six inches in length, very thin, and come nestled in two gold trays covered in clear wrap. Not completely pretty, but completely average for packaged, mass-produced chocolate. 

And despite all my misgivings about the gold trays and the cheap chocolate, these twigs really did satisfy my tree interest. You can't, perhaps, tell so much from my pictures (which are in the aforementioned gold trays), but the chocolate twigs are quite pretty. They're smooth and rounded on one side, with a flat, lightly patterned end, which makes me wonder if they were somehow piped out onto a flat surface instead of being molded. At intervals, there are little knobs in the chocolate wood and tiny dots, which look like they would be hard sprinkles, are simply more chocolate. I would love to see how someone creative would incorporate these twigs into a dessert display.

I was not, however, wrong about the chocolate. This chocolate is fine. It's milk chocolate. It's sweet and a little nutty and a little greasy. It's standard confectionery chocolate. Alright, but nothing memorable and nothing for chocolate snobs. In a chocolate bar, I wouldn't be interested in eating more than a square or two. But in this form, in this form I am happy to eat it all and not share. 

It's the texture and the shape. Texture and shape mean so much for chocolate; this is why I might occasionally eat a Hershey's kiss but never a Hershey's bar anymore. The delicate thinness of the twigs somehow tantalizes the palate. My favorite way to eat them is to bite off half of a twig and softly break it into pieces in my mouth before chewing it away to a finish. Chocolate tasters make so much of a chocolate snap, but it isn't always that you can snap (not bite) a chocolate in your mouth. This stick shape makes these chocolates addicting like pretzel sticks even without the salt and the crunchiness. Even without liking the chocolate much, I do like this product.