Candy Bar Lab

This is my second shot at a lime flavored, dark chocolate candy bar. The first one by Choxie didn’t quite live up to my hopes, but hopefully this one by Dagoba will find the right balance of taste and texture.

Structure
A 10-segment, molded dark chocolate bar with lime flavoring and small bits of macadamia nuts mixed in.

Texture
The macadamia nuts were completely unnoticeable. In fact, I ate a few sections of the bar and started writing this post before I took another glance at the picture and noticed they were in there. That’s how unnoticeable they were. You’re pretty much getting plain chocolate with this product. Fortunately, the chocolate was rich and very smooth.

Taste
The macadamia nuts were once again unnoticeable. The lime flavor was VERY subtle at first, but became increasingly noticeable on the finish. The chocolate was delicious (better than Choxie), so I wasn’t too upset by the light application of lime flavor.

Verdict
This candy bar desperately needs some texture, which it should have gotten from the macadamia nuts. They simply needed to be bigger and more plentiful. The lime flavor was a little underwhelming, but that can be forgiven because the chocolate is pretty good. In the end, I would have preferred a plain dark chocolate Dagoba bar to this effort.

In the candy aisle of my local Target, on a shelf full of $3 Choxie candy bars, I spotted this one marked down to $2.50. That’s not exactly a good sign, but I thought maybe people were scared away by the thought of lime and chocolate. I thought to myself however, that this bar conceptually worked. I’ve had frozen key lime pie covered in dark chocolate down in Key West and it was delicious. I’ve also made lime flavored white chocolate candies with graham pieces and they were delicious. So despite the suspicious sale price, I had high hopes for this candy bar.

Structure
The label has the following detailed description: “Dark chocolate with a truffled filling of white chocolate balanced with tart key lime and crunchy graham biscotti cookies.” The bar is constructed by lining an 8-segment mold with dark chocolate, filling the cavity with white chocolate lime ganache and sealing the bottom with another layer of dark chocolate.

Texture
The dark chocolate coating is a bit waxy, but still smooth with a firm snap. The truffle filling feels pretty much like regular white chocolate. The difference between the hardness of the dark chocolate and the inside is slight. It’s almost like biting into a solid, thick chocolate bar. The graham biscotti cookie bits are small and sparsely sprinkled throughout. This was disappointing because I was hoping they’d provide some crunch and contrast to the texture of the chocolates. Overall, the texture of this product is very one-dimensional.

Taste
The lime flavor is very subtle. I had an expectation of a sweet and sour citrus burst countered with the bitterness of dark chocolate. Instead, both the lime and the chocolate were underwhelming. You do get a little bit of the sour lime flavor on the finish, but it’s not nearly as pronounced as I would have liked. The flavor of tiny graham bits is imperceptible. Without the aid of the product label, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that they were graham biscotti versus any other type of cookie bit.

Verdict
I give Choxie credit for trying to create a unique candy bar, but I think they fell short on the execution. It’s almost like they were scared to make it taste TOO much like lime. This is unfortunate because if you’re the kind of person who would pluck this product off the store shelf, that’s exactly what you would be looking for. I wasn’t completely turned off by the Choxie brand though and I’m sure I’ll be trying out some of their other products in the future.