In 1999, Byrne & Carlson opened in Portsmouth, New Hampshire: a great artisan chocolate shop located in a charming brick townhouse. Portsmouth, the nation’s third oldest city (settled 1623), regularly appears on various “best places to live” lists. For our vote, Byrne & Carlson strongly helps that standing.

The chocolates and confections are made by hand in small batches, using the finest ingredients. When we first saw Byrne & Carlson’s wares at a trade show, we were enchanted by the beauty of their chocolate bars, decorated with edible flowers. It was the first time we’d ever seen such creative garnishing, and the chocolatiers set the standard for all others to come.

Made from the finest chocolate couverture, the chocolate bars a delectable and beautiful Valentine’s Day gift.

TO PLACE AN ORDER

There is no e-commerce, but it’s easy to order:

From top to bottom: Violet Bar with candied violets and mint leaves, Venezuelan Bar with crushed cacao nibs, Mendiant Bar with almonds, orange peel, pansy and candied violet petals. Photo courtesy Byrne & Carlson.

FIND MORE OF OUR FAVORITE GOURMET CHOCOLATE ARTISANS.

Valentine’s chocolate can mean more than heart-shaped pieces. One of our favorite chocolatiers, John & Kira’s, enables you to express your affection with a “Bee My Lovebug” collection.

The exquisite-tasting, hand-painted love bugs (ladybugs) and bee chocolates will delight the most demanding chocophile.

 
Both lovebugs and bees are made with Valrhona 64% cacao chocolate. They arrive beautifully packaged in a reusable red boutique box finished with an old-fashioned letter-pressed card.

Give your loved one some chocolate love bugs for Valentine’s Day. Photo courtesy JohnAndKiras.com.

Treat your Valentine to:

 
Everything made by John & Kira’s is top-drawer delicious, beautifully crafted and a very special treat.

FIND MORE OF THE BEST CHOCOLATE: THE NIBBLE’S FAVORITES.

Baguette slices dipped in chocolate. These
are topped with a sprinkle of sea salt. Photo
by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

We were waiting for our latte at Le Pain Quotidien when we noticed, among the baked goodies, a clamshell box of chocolate-covered something.

Homing in on the label, the quirky-looking product turned out to be chocolate-covered baguette slices, made from baguettes left over at the day’s end.

Traditional tips for leftover baguette include bread crumbs, bread pudding, bread salad, bruschetta, croutons, crostini, fondue dippers and garlic toast. But we like the sweet treatment of chocolate-covered bread.

It’s easy to make for home snacking (delicious with coffee and tea), to bring to work or as gifts.

CHOCOLATE COVERED BREAD

Ingredients

Preparation

1. SLICE leftover baguette into 1/4″ wide pieces and toast lightly. You can use a toaster oven or conventional oven. Let the toasted slices cool to room temperature.

2. MELT chocolate in the microwave or in a double boiler. Dip one side of the baguette slices and coat thoroughly. Let dry, coated side up, on wax paper. Then dip second side.

3. SPRINKLE before the chocolate dries with your choice of one or more garnishes: coarse sea salt, chopped nuts, dried fruit (blueberries, cherries, cranberries, raisins or other favorite) or seeds (sesame or pumpkin seeds).

4. ENJOY within a day or two; keep in an airtight storage container.

Find more of our favorite chocolate treats.

The Chocolate Crisis Center helps you cope
with delicious chocolate-covered treats.
Photo courtesy Chocolate Crisis Center.

A chocolate crisis, according to the Chocolate Crisis Center, is defined as “an emotionally stressful situation caused by an insufficient supply of premium quality chocolate.”

What are those emotionally stressful situations? The holiday season: shopping, decorating, entertaining, dieting (yeah, sure). It all adds up to seasonal insanity, says the Chocolate Crisis Center.

Their solution: a variety of chocolate candy pills that “will give you the fortitude to survive the season.”

Or the office. Or the kids. Or anything, one chocolate bite at a time.

The Chocolate Crisis Center, which is not a government agency but a Denver-based producer of confections, packages confections in classic pill bottles and First Aid kits: Caramels, truffles, nuts and fruits are enrobed in rich Belgian dark or milk chocolate.

These delicious confections are then topped with cocoas, spices and fruit essences for a wide range of delectable taste surprises—all with a humorous “First Aid” twist.

Everything we tried was delicious. Individual bottles, called Daily Doses, are delightful stocking stuffers or party favors.

Various kits are larger gifts. There are Calamity Kits, Major Crisis Kits, a Minor Crisis Kit and a Shock Treatment Kit, some assembled from your choice of the Daily Dose candies:

A reusable first aid kit is filled with bottles of chocolate “pills.” Photo courtesy Chocolate Crisis Center.

There’s more, including Holiday Blues Peppermint Creams, a large blue bottle of jumbo “pills” the size of a nickel, a gentle peppermint coating over a soft, green minty center. The mint is very delicate—there’s no throat-cooling blast of peppermint oil. Seven big “pills” per serving is more than most people need to be cured.

Order online at ChocolateCrisisCenter.com or phone 1.800.329.6950.

Make your daily chocolate nibble fairly-
traded. Photo of Equal Exchange Minis by
Elvira Kalviste.

This year, we went Fair Trade for Halloween. That means that the chocolate we handed out was ethically produced.

While you won’t see many articles about it, cacao is an agricultural product that uses child slave labor in the fields. Just search for “chocolate slave labor” and you’ll read all about it.

Start with this article from CNN. The journalists document that “child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife in an industry that produces some of the world’s best-known brands.”

So, with a small effort to help make the world a better place, we buy Fair Trade/fairly traded products whenever we can. Especially for Halloween, we don’t want to give kids chocolate that enslaves other kids.

Equal Exchange chocolate is a producer/packager of chocolate, cocoa, coffee and tea, supporting small-scale farmers and their families in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama and Peru.

All of the products are organic as well as fairly-traded. The company motto: “Small Farmers, Big Change.”

Fair Trade ensures that farmers are paid fair value for their beans. In more than a few situations, brokers buy up crops for less than it costs to produce them, keeping small farmers in an endless loop of poverty.

Fair value affords money for adult labor (enabling the farmers’ children to go to school instead of working in the fields), a minimum standard of living and sound agricultural practices that protect both workers and the environment.

This issue impacts mass-marketed chocolate brands. In the case of the expensive gourmet chocolate, the chocolate makers are already paying top dollar to the best farmers (those fortunate to have the land in the areas that produce the best beans) to secure the limited supply of the world’s finest cacao (so you can feel good about paying $6.00 or more for that chocolate bar).

“Fair Trade” is a trademarked term authorized by TransFair USA, a nonprofit organization that audits transactions between U.S. companies offering Fair Trade Certified™ products and the international suppliers from whom they source. TransFair is one of 20 members of Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO). Read more on the issues of Fair Trade.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAIR TRADE & “FAIRLY TRADED”

Only products certified by TransFair USA can use the trademarked term, “Fair Trade.” Products certified by other organizations must call themselves “fairly traded.”

EQUAL EXCHANGE HOLIDAY GIFTS

If you want to buy products that are ethically sourced, Equal Exchange and other producers are more than happy to provide them.

Equal Exchange has candy bars for stocking stuffers, boxes of minis (single bites of chocolate) for those who like to nibble and tins of cocoa, along with tea, coffee and gift baskets.

Shop online at Shop.Equal.Exchange.com.

And spread the word about Fair Trade.

Equal Exchange’s fairly traded, organic candy bars. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

What’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys?

A Halloween Treat Box from See’s Candies!

This spooktacular gift box has a bright orange lid (not shown) adorned with a black organza bow, but the real fun is inside:

In total, there’s 1 pound, 15 ounces of Halloween treats ($34.30). It’s large enough for a family gift. Order yours today.

For those who deserve something better than drugstore chocolate, See’s is a treat year-round.

Any milk chocolate lover will be thrilled with this Halloween Treat Box. Photo courtesy See’s Candies.

We also loved the foil-wrapped Jack O’ Lanterns (six 2 oz. chocolate discs, $15.60).

Not a chocolate lover? Consider the Pumpkin Spice Lollypops, gently flavored with pumpkin pie spices (a box of eight lollypops, $5.55).

We don’t know what we like better about Halloween: the opportunity to dress up in costume or the mandate to eat candy!

They’re almost too lovely to eat—but we’ll
manage. Photo courtesy Woodhouse
Chocolate.

There are only two weeks until Halloween, but that’s plenty of time to send for these gourmet peanut butter cups.

Not only are the chocolate shell and peanut butter filling artisan quality, but the “dressed for Halloween” artwork deserves a shout out.

The PB cups are made by Napa Valley’s Woodhouse Chocolate, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week (read our review).

In bat, haunted house, raven and witch motifs, the two-inch-diameter cups are $4.00 each at WoodhouseChocolate.com.

Find more of our favorite chocolate in THE NIBBLE’s Chocolate Section.

A beekeeper in the Catskills harvests honey twice a year. She bottles most of it for sale, and blends some of it into achingly good honey truffles.

Made with the finest 70% Belgian chocolate and sweetened only with Catskill Provisions’ wildflower honey, these truffles are gems for indulgent chocolate enjoyment, or a special trick-or-treat gift for Halloween. (Keep them on the list for holiday gifts, too.)

Any chocophile will appreciate some. The beautiful gift boxes are embossed with a honeycomb pattern. One might say that they’re the bee’s knees.*

Send for a box or two and let them melt in your mouth.

Read the full review.
 
*“The bee’s knees” is a Jazz Age idiom meaning something or someone considered extremely special. According to Mark Israel of the University of Ottowa, 1920s U.S. slang had a slew of similar phrases with the same meaning, including, but not limited to, “the cat’s pajamas” and the less familiar “the eel’s ankle,” “the clam’s garter,” “the kipper’s knickers” and “the sardine’s whiskers.” How about “THE NIBBLE’s quibble?”

You can purchase 4, 9 or 18 truffles. Go for 18! Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT TRUFFLES?

 
Find more of our favorite chocolates in our Chocolate Section.

We just reviewed delicious honey-sweetened truffles (honey-sweetened chocolate) from Catskill Provisions as a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week.

If you’d like to make your own honey truffles, Chef Alex Guaranaschelli shows you how easy it is in this video.

You may enjoy truffle making so much that you’ll have solved your year-round gift giving challenge.

The History Of Chocolate Truffles.

The Truffle Confusion: Why Other Types Of Chocolates Are Also Called Truffles.

Truffles Versus Pralines

You’ve heard that chocolate is good for you, but those claims leave out two key points:

 
If you want to try a healthier chocolate, check out Gnosis Chocolate (gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge).

Gnosis celebrates “the origins of cacao, the well-being of our society, and Earth’s natural majesty.” This specialty line:

Healthier chocolate for Halloween. Photo courtesy Gnosis Chocolate.

The bars are available plain or flavored with popular herbs and spices (chili, coconut-almond, hazelnut, mint, sea salt) as well as nutrient-dense superfoods (cashew-fig, cinnamon-goji, pomegranate-açaí).

Some bars have holistic and ayurvedic ingredients rarely found in chocolate: camomile essential oil, chaste berry, dong quai, evening primrose oil, goldenberry, Inca berry, hemp seed, mulberry, yumberry, schizandra berry, shatvari, Sunwarrior Protein Powder (vegan) and valerian.

In addition to chocolate bars, Gnossis makes truffles, hot chocolate and trail mix.

The products are certified kosher, organic and vegan and are free of soy, gluten, and dairy. The bars are wrapped in PCW* recycled, biodegradable packaging printed with vegetable inks.

Gnosis was founded by Vanessa Barg, a board certified holistic health counselor, who began making chocolate in 2006 as gifts for her clients. In her search for raw, unadulterated cacao, she studied the beans, working on cacao farms and processing beans from the pod. She personally visits the sources and works with growers to assure bean quality and working conditions and to support the growth of organic farming.

Learn more and shop online at GnosisChocolate.com.

*Post consumer waste.