Winter's Tale Chocolates

These "Winter's Tale" chocolates showed up at my local convenience store on March 11. I'm not sure why they're called "Winter's Tale" or why now is the time to release them. There's nothing vaguely wintry about them. The maker, Lotte, either has no information about these or it's buried somewhere. My guess is that these are seasonal and are no available in warmer months because they'd melt. There's information on the back of the box saying that they shouldn't be stored at temperatures of higher than 23 degrees C/73 degrees F.

I picked up a box of these for 99 yen and I get 14 tiny pieces for that price. When I say "tiny", I mean it. Each little block is about 1.5 cm wide and deep and slightly taller than that. They are individually wrapped in little brown foil wrappers in an excellent example of wasteful packaging at its finest. For each tiny morsel, you get twice as much wrapping and 25 calories of cocoa butter and cream-laced goodness.

The outside of the squares is very firm semi-bittersweet chocolate with a light and uneven dusting of cocoa powder. They smell of cocoa powder and sweet chocolate. For something that is supposed to melt at high temperatures, they are surprising solid in feel. The inside is dense milk chocolate ganache, though it's so firm that it's about as far from a truffle as one can get. The taste is quite sweet but with a bittersweet edge. They are best eaten by allowing them to melt a bit in your mouth.

These are interesting chocolates because they look and feel cheap, but they taste and feel quite rich in your mouth. The portion sizes are minuscule, but this should be seen more as a quality over quantity chocolate choice. I'd recommend sampling these and revisiting them often, though I'm really unhappy at the pile of wrappers produced when you eat these.