One Very Special Chocolate Square

I got a very special box of chocolates this Valentines Day. They were special for a number of reasons, including that, though I’d had this chocolatiers hot cocoa, I’d never actually indulged in a square of her truffles (something new!!). They were also made special by the unique and darling one-woman scenes painted onto each square... A lady hang gliding, deciding on a pair of shoes, checking herself out in a mirror, enamored by her boyfriend in the window.

Impress your girl any time of year with  MarieBelle Chocolates. I was giddy with delight when I opened the box and went uncharacteristically to the provided guide in order to decide on which one to chow down first.

I went for the cinnamon which ended up being a favorite, but once we’d nibbled the corners of one (these are to be cherished slowly and thoughtfully), I felt compelled to test a few more. Caramel, white kona bean, and dulce de leche were fast favorites.

Trying as best as we could to savor these wonderful bursts, we nibbled at them slowly for a week. We could identify all of them until we got to the last one, of course, my favorite. The guide only helped so much, since it was for the generic 16-piece box and not the hand-selected version with which I’d been presented.

A few days post-chocolate consumption, I visited the MarieBelle website and a few New York-centric food blogs to try to get to the bottom of the mystery square. I was hoping for a fuller guide, done either by the company or by some fanatic chocolate blogger. I didn’t find a picture guide but I did find a lot of writings on the topic of MarieBelle in general.

After a few hours of searching, I came to a site entitled The Chocolate Review. In it, the goal of the choclossieur is to provide an extensive guide of every available chocolate so that we don’t have to waste our time with mediocre pieces. I liked this site. I came to the MarieBelle descriptions, which were so clear; I could practically relive our short-lived box. The writer described an elusive square that had been labeled as “spices,” calling it a most complex piece of chocolate and referencing cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, and chili as major players. The mystery was solved. This is my favorite piece.