Following a trip to Kansas City, Missouri, I picked up a couple of locally produced chocolate bars as tasty souvenirs; a peanut butter and toasted corn milk chocolate bar by KC-based Christopher Elbow Chocolates, and a dark chocolate and sunflower seed bar produced in my new home of Kansas.
Christopher Elbow is a renowned chef and chocolatier. A KC native, his highly skilled confections were in such high demand that in 2003 Christopher Elbow Chocolates was launched. They are the creators of beautifully sculpted bonbons and a delectable range of bars – the one that intrigued me most was the peanut butter and toasted corn.
Hang on…toasted corn in chocolate I hear you say? Well, if you like classic sweet and salty combination snacks like chocolate dipped pretzels or salted caramels, why not?
That is exactly what this bar is – a delicate dance of the two. The 38% milk chocolate is so smooth and so thin it melts in the mouth so quickly (it very much reminds me of Swiss chocolate) and as it melts the peanut butter is drawn out. Then you are left with the popping crunch of small pieces of toasted corn and a salty aftertaste.
I love eating salted and roasted corn nuts of an evening, so this bar, despite being a little cautious at first, was a great eat for me. Simple, quality ingredients and so much more refined than the chocolate pretzel!
‘Bar Du Soleil‘, distributed by the Sunflower Food Company of Kansas, is a chunky bar of semi-sweet chocolate interspersed with sunflower seeds. Kansas is the ‘sunflower state’ and so it’s a fitting inclusion for a locally made candy.
I really enjoy nibbling on chocolate coated sunflower seeds (when I can find them), and that is what this bar reminded me of. Like the Christopher Elbow bar, this one is a mix of sweet and earthy flavours, although the result is more subtle.
Dark chocolate with seeds in it…it’s simple, and nice, but that’s about it. As fussy as I am when it comes to milk chocolate, I think it’s much more difficult to make ‘bad’ dark chocolate – and this one was just ‘nice’. I would have liked to have more seeds providing a bigger crunch and contrasting tone against the sweeter chocolate, but it was tasty all the same.
In summary, here are two tasty small-scale chocolate bars that are representing the neighbouring states of Kansas and Missouri through local flavours and honed home skills.
The British Candy Connoisseur 