UPDATE: September 2014, it appears that Double Dutch Sweets is no longer in business.
I don’t eat candy bars anymore. It started decades ago when they changed the formula for Three Musketeers bars from one of my favorite candies to something inedible. As I got older and preferred darker chocolate, more bars dropped out of my favor as being too sweet.
Then 10-12 years ago, I found out about the horrors of trans fats and high fructose corn syrup and stopped eating traditional candy bars altogether. Don’t pity me, though — at the time I lived half a block from a See’s Candies store, where I could get my candy bar fix without the trans fats and high fructose corn syrup, and which started my interest in local chocolate.
But I’ve even stopped dropping by See’s, now that we have so much great chocolate here in SFBA. Now I prefer high-quality artisan chocolate bars, bonbons and truffles. Candy bars had fallen off my radar.
Nostalgic splurge
Recently, I saw a Double Dutch Sweets display in my local cheese shop. Checking a wrapper, I saw they were local handmade candy bars with dark chocolate listed as the second ingredient, so I splurged on a bar. It’s shorter than traditional commercial candy bars, but thick and heavy.
When Cacaopod split it open, we saw deep layers of nougat and caramel inside the chocolate shell. With the first bite, Cacaopod said it tasted like a Snickers bar, but better. We especially liked that the shell is made of a tasty dark chocolate, plus the nougat and caramel had a nice chewy texture so the active pleasure of eating it was longer than a typical candy bar. And the tastes lingered afterwards — all that high quality fat and sugars.
This is a good bar to share because unlike a traditional Snickers bar of similar weight, this one really does satisfy. It might not be what you want if you are looking for a chocolate fix — it’s not a full-mouth-of-chocolate experience — but if you’d like to enjoy a candy bar again, splurge for yourself.
