Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Honey Mints

Imagine, if you will, if you're a musical producer looking to make a smash album, and so decide to get together two classic acts, like say Neil Young and Pearl Jam, knowing how well they'd mesh together. Then, you decide your collaboration needs something just a little bit more, so you call Kanye West into the mix. Or, for a moment, pretend you're a movie director, looking to make a blockbuster. You call upon DeNiro and Pacino (or, if you prefer pure hunkiness, Ryan Gosling and Lenny DiCaprio*), but needing one more actor to round things out, you call Zach Galifianakis' agent. Or, for your all-time Olympic fantasy team draft, you choose Michael Phelps, Carl Lewis, and the Jamaican bobsled team. It's not that there's anything wrong with each individual member of these threesomes (in fact, they're all good in their own way) but while two seem to mesh, the remaining third...just doesn't. It's kinda one of those "one of these things isn't like the other" set-ups.

To be honest, that's more or less how I expected these Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Honey Mints to be. Dark chocolate with mint makes a great, classic combination. But adding honey? Really? Honey's good and all, but while I could see it pairing okay-ish with chocolate, honey and mint together just doesn't sound all that great to me on the surface, and adding chocolate doesn't help it out.

Good thing is, I can be wrong, and I'll admit it. These are actually fairly good lil' candy disks, despite my initial hesitation. They're made from just three ingredients - chocolate liquor, honey, and peppermint oil. And, unlike you'd expect with the third party mentioned in each threesome above, I really didn't notice the honey too terribly much. If anything, the honey adds just a little sweetness, which, with the cocoa coating basically being baker's chocolate, is a good thing, while not interfering with the mint too much. In fact, if given one of these on a blind taste test, I wouldn't be guess there'd be honey at all in these. Each candy is a soft, melt-in-your-mouth bite that's pretty satisfying that strays almost towards the little-bit-too-rich side, which for me is good enough to keep me interested in eating just one or two of them at a time, as opposed to one or two handfuls.

Sandy likes them quite bit, too, and for more reasons than the "cute package" they come in. In making the obvious comparison, she says she likes them more than York Peppermint Patties, and that's enough to make them a good, solid 4 for her. I'm not sure if I'm willing to go that far, but I do appreciate these as an alternative that, perhaps because of their simplicity, taste a little more "natural"** than the competition. I'll go with a 3.5.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Honey Mints: 7.5 out of 10 Golden Spoons
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*I know he's a pretty good actor, but is he still considered a hunk? I know he was in the Titanic era, but really, I have no idea where Lenny's considered to be on the scale these days.
** This, of course, being a completely relative term that I tried to shake out of my head, yet it keeps coming back for no real good apparent reason. Maybe it's the lack of processed sugar that's getting to me.