Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a thing for advent calendars. There's just something about a countdown that's so suspenseful and fun. In elementary school, we'd make chains out of construction paper, with each of 25 links to be broken as the days crept closer to Christmas. We'd alternate red and green paper for the links, or maybe we'd throw in some white to represent the snow that we hoped for throughout December.
We even looked at Trader Joe's Advent Calendars on this blog a whole decade ago. Can you believe it's been that long? Since then, we checked out the Advent Calendar For Dogs. Some years we'll even purchase separate advent calendars for Sonia and me, as well as two individual ones for each of our mutts.
This year, we got two of these calendars with Boozy Little Chocolate Truffles. It's a different assortment of confections/liqueurs than its predecessor. The original boozy chocolate assortment featured gin, whisky, rum, and prosecco, while these candies contain liqueur de cafe, honey caramel, peach bellini, eggnog, coffee martini, and pink champagne. We're gonna jump ahead until at least December 6th so we can hopefully sample one of each flavor and give you the lowdown on all of them.
Wednesday, December 1: we got liqueur de cafe. It's a vaguely Kahlua-esque flavor, nice and chocolatey with a coffee booze edge. Probably Sonia's favorite.
Thursday, December 2: coffee martini time. Similar to the previous selection, but there's more of a harsh gin-like essence mixed with traditional coffee flavor.
Today, Friday, December 3: we found an eggnog chocolate. It actually tastes like eggnog with alcohol. I wanna say it's eggnog mixed with rum..? Not as tasty as it might have been if they had gone with Jagermeister, but hey, these chocolates are from the UK, not Deutschland.
Then we got in our magical time machine and jumped ahead to:
Saturday, December 4: and we got honey caramel. Tastes a bit like actual honey. And caramel. Imagine that. Pretty high quality. I'm not complaining.
Sunday, December 5: peach bellini. There's actual peach puree in there. It's barely tastable, but it's there. And peach Schnapps, too. This one might be my favorite, although the peach flavor struggles to shine even when paired with plain white chocolate.
The order of the chocolates appeared to repeat at that point, starting over again with liqueur de cafe. I warped ahead to Christmas Day in my magical DeLorean TARDIS time sled hot tub and found what we were missing: a pink champagne chocolate truffle. Awwww yeeeah.
The verdict: a bit anticlimactic. Meh. It's not bad. Sonia said, "This doesn't taste like anything." I wouldn't go that far. I tasted something champagne-esque. It still tasted more like white (pink) chocolate than anything else, with maybe a hint of being spiked with white wine. Acceptable. Don't get your hopes up too high and you won't be disappointed.
For $6.99, this imported set of 25 unique chocolates presented in 6 different flavors is fun, giftable, and pretty. It's in a whole 'nother ballpark quality-wise compared to those original Trader Joe's Advent Calendars with 24 bites of barely edible "chocolate." I mean, granted, we're paying 7 times as much, but it's worth it.
I should mention, too, that the fillings in each chocolate are smooth, semi-solid cream, rather than liquid. You can totally get away with biting them in half and not having random shots of liquid alcohol squirt out onto your clothing. 2.5% ABV.
Three and a half stars from Sonia. Four from me.
Bottom line: 7.5 out of 10.
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