It may have taken me over a year, but I’ve almost finished reviewing the squillion Vosges chocolates that my brother brought back for me from America. (You can find all of the previous reviews here.) In fact, after today’s review, I’ll only have the Cherry Rooibos bar left. It’s been a hard slog, I’ll tell you that.

Today’s post marks a special event in the Wayfaring Chocolate Universe, as the lovely E.Moonbeams has graciously contributed her thoughts at the bottom of the review too. Thank you E.Moonbeams!

Vosges Amalfi Bar

The Vosges Amalfi Bar is comprised of white chocolate with an impressive 36% cocoa butter, lemon zest (and lemon oil), pink peppercorns, and pretty packaging in which the peppercorns look like sequins and the lemon zest like brightly coloured streamers. Sequins and streamers, you say? Why yes, it is my birthday in eight days!

Queen of Subtlety, that’s me.

The creamy buttery colour of this chocolate was a testament to its high-quality-high-proportion cocoa butter, and the flecks of vibrant pink showed that the peppercorns were no shrinking violet. (Metaphorical violet, literal pink… s’all good.) The aroma of this bar was noticeably sweet and less like straight lemon than a Lemon Delicious Pudding, which is one of my favourite desserts of all time.

As I started to nibble the Amalfi Bar, my first thoughts were positive. The flavour was more lemon zest than lemon juice, with the almost-bitter citrus edge playing well against the muted golden syrup, custard, and clotted cream notes of the white chocolate itself.

All of a sudden, though, I found myself biting down on a whole pink peppercorn. In a split second, my thoughts shifted from “lovely lemon cocoa butter zesty custard good” to “hot spicy strong STEAK STEAK STEAK GET IT OUT OF MY CHOCOLATE GET IT OUT”.

It seems my brain equates pink peppercorns with steaks covered in creamy peppercorn sauce (which I couldn’t have eaten more than a handful of times as a child). Unfortunately, this brain connection marked the end of the line for Vosges Amalfi Bar and me.

Because of my inability to dissociate peppercorns from steak, I decided to trick E.Moonbeams into contributing her thoughts to this review. Take it away, E.Moonbeams!

Hannah told me not to overthink this: Hannah recently introduced me to chocolate. Not in a ‘very first time’ kind of way, but in a ‘chocolate ain’t chocolate’ kind of way. Before meeting Hannah I would have been quite content nibbling on some crusty white-around-the edges Easter egg, but now I feel the need to break my gleaming fair trade, dark chocolate, notes of blackberry and asphalt block in two, placing the halves atop each other ‘just so’ whilst marvelling at its textured side profile for a while.

I don’t know if that made sense.

Anyway, now Hannah places me under immense pressure when she brings chocolate into work. She says ‘E.Moonbeams, try this chocolate! It’s made of camel milk! It’s raw! It’s Russian! This is the chocolate Napoleon would have eaten if he were a bit strapped for cash…and there was nothing else going! Lemme know what you think’. So this happened yesterday with this white/pink spotty chocolate. And then she said: ‘write me some tasting notes!’ So here they are! This chocolate tastes like lemon! And pepper! You wouldn’t think it would work but it does! I couldn’t eat too much of it because I only like my chocolate white if it went that way in the process of decaying, and because it was a bit too fancy for my mouth. But it was good, and you should get some into ya.

So there you are. This chocolate doesn’t really taste like steak. And, as a bonus, you can now see why I love this E.Moonbeams lady with an inordinate amount of my heart and soul.