Surprise Chocolates from Kirk's (thanks Mr Cake!)

Mr Cake is a pretty good sort - and occasionally he goes out of his way to do really lovely things for me (right now he's vacuuming - so he's well trained around the house, too!). Last week he came home and presented me, for no apparent reason, with this box of chocolate from Kirkcaldie & Stains:

He said he couldn't resist the big chocolate cups but they didn't fit in the box - so he got them on the outside!

As you can see, there's quite a variety (although I think his preference for dark chocolate shows through!). We ate them over a couple of nights (very piggy of us - though I did share so hopefully that  makes it a bit better!) and it was lovely to have a special wee treat or three to savour after dinner.

The fakey pink of this one put it high on my hit-list - I am a bit OCD in my approach to consumption, and confess I find myself carefully working out the sequence to consume the chocolates in, in order to ensure the best are saved till last (obviously this doesn't always work as you don't know what it will taste like until you've eaten it, but I don't think OCD behaviour has to be rational, does it?).

Unfortunately my instincts here were spot on, and this was very sugary and the flavour was very artificial - raspberry white chocolate at its worst. Never mind, it's out of the way to allow for better things! ;-)

The bee-topped cone was pretty nice; again very, very sweet, but with a strong honey flavour - honey is supposed to be sweet and it worked. I was glad to share it though; it was a bit big to cope with alone!

These two - coffee and strawberry flavours, respectively, were both okay - the chocolate failed me, I'm afraid - I guess I have become a chocolate snob! The fillings were nothing special but might have lived up to expectations had they been encased in something better.

I don't recall the fillings of these as I pushed them both towards Mr Cake - too sugary and I was getting to a stage of dark chocolate overload!

The mouse was very cute until I bit his head off, and a welcome bite of white chocolate among all the darkness. His filling was truffley and sweet - again, a little too sweet to tolerate all of, but it was perfect for sharing!

The cone was pretty yummy - filled with praline, this made me happy.

Pretty but unremarkable sums these three up. Presentation is looking up but flavour-wise they didn't quite cut the mustard.

This was a cherry liqueur chocolate - the sweet candied cherry balanced the dark chocolate and though I am not really a fan of boozy chocolates I did like it - the alcohol wasn't too strong, as can be the case, and the flavours worked well together.

I'm not sure what 'flavour' this was but the white chocolate covered a lovely milk chocolate filling. Memory fade means I am unable to give a proper description but I know I enjoyed it and was glad to have saved it for the end.

This is a Chocolate Brown caramel (I know them well!) and was my favourite of the bunch. Chocolate Brown have the perfect (for me) balance between their caramel and their chocolate - not tooth-achingly sweet, a lovely milk chocolate (I don't mind dark chocolate and accept that some flavour pairings belong with it, but deep down I'm definitely a milk chocolate kind of gal), scrummy. So saving the best till last worked (mainly because I knew it would be hard for anything to beat this!).

Overall, I wasn't that impressed with the chocolates - they were nice but not astonishingly so (except the Chocolate Brown one). I know the chocolate counter at Kirk's is stocked with a variety of brands and it was pretty obvious that some don't use quality ingredients, which is a bit of a shame. I love being able to handpick chocolates to go in a giftbox, though - adds that extra something special to a gift.

So a big thank-you to the lovely Mr Cake, who not only buys me expensive chocolates out of the blue but accepts that I will immediately proceed to critique them to bits - perhaps I look the gift-horse in the mouth a little too much but he is very tolerant so I guess I got lucky there!