I recently received a care package from some friends in Canada, and I was really lucky to get inside the box some delicious treats!
One of the wonderful snacks that was included was Maple Leaf Creams. These are maple leaf shaped white and milk chocolate filled with maple cream.
Another treat was some salted caramel cocoa!
So, the Maple Leaf Creams are made by a company called Heart Industries. They are located in the province of Ontario, which helps explain the image of Niagara Falls on the front of the package. It is a little curious why they don’t have pictures of maple trees considering that is a selling point of the chocolate!
On the back they talk about the challenges of making maple syrup. According to the package, it take 40 litres of maple sap (the juice from the tree) to make 1 litre of maple syrup! That sounds amazingly hard, and a lot of work!
Upon opening the package, there was a beautiful covering to protect the chocolates, with a pretty design decorating it. There was also a strong and mouth-watering aroma of maple syrup emanating from the box!
Underneath was the real treat, the chocolates filled with maple cream. The chocolates were lovingly laid out, but interestingly there were only six white chocolate maple creams compared to 18 milk chocolate maple creams.
I took a few out, and cut them in half to see what the maple cream looked like. On the front of the package it looks like it is a liquid, but as you can see upon cutting them the maple cream is actually solid.
Then of course it was time to try them! The white chocolate maple leaf cream is very sweet, and the white chocolate has a very nice flavor. The maple cream inside is surprisingly delicate on the palate but provided an interesting taste contrast with the white chocolate.
The milk chocolate was not quite as strong as the white chocolate and meshed better with the maple cream. I have to say that the milk chocolate one was tastier than the white chocolate, but both were delicious.
Next was the salted caramel cocoa. This is made by a company called McSteven’s. The package has a wonderful winter scene on the front, with a snowman standing outside a fantastically decorated log cabin.
The cocoa was interesting to make, in that the water is supposed to be added to the mug first, and then the cocoa. Some of the ingredients were also interesting, as it included dried milk and coconut oil.
The scent when I opened the package was a little strange, and it didn’t really get much better as a I mixed it with the almost boiling water.
The Salted Caramel Cocoa had a nice, dark, rich, color to it, which was definitely a plus.
Tasting the cocoa, it wasn’t special. The taste was okay, but it had a very artificial flavor to me. I think that using dried milk is much worse than using milk to make the drink itself. I much prefer making cocoa with milk as opposed to water, but I wanted to try it the way it was suggested on the package.
The cocoa was very rich, and there was a tiny hint of salt to the flavor, but it really didn’t taste like salted caramel. Especially if you compare it to the Salted Caramel Brownie Brittle that I wrote about before, there is no comparison in the level of salted caramel.
I would definitely buy or ask for more of the Maple Leaf Creams in the future. They were so delicious! As for the cocoa, because it was a gift if was okay, but I will look elsewhere in the future for my cocoa purchases.