fête à fête

If you need to buy some gourmet chocolate, Valrhona is making your holiday entertaining and shopping a bit easier. Their new online shop has all their great chocolate products (baking bars, retail bars, etc.), and they even have a new and elegant packaging to boot.

The dried fruit and nut confections within the impressive Equinoxe collection are so addicting that I had to really control myself from eating the entire box. The Milk Fig and Biscuit box had the perfect combo of alternating tastes and textures. You can crunch on a buttery biscuit pearl that's encased in creamy milk chocolate, then later chew on a chocolate-covered piece of dried fig. Trust me, it's absolutely delicious.

If figs are not your thing, there's always the lovely Gianduja Almonds and Hazelnuts box. For a really deluxe array of treats, you can get everything in the large Equinoxe Collection Box. This contains Almonds & Hazelnuts covered with Dark and Milk Chocolate, Biscuit, and Candied Orange Peel.

Or, if you're watching your waistline, the cute new mini-canisters of Crunchy Pearls and Candied Orange Rind (sooo good) will ensure that you won't over-indulge.

For more tempting ideas, the Mendiants are little disks of milk and dark chocolates, each topped with a hazelnut pearl, dried apricot and pistachio. These are so pretty that they'd look fantastic on a silver tea tray.

I also liked the Palmira bar from the Estate Grown Bar collection. With notes of honey and nuts, this bar featured select Criollo beans from the Palmira plantation in Venezuela. The Ampamakia bar from Madagascar ran a close second for me, with notes of cherry plum and plum.

For a limited time, if you buy more than $65 worth of products, you get free ground FedEx shipping.

www.valrhona-chocolate.com

For editorial consideration, a product sample was provided for this review.