Box Chocolate Review

Mademoiselle Miel

Info Details
Country USA   (St. Paul, MN)
Style New School      
lo
med
hi
CQ
Sweetness
Intensity
Complexity
Impact
Admittedly, the C-spot® has acquired its share of frenemies / enamigos over the years. Even received a death threat once (thank Allah Akbar, they're not violent religious extremists). Just part of the nature of critiquing, as well as the fact that for some barsmiths & chocolatiers the C-spot® won’t ride their dicks hard enough.

Oh well, here’s one that might prove the exception to the rule or even lead to suspicions of such… & this site hardly knows ‘em.

From the land of Honey Boo Boo, here comes honey bon bons.
Presentation   4.4 / 5
elegant simplicity
Aromas   4.1 / 5
chocolate honey, naturally
Textures/Melt   7.9 / 10
Shells: a hive of activity as firm chocolate cases juxtapose….
Centers: … reservoirs of oozing sweetness (some honeys crystalize over time & affect texture; these apparently resist crystallization / particulates)
Flavor   42.3 / 50
Ditto a hive of flavors too.
No cane sugar at all; just unsweetened 100% chocolate couverture enveloping a center of honey tapped from basswood trees whose opaque green color reflects in a light chlorophyll-citrus taste & buttery feel, the latter possibly due to the local purple loosestrife weed (Lythrum salicaria). Throws a timely & precise 1-2 combination of dark chocolate base to contrast the sweetly pronounced honey.
The choice of componants really broadens the horizons of possibilities compared to refined sugar.
Quality   26.1 / 30
Susan Brown aka Mlle. Miel helps pioneer a 21st century movement to naturalize America's metro areas.

If the Amazon, as recounted by Prof. Michael J. Heckenberger, flourished in the pre-Columbia era as a proto-urban green zone, then Susan Brown & a small but growing cadre of rogue ecologists are transforming cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul into a proto-green urban paradise.

Inspired by the Paris Opera House which has housed an aviary around its dome for 25 years, Susan became the Twin-Cities first beekeeper.

Her spidery-woman senses currently commandeers 5 roofs as the tree tops of the skyline on which she tends to bees that visit heterogenous pollen sources. Not specifically clover or acacia or "wildflower"…. could be anything…. for if beekeepers don't control environment, honey experiences variability from season to season just like cacáo / chocolate.

Yes, bees are all the buzz these days -- from threatened extinction to the research that they probably experience false memories. Nary a false anything here though. The net: a unique & tastefully done box. In a class of her own.

Selections
Couverture: Domori 100 (Sur del Lago)
The Classic -- gold leaf; honey-dominant, though by the finish chocolate stages a dry tannic charge

Smoked Honey with Scotch -- red-striped marking on the shell signals a peaty liquid smoke beneath (via applewood chips) that occupies center stage, then shares with honey, & to a lesser degree chocolate, the spotlight; comes off heavy-handed / overdone, even showy

Fennel -- sweet licorice in another 1-2-3 pattern of root (fennel or, more specifically in this case, the distilled leaf), sugar (honey) & fruit (cacáo); vibrant & clear

Reviewed March 4, 2015

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