Turtles
Ooooooo I love Turtles! Turtles are the one chocolate I love that is the worst for me. With a huge dollop of caramel, pecan pieces and smothered in milk chocolate, Turtles are just a sugary, fatty treat I love to eat. Of all the junk chocolate this and Laura Secord French mint are the ones I keep coming back for. Of all the chocolates, this at least has stood the test of time.

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Well, Turtles have stood the test of time in my mind at least. One of the things I love about them is the sweet nutty-ness of them. They are awful and delicious and bad for me and I can’t really stand more than 2 in an evening but I still love them. I love these things. They aren’t top notch and they leave a weird aftertaste in my mouth and the chocolate isn’t my favourite but I love them.

Caramilk
This chocolate I have fond memories of “unretouched” images with people putting hands in front of camera lenses to stop then photographing the secret of how they get the caramel into a caramilk bar. I spent a whole heck of a lot of time trying to figure it and I figured that they had to freeze the caramel, fill the mould, drop the frozen caramel in and it sealed itself up.

The chocolate here is a bit chewy and not the topmost quality but I loved the caramel interior. I always have. I just can’t take the chocolate now I’ve been eating the good stuff. However I just loved this as a kid and now that I can’t take it as an adult I feel like I’ve lost something. I do still have Green & Blacks Caramel

Jersey Milk
I remember when I was growing up going to the “Ex”. It was the Canadian National Exhibition, CNE or the “Ex” in Toronto. At the Ex there was a food building and in the summer I got to go to the Ex and to the food building and it was full of delights. The food building was where you could get chocolate bars cheaply. Oh ya… candy and chocolate and all sorts. The worst part was choosing. Do I pick the Twizzlers and Jersey Milk and Life Savers or some other mix? But joy of joys it was delightful torture.

Jersey Milk used to be thinner and I could swear it used to be richer with a different flavour. It used to be this awesome treat and it seems to have changed. I’m just not finding the milk chocolate all that different than others. It used to be distinct and different and now it just feels like more of the same. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this new bar as much if this iteration was around when I was a kid. It was a big part of my childhood and I’m kind of disappointed now but as I have said before – you can never really go back.

My mom has always been an awesome baker. I’ve always loved her baking and on Canada Day I miss being home because we’d always gather at my grandma’s and we’d have a BBQ and mom would bake and Mike would BBQ and grandma would have little gifts for us all. One of the awesome things my mom did was to modify recipes because I was, and am, a fussy eater. This is one altered recipe because I don’t like coconut – Nanaimo Bars. I’m not sure if these are Canadian but they are named after a Canadian city.

(1)
120 g butter or margarine
50 g white sugar
1 egg
30 g cocoa

(2)
210 g Graham wafer crumbs
100 g chopped nuts

(3)
60 g butter
50 ml milk
30 ml vanilla custard powder (or pudding powder)
250 g sifted icing sugar

(4)
4 squares semisweet chocolate
5 ml butter

(1) Mix the 120g butter, white sugar, egg, and cocoa. Set over boiling water and stir until mixture resembles a custard. This is going to be mixed with the base to bind it
(2) Combine crumbs and nuts. Combine with the butter/sugar mixture, blending well. Spread and press tightly into a 22x22cm pan. This is the base so make sure it isn’t at all loose. Pack it in really tightly, pressing it firmly.
(3) Cream the 60g butter, milk, custard powder, and icing sugar. Beat it wekk so it becomes light. Spread carefully over the mixture in the pan. Don’t mush it into the base but spread it gently.
(4) Melt the chocolate over simmering water in a bain marie; add butter to this melted chocolate and blend well. Let it cool a bit and while still liquid but cool spread gently and carefully over the icing without pouring. Let set.

Chill and keep refrigerated.

While not the height of culinary cuisine, an honour possibly held by the beaver tail, poutine or split pea soup I’m sure, these are a wonderfully different sweet dessert. Share them with people you love.

Coffee Crisp – it is the thing that sets Canadians apart from Americans. Its that chocolate bar where as Canadians we said “You know what this chocolate bar needs? A hit of caffeine!” and made it so. It is what sets us apart and is as much a part of our nation’s proud heritage as Tim Hortons and the Second Cup.

So as a Canuck, you can imagine my delight and surprise when upon visiting my local corner store I saw a display of these beauties in a box on the floor. You know, one of those stand-up cardboard display boxes. Interestingly the Turtle ones were sold out but they have plenty of Coffee Crisps left. That should have been a warning really…

So there I was… Coffee Crisp Easter egg in my hand. I had high hopes. As a Canadian, I had pinned my nation’s pride on this egg. How would they handle wafers, whipped filling *and* coffee? All I had to do was try some…

Well, as you can see that filling looks more like sick than filling. And what’s worse, it doesn’t taste anything like a Coffee Crisp. It is a poor substitute for my beloved Coffee Crisp (original). Shame on you Nestle – I know you are capable of much better. Next year I want to see a new one that’s even better!

“Laura Secord what a reward, isn’t it time to get there…delicious chocolates…” or so the commercial jingle went. Laura Secord is one of those great Canadian stories of a woman who escaped from the enemy camp and struggled through trials and tribulations to arrive safely at the friendly camp and warned the Canadians of the movements of the Americans which she had overheard.

Whoever Laura Secord originally was, she now makes chocolates. Call it nostalgia or call it a bad memory, it seems to me that the chocolate was nicer when I was younger. More chocolaty, less waxy. And I think I liked the old-style French mint chocolate bars better too – but I digress.

The mini Secord egg is another Canadian institution which I place a great deal of trust and faith in as being representative of the excellence that (is) used to be Canadian Chocolate. It is a small, gooey, sugary confection that beats the pants off a Cadbury cream egg. It is just head and shoulders above the competition in my mind and each Easter I spend away from Toronto is another Easter I shed a tear for having missed Secord eggs… or should I?

The egg is described as a “buttercream” which is apparently Canadian parlance for “sugary sweet with a hint of synthetic vanilla” and really code for “addictive as all heck”. As you can see from the image, they have imagined these eggs as having a yellow “yolk” surrounded by the white as in the egg itself but as you can also see, there is hardly a hint of yolk. I blame time (and time – which wait for no one it seems) for making these taste better in my memory but it could be the size. When I was younger, the mini ones were better than the full-sized ones but those had an appeal all their own related to the lovely way you could slice a paper-thin slice and… oh wait, back to the review…

As a small hit of sugar and at only $0.85 individually, these aren’t bad value. There is a very thin dark chocolate shell which I think is what has always balanced off the flavoured buttercream nicely. I noticed the blend is more grainy than I remember, less smooth and less creamy. This could be the result of changing recipes or even just the type of sugar used.

Regardless, these are still a treat though as opposed to the large ones, a small one does me just fine now

Not the best chocolate in the world, but something that comes straight from my childhood and will remain close to my heart.  I’ll always have a french mint chocolate bar melted slowly in a hot drink and allowed to melt in my mouth slowly.  Utter bliss, as are the maple creams.

The name Laura Secord was used because she was a Canadian heroine and an icon of courage, devotion and loyalty.  While no longer Canadian owned, the shops remain a Canadian icon and a treat for many.

Laura Secord started as a single shop on Yonge Street in Toronto. O’Connor turned the flat above the shop into a kitchen and prepared his own products. The chocolate no longer reflects that hand-made flavour and its mass-market production has necessitated a low quality chocolate but it’ll always have a place on Canadian tables and in Canadian stockings.

My favourite bars are the french mint and fronted mint.  I find these taste best when warmed ever so slightly and then eaten slowly – allowed to melt in the mouth.  That oily aftertaste is regrettable but I can rarely bring myself to chew these lovely bars.  French mint is a dark milk chocolate flavoured with mint and fronted mind has a green-tinted white chocolate outer covering of the inner dark milk chocolate core.

The maple cream chocolates shaped like a maple leaf are the most Canadian of products and is a blissful combination of milk chocolate maple leaf shape and maple cream centre.  The flavour brings to everyone what is quintessentially Canadian.  I bring a lot (50+) of these back with me when I can.

The Secord egg at Easter is the one thing I’m sure most Canadians living abroad long for.  It is a different fondant centre than an Easter cream egg, with a more pronounced vanilla flavour.  The sizes vary from a small chocolate to a rather scarily large solid egg.

This is almost as Canadian as it gets, despite being owned by Americans.