Speaking as a confectioner and a chocolate lover, familiarity with great ingredients really gives an appreciation of what to look for in truly fine chocolates: character and depth of flavor; smooth texture with a thin coating; nuanced, and not too sweet. But this tasting is not about that kind of chocolate. It's about something that gives us all (yes, even you) a certain kind of comfort: drugstore Easter candy. We rated five of the classics on a very scientific scale, from one to five NOMs. More

In November, Serious Eats ran my optimistic interview with Seneca Klassen of Bittersweet, who described the cacao-growing industry as "fundamentally organic." It wasn't long before Sam Madell—a spirited bean-to-bar chocolate producer at Tava in Australia—sent us an intricate, itemized response, dismissing Seneca's take on the situation as "blatant misinformation." "For your information," Sam wrote, "a wide range of pesticides—many of which are banned in Europe because they are unsafe—are used on cocoa trees and beans in many countries, including Ecuador, Venezuela, and Ghana, as well as the USA, where highly toxic methyl bromide is used on cocoa beans in storage." I thought it would be a good idea to ring in the new year with a new take on organics... More

We Americans used to believe that all chocolate came from France (or possibly from Belgium or Switzerland). Now we know that it comes from asymmetrical pod-laden trees that grow in the jungles of Côte D'Ivoire, New Guinea, Brazil, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and Central America. But the French are still in charge of the Chocolate Show. Francophone couple Sylvie Douce and François Jeantet founded the show in Paris in 1995 (they got 40,000 visitors on the first try), and they brought the event to New York ten years ago. At this weekend's New York Chocolate Show, France's chocolate artisans offer some healthy competition to their American counterparts.... More

Even on October 31, some of us would just as well pass on the Hershey's Miniatures. Luckily, there are some other options: High-Art Trick or Treat: Bay Area superstar Michael Recchiuti is known for blending five or six chocolate couvertures to achieve the right flavor profile for his confections, and for the savvy designs that he applies to his bon bons using transfer sheets painted with colored cocoa butter. This season, he's whipped up fresh cinnamon-malt-chocolate bon bons and topped them with bats, ghosts, menacing pumpkins, and black cats. Border-Crossing Trick or Treat: Mexican customs for acknowledging departed souls are simultaneously more grown-up and more spooky than their American counterparts. Instead of dressing up like ghosts and goblins on October... More

A new set of distinctive hand-painted bon bon designs will debut along with the new branch of MarieBelle this Friday. In New York, the chocolate race uptown from SoHo is on, and Maribel Lieberman is a lap ahead of Jacques Torres. Torres has been making noise about a new location on Amsterdam Avenue for months, but the grand opening won't come before November. Meanwhile, Lieberman (who's also been busy planting cacao trees in her native Honduras and selling Blackberries on the web) will open a branch of her MarieBelle chocolate boutique at 762 Madison Avenue this Friday. The MarieBelle aesthetic is Latin sass trimmed in Parisian frill, and the brand includes chocolate bon bons in flavors like White Kona... More

There's still time to book passage to London for this month's U.K. Chocolate Week. Now in its fifth year, the event—which runs from October 15 to October 21—features chocolate-and-whiskey pairings led by chocolatier Paul A. Young, chocolate tours led by the pommy purists from SeventyPercent.com, and lectures given by Order of the British Empire (and food writer) Sara Jayne Stanes. The week is sponsored by Divine Chocolate, the U.K.-based fair-trade operation that sources its cacao from the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana. All-business-class airline Silverjet sells tickets between New York and London for about a thousand bucks each way on short notice. British Airways and Virgin might be worth a shot, too.... More

I wonder if Fritz Knipschildt, "Maitré Chocolatier" at Knipschildt Chocolatier, is a nice guy. I'll be lucky if he is—because I stood him up recently. The thing is that I didn't believe that Fritz—the man behind the chocolate bon bons named for mystery women like Helena, Kelly, Jennifer, and Donna—the provocateur behind a trio of chocolate bars molded in the image of lingerie vixen Eve Kitten—the hopeless romantic behind the $250, 1.9-ounce morsel of Perigord truffle bathed in Valrhona chocolate—was real. Like Häagen-Dazs, the name "Fritz Knipschildt" struck me as the kind of fabrication intended to sound appetizing and vaguely Scandinavian. Fritz Knipschildt is very really indeed. He relocated to this continent from his native Denmark a decade ago,... More

This month, Theo Chocolate founder Joseph Whinney shares the limelight with Paul Newman's daughter Nell Newman of Newman's Own Organics, supermarket demagogue John Mackey of Whole Foods Market, and a dozen others on a list of 15 Green Business Founders. That particular hue of green was bestowed upon the Seattle-based organic and fair-trade chocolate maker by Seattle-based eco-news outlet Grist, which links the Theo profile with enough commentary on sustainability in the chocolate industry that you could spend all day reading up on the subject (and I just might).... More