swiss this!

back at the beginning of june, amy (the bro's lovely lady friend) travelled to switzerland for a few weeks. while this meant that i got to pooch sit for the weekend, the real benefit was that every time amy goes on a trip, she comes back with treats for me. two years ago, it was a bag o' snacks from nicaragua & this year, it was european-made chocolates. other than cheese or chard, i couldn't think of a more perfect snack to represent the swiss. after all, they are the world's largest consumers of chocolate.

the first item was a frey chocolates japonais chocolate bar. it's made by chocolat frey AG, a swiss company that's been around since 1887 & pulls in about a half-billion dollars a year in revenue. the description on the front of the packaging is in friggin german, my knowledge of the german language doesn't go beyond "scheiße" & google translate was worthless, so i can't really tell you what the description on the front of the packaging says. from what i can tell though it's a milk chocolate bar with hazelnut & pieces of "japonais biscuit" (whatever that is) inside it.

while i prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate, there's just a certain something about european-made milk chocolate that makes it better than american-made milk chocolate. i don't know what it is exactly, but i believe 1/5 of the swiss population call it je ne sais quoi. it's definitely true in this case. with each bite of the bar, you get a layer of tasty 34% milk chocolate, a crunchy & slightly creamy inside part & another layer of chocolate. consistency-wise, it's sort of like eating a nestle crunch bar made with a nutella filling. not bad.

the second treat was a bag of kinder schoko-bons. kinder's a branch of ferrero SpA, the italian chocolatiers who are best known for creating nutella & ferrero rocher. as the story on their website goes, ferrero expanded to germany back in the 50's & a decade later, they introduced the kinder brand to germans. these days, kinder products can be found all over the world.

the schoko-bons are individually-wrapped, egg-shaped treats made with a shiny 16% cacao shell & a creamy hazelnut center. the bag contained around a dozen of them & of my two swiss-procured chocolate treats, i preferred these. while they're much tinier, they sort of reminded me of cadbury cream eggs, where it's partially about the chocolate but it's mostly about the filling. the combo is quite nice, so much so that once i opened the bag, i finished them off pretty quickly. luckily, they're not just sold in switzerland, so all i'll have to do if i want more of them is find out where they're sold here in nyc & i'm back in business.