Three hazelnut butter cups, 13 g each, from Bett'r. The same construction as the peanut version — a soft nut cream centre inside a dairy-free dark chocolate shell, with a pinch of salt — but built on roasted hazelnut, which changes the character completely.
Hazelnut against peanut. These two cups are worth tasting side by side, because they illustrate how different the two ingredients really are. Peanut is a legume: savoury, earthy, salty-tasting even before salt is added. Hazelnut is a true tree nut: sweeter, rounder, and — once roasted — full of filbertone and the other Maillard compounds that we recognise as praline. Against dark chocolate, peanut provides contrast; hazelnut provides harmony. It is not an accident that hazelnut-and-chocolate is the oldest and most enduring pairing in European confectionery, from Piedmont's gianduja onwards.
What is in them. Roasted hazelnuts, coconut sugar, cacao mass, cacao butter, coconut cream, sunflower lecithin and salt. No dairy — coconut cream replaces the milk powder that would normally give a filled chocolate its creaminess, which is what makes these vegan without them tasting thin. The chocolate shell is a proper dark chocolate, not a compound coating.
On coconut sugar, honestly. It is boiled-down coconut palm sap and it is roughly three-quarters sucrose — chemically close to cane sugar, with a nice caramel note from the trace minerals. The low-glycaemic claims attached to it are thinly evidenced. These are very good chocolates; they are not health food.
Allergens: hazelnuts. May contain traces of peanuts, other nuts and sesame.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.