Of all these Valrhona Inspiration feves, the almond ones are sort of the odd one out of the bunch. They are the only ones that are nuts rather than fruit. They are also a bit less intense in flavour, they are mellow and sweet and a bit biscuity, and almondy.

The raspberry feves really taste very raspberry-y. Because they are just powdered fruit in white chocolate there is no artificial raspberry flavour, but they also are quite fresh. They don’t have that preserved flavour of dried fruit or jam. These raspberry feves taste like summer, but are available any time of year.

When I first saw these Valrhona fruit feves, I thought they looked really cool, and I also thought that they were probably not really that good. They are white chocolate with freeze dried fruit powder. I imagined that they couldn’t really have made them very fruity, after all they are in a base of white chocolate so they are probably very sweet with a pretty mild fruit flavour. More like white chocolate than like fruit.

Tiffin is a sort of refrigerator cake, a dense, chocolatey, no-bake confection. Not exactly like an American style icebox cake, which tends to have a fluffier filling to hold it together. Tiffin is from Scotland and it has a dense, ganach-y sort of chocolate filling, holding together biscuits, chocolates, dried fruit and anything else you would like to include. It’s easy to make and very rich.

I have vivid childhood memories of eating Nanaimo bars on the BC ferry. I live on Vancouver Island and taking the ferry has always been a fun part of adventure to and from the mainland to visit Vancouver and beyond. The ferry held the promise of watching the scenic view of the windows, reading magazines in the gift shop, watching eagles, seals and maybe spotting the occasional whale if we were lucky. And snacks. I loved ferry snacks.