My father loved them but I could never understand why. They came from Mavrakos, a “fancy” candy store, and were packed a dozen to a box, each one cradled in a brown plastic nest. They were huge and they were messy, requiring a minimum of three bites and a lot of finger-licking. And wow, were they sweet, Too sweet. For obvious reasons, we kids were allowed only one.
I speak, of course, of the chocolate-covered cherry cordial.
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You remember the confection: a globe of waxy, milk chocolate nearly the size of a ping-pong ball was filled with a maraschino cherry precisely the color of red dye #40. It was held in place by a sticky, hyper-sweet, thickener-laden goo that ranged in color from clear to opaque to cloudy—often all three. It was that otherworldly slurry that scared me.
So yesterday we discover that Dan Abel, Jr. of Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate has created an all natural version of something that had been anything but. Abel sourced cherries that were processed with no artificial dyes or colors—just natural beet juice—and cordialized them without any preservatives or high-fructose corn syrup.
The new iteration (above) is smaller, crisper, and sweet but not cloying. And Abel’s version is a one-bite affair, so there’s no way any of it will find a home on your shoe.
The All Natural Cherry Cordial is available beginning today in all nine Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate locations. The eight-piece pack (below) retails for $11.95, and it’s available online as well, here. According to Abel, 1000 boxes have already been pre-sold to wholesalers.
Abel also mentioned that the farm-to-factory logistics gives the cordials a shelf life of six months, not bad for a preservative-free product. The ones I remember as a kid could have hung on like a box of Twinkies.
