It’s an essential for high school sweethearts during Valentine’s day, a cheesy card, perhaps a cute little stuffy, and of course, the chocolate hearts. Found at your local HEB is the Elmer’s brand chocolate hearts for $1.48 complete with the cheesy clip art, stale chocolate, and questionable fillings. It’s the whole package.
Let’s start with the price – $1.48 split five ways rounds up to $0.30 per piece and considering I doubt there are any high schoolers around that are swimming in money, it’s an unbeatable price for the novelty of it.
The packaging is cute with a variety of clip art on the front and there’s a plastic insert that separates the different chocolates. The actual chocolates are bigger than I expected when I think of chocolate hearts.
Moving onto the actual chocolates – I’m starting with the fact that most of the charm from these things come from the novelty of it. Your sweetheart gets you a sweet-heart and then you get to be cheesy together. It’s meant to be a cute little gesture and while I’m sure there are plenty of these things with artisanal level treats inside, this is not one of them.
The chocolate shells are pretty unnotable. I felt the dark chocolate was a bit sweet, but that is also just a bit of a preference on my part. Overall most of it tasted stale and was crumbly when you bit into it. The fillings were where my biggest issues were. The caramel ones were fine, a bit stiff and the texture reminded me of putty, and the truffle was bland and much dryer than I think it should have been.
The biggest issues were the creams. Both were slimy, sticky, and disgustingly artificially flavored. It felt like having a Bath and Body Works set up shop on your mouth. The fillings were also dyed some concerningly neon colors for something that’s meant to be ingested. They could have easily been substituted with maybe some hazelnut or almond filling and been a million times better.
Overall, it’s cute. At less than $2 it’s a fun way to tell a partner or friend that you care while staying on a budget and the people that matter will love it regardless of the treats inside. It definitely won’t win any prizes, but it’s a sweet gesture that has years of charming novelty behind it to make it memorable.
