Life can be stressful sometimes. However, I have found just the thing to give a quick pick-me-up: Brookside Dark Chocolate Fruit Crunch. I think the name most certainly doesn’t do the taste justice so let me preface my review with a preamble that it should be called “best things come in small things”. Brookside has elegantly blended cranberries, fruit juice pieces (aҫai, blueberry and pomegranate), crunchy rice crisps, and whole grain oats with a chewy truffle centre covered in rich dark chocolate. Each delicious chocolate drenched nugget is unique and absolutely delicious! I fell in love with it after my first bite.
It is a Canadian-made product (the best things all are), and I found it in my local supermarket. I usually gravitate to dark chocolate when I indulge (or binge) in cocoa so this seemed like a good supermarket splurge. One third cup (or 40g) of these tasty gems sets you back 190 calories (surely, that doesn’t break the calorie bank), but I can’t keep my hand out of the bag. Last time I had them I finished the whole package in one sitting. For me anything with chocolate is here today and gone today. So my chocolate binges invariably lead to extra long cardio workouts. But, few extra laps have been well worth the gratification I get from chocolate.
Brookside has eight different chocolate and fruit/nut pairings, from Dark Chocolate Mango Mangosteen to Dark Chocolate Goji and Raspberry. If you are looking for a better reason to indulge in chocolate you can go for Goji and Raspberry – according to the package, a 40g portion has 60mg of cocoa flavanols which means it’s full of antioxidants and good for you. And, the goji berry apparently has been used for thousands of years by herbalists as a remedy for all kinds of ailments. A friend tried Dark Chocolate Goji and Raspberry and she tells me it is a good one to try if you like something sweet and a little tangy.
Any excuse to eat chocolate is alright by me. But, do you really need a reason to have chocolate? I think not!
“If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?”
Marquise de Sévigné (1626 – 1696)
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All My Nosh 
I just discovered Brookside Dark Chocolate, Pomegranate at the supermarket and bought a bag to see how I liked it. I love almost any combination of fruit and chocolate and these sweet-but-tart little morsels are a superb example of how delicious that blend can be. In my opinion the great dark chocolate flavor and the pomegranate centers are just the right combination of sweet and sour.