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Not Your Kid’s Milk Chocolate & Food Gal Contest

Milk chocolate doesn’t get a whole lotta respect.

Dark chocolate aficionados turn up their noses at the stuff, sneering that it’s weak, sweet, and uncouth.

But there’s a new milk chocolate in town that just might change even those snobby taste buds.

Dark chocolate lovers already know Amano Artisan Chocolate, the Utah specialty chocolate maker, for its amazingly complex dark chocolates. The company, founded by a scientist who develops search engines, has now gone the milky way. It has created two different milk chocolate bars, ($6.95 for each 2-ounce bar), which I recently received samples of. So just how do they taste?

I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.

Amano Artisan Chocolate Ocumare 30 Percent: This bar is made from Criollo cocoa beans, harvested from the colonial village of Ocumare, which lies between the coastal mountains of Venezuela and the Caribbean. The beans are tempered with whole milk. And you can really taste a creamy milkiness in the bar. It’s definitely sweeter than dark chocolate, but not hugely so. Indeed, there are notes of earth, and even raisins. The bar has a long, deep finish. This is as far from a Nestle’s Crunch Bar you can get, and still be considered milk chocolate. This is a bar that dark chocolate lovers could be tempted by if they wanted to dip a taste bud into the milky pool. Rating: 8 lip-smackers.

Amano Artisan Chocolate Jembrana 30 Percent: Balinese cocoa beans are again tempered with whole milk. This bar is more milky sweet than the last one. It reminds me of British milk chocolate bars or a cold glass of milk swirled with chocolate syrup. It’s like a sophisticated version of a childhood candy. Die-hard milk chocolate lovers would go mad for this. There’s also a lovely honey-note to it. Rating: 7 lip-smackers.

Contest Time: How would you like to try one of each of the new milk chocolate bars, along with the new Amano Montanya 70 Percent dark chocolate bar that’s made from beans grown in the mountains of Northern Venezuela? One winner can.

Just complete this sentence: “Milk chocolate is….”

I’ll give you a few of my own examples:

“Milk chocolate is the Rodney Dangerfield of chocolates.”

“Milk chocolate is the only chocolate my husband will eat. But that’s fitting, since he often admits to being a 12-year-old at heart.”

“Milk chocolate is what I eat when nobody’s looking. I can’t be seen with it or else the chocolate police will surely cite me.”

Just complete that sentence to enter the contest. The most creative, original or memorable answer will win the chocolate bars.

The contest is open to all chocolate lovers in the continental United States.

Deadline to enter: End of the day, Oct. 10. The winner will be announced on Oct. 12.