Chocxo Coconut Almond Butter Cups and Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups

It's about chocolate candy, but also, climate change and swimming pools.

Chocxo Coconut Almond Butter Cups and Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups

Last year, I was at the town pool when one of my son’s friends came over to me and said he thought maybe another kid accidentally left the pool with his Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup towel (which I’d been admiring earlier myself). I offered to call the other kid’s parents to see if we could solve this missing towel mystery.

“That’s ok,” he said. “I’ll tell him at baseball practice.”

The kid ran off, and I marveled at his maturity (fortunately, the towel was found on the ground) – because if I’d had a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup towel when I was his age, I would have been very upset if I’d thought it had gone missing.

That’s because I’m a lifelong fan of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. When I was a kid, I even made an Andy Warhol-esque papier-mâché Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup package in art class (as it happens, papier-mâché also re-entered my life last year when my son had to make a papier-mâché head for a class project). Every Halloween, the “candy tax” I collect from my son is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup or two. If I could only eat one candy for the rest of my life? RPBC, easily.

So I was pretty excited when I found out that Chocxo, a Canadian candy company, had launched two new products: a Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup and a Coconut Almond Butter Cup. The Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups are made with 70% dark chocolate, and the Coconut Almond Butter Cups are made with organic 70% cacao. Both nut butter cups have only 3g of net carbs and 3g of sugar per serving. Plus, they’re organic and keto-friendly.

It sounded almost too good to be true.

The peanut/almond butter & chocolate cups arrived at my house on the day of an epic rainstorm that caused water to seep into my basement, ruining the floor. The dog barked as the FedEx guy dropped packages at our front door while I was trying to get work done. It had been a stressful day. It was time to Treat Myself.

If there’s anything better than milk chocolate and peanut butter, it might just be dark chocolate and peanut butter. Dark chocolate is “healthy”, right? Honestly, I just think it’s delicious. I like a little bitterness with my sweetness, like a nice, bold cup of coffee. The Chocxo Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups delivered. The Coconut Almond Butter Cups also offered a more grown-up take on a Reese’s crossed with a chocolate-coconut candy, like an Almond Joy. You’d never know these have only 3 grams of sugar per serving (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have 21 grams of sugar per serving).

I’m definitely a fan of these Chocxo confections. I ended up giving some of the Chocxo candies to my son’s baseball team, and they were a hit. I also gave some to several friends and colleagues. Everyone loved them. I might even, dare I say this blasphemy, like them better than my beloved Reese’s. My husband eventually said, “Get these out of the house, because I can’t stop eating them.”

It turned out the rain we had the day the Chocxo cups were delivered was a precursor to more rain. We ended up ripping up our old basement floor, fixing up the concrete underneath, and putting in new, waterproof vinyl flooring. We patched up holes. Outside, we graded things and moved pipes. We spent the whole summer shoring up our basement in our more-than-100-year-old house, which had never had water in the basement before. But now, climate change.

A few months later, Hurricane Ida tore through our area. My husband and I stayed up all night bailing water out of our basement as fast as it came in. Fortunately, we’d recently purchased an electric pump and a wet/dry vac. We managed to keep the water at bay, mostly. Many neighbors of ours were not so lucky. One family in town had to be evacuated from their home as water breached a local pond and came pouring down hills.

The water also damaged our town pool extensively – so much so that this year, the town pool is closed to residents. They couldn’t fix it in time for this summer. My son only has so many carefree summers left as a child. The town pool was a simple pleasure that we all looked forward to. It was a microcosm, in many ways, of his childhood – he started off in the baby pool/splash pad, graduated to the training pool, then the big pool. A big draw was also running into all his friends and raiding the pool snack bar for junk food. There are other pools nearby, but they’re bigger and more crowded. We miss the town pool terribly. By next summer, they promise us, it will be ready. One can only hope.