Guest Author - Deborah Markus

Ghirardelli, arguably the best-known American chocolate company after Hershey, now has a line of flavored coffees. Ghirardelli chocolate is wonderful -- it has a good snap and a terrific melt, excellent either for eating or baking -- and I love flavored coffee, so I thought this would be a perfect pairing. Instead, it's more like an arranged marriage: comfortable, but not exciting.

The various coffees are called "Caffé" on the label. Don't ask me why. All I know is that Google and my spell check both detest the word, and keep asking me if I'm sure that's what I really mean.

At any rate, the coffee used to make the Caffé is good quality. As coffee, it's excellent -- smooth and strong and not at all bitter. I generally start my day with tea, but while I was taste-testing this line, I found myself thinking that a little change now and then was not at all to be regretted.

The problem is, I can already brew myself a really good cup of coffee. Good water is half the battle there, and the other half is easily covered by some decent beans from my local health food store. I also live in a very urban-chic kind of neighborhood. You can't open your car door in your own driveway around here without banging into yet another high-end coffee establishment.

So if I'm buying Ghirardelli coffee, it's because I'm hoping for some Ghirardelli magic. You know, chocolate. And that's what's distinctly missing from these products.

Because at heart I am a greedy, chocolate-grubbing child, I started right off with the Double Chocolate flavor. By the power of suggestion alone, I should at the very least have been transported to single-chocolate land. Instead, I just had a very nice, rich, but ordinary cup of coffee.

The same was true with the Chocolate Peppermint and Chocolate Hazelnut. With that first one, I would have been satisfied with even just the scent of chocolate and peppermint as it brewed. I didn't even get that. Somebody's doing all the work in this relationship, and I think it's me.

The only coffee that delivered a bit of what its name offered was the Chocolate Cinnamon Almond. I caught both a whiff and a taste of cinnamon and almond. The chocolate was conspicuous only by its absence.

I didn't have the heart to even try White Chocolate Eggnog. I don't like white chocolate; if this was the one flavor that ended up really coming through, I didn't want to know.

So: as a gift for a coffee lover, these might be nice. They're very prettily packaged, and they're good coffee. But don't disappoint the chocolate lover on your list, or yourself, by giving these.

If you really want chocolate-flavored coffee, you're better off dropping a square of your favorite chocolate into the pot of a filter-drip coffee maker and letting the brewing coffee slowly melt and infuse it into your drink. You could stir it with a candy cane, if you want a festive hint of peppermint.