While customizing your own chocolate is always fun, sometimes you draw a bit of a blank when adding toppings. What goes with pear? Which spice best suits my dark chocolate base? Does strawberry chocolate suit my complexion? It's kind of like going out to dinner with your friends- sometimes you can't figure out what you want until you know what everyone else is getting!

With that in mind, we've launched a recommendation engine to guide you. Of course, we still encourage you to be as creative as you want when creating a chocolate bar that's just for you. But if you need a bit of help with pairing chocolate and the perfect toppings, or have an idea of one or two aspects you'd like but want to complement them with a spice or nut, check out this awesome new feature.

You can start the process in our "Create Your Own Chocolate" tab, and below is a pic of how the feature works. How cool is that?

Last week, we contributed two bars to the back to school shopping lists of chocri fans everywhere. This week we're following on with another new bar, one that's especially well-suited to tuck into the bags of a new or returning college student. New today in our recommended chocolate bars is the Extreme Concentration chocri!

Everyone's familiar with the concept of the college all-nighter. And while coffee is often linked to staying up and staying focused, we've got an alternative for people who prefer their perkiness from creamy, tasty chocolate. The Extreme Concentration chocri has a bold dark chocolate base, in and of itself enough to snap you back to the here and now. We've added ground coffee beans for obvious reasons, black sesame seeds for alertness and focus, organic cane sugar for a blast of energy, and omega-3 rich walnuts for an additional brain boost. Tasty and clever.

Send your favorite college kid five bars, and as always, we include a sixth bar on us. And let us know in the comments- what do you reach for when you need an energy infusion?

After we covered the basics of our fair trade and organic chocolate in yesterday's "Ask chocri" post, we got another, similar question from our Facebook friend Bryan, and we thought it warranted its own answer. Bryan asked a question concerning what goes into our chocolate. He wants to know:

"Where does Chocri source its cocoa beans and other ingredients from?"

Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? :) Actually, that's another question without a simple answer. While the short answer is "lots of places," the long answer is "mostly Europe." Our chocolate is from Belgium, and unsurprisingly, a lot of our toppings come from Germany.

Toppings are a bit more broadly sourced, though again mostly European. An example would be our candied lilac and rose petals, which are from a little farm in the Austrian alps. They're real, and created and candied in small batches, by people with giant horns wearing lederhosen. Okay, the last part was hyperbole, but they are really painstakingly handcrafted, just like our blog posts.

Another topping sourced from Germany is mymuesli- if chocri has given you a jones for creating your own food items and you can no longer stand the same cereal everyone and their brother has, you might want to take a look at their 566 quadrillion organic muesli combinations. We've gotten great feedback about this particular topping, and the mymuesli website has some great info not only on their products, but as another example of co-creation. If you're into the idea of making your very own muesli but are in the US, you might want to check out mix my granola. Same idea, but if you enter the code CHOCRI at checkout, you get 15% off!

And lastly, our peanut butter drops are American- has anyone managed to do the humble peanut as much justice as the US? Of course, we can't cover every topping here, but if you have a specific question- tweet us or say hi on Facebook!

If you read our blog or follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you know we've been picking your brains for questions about chocolate or chocri in general to answer on our blog. We've tackled chocolate and gold flakes. We've addressed whether chocolate makes you horny. We told you whether white chocolate was actually chocolate or something else. (Well, is it? You should click!) We've explored whether chocolate helps you pay attention to things other than the delicious, custom Belgian chocolate creation sitting before you. What were we talking about?

Oh, questions. So we want to know what you want to know. And we recently got a very interesting question from our friend @saleemkhan on Twitter, who wanted to know:   

”What specifically do you mean when you say "Our chocolate is organic and is produced fairly and healthfully." Details?”

When we say our chocolate is organic, that refers to not only the cocoa used in our product, but the other ingredients as well. The milk, the sugar, and the flavorings used in our chocri chocolate is organic. While not all our toppings are organic, there are several that are, and these are marked in our Toppings section. So browse! Invent your perfect all organic bar. (Or add potato stix and sugar stars, we won't tell.)

As for “produced fairly,” this refers to our chocolate being fair trade. Much of the world's chocolate is produced in third world countries where unethical conditions and child labor proliferate. We feel that we couldn't in good conscience produce chocolate without knowing its origins, so all the chocolate we use is certified fair trade. Want to know more about chocri's use of fair trade chocolate and our relationship with DIV Kinder, to whom we've donated just over $43,000? We wrote a blog post about it a while back, and it goes into a bit more detail.

Of course, the benefits of organic and fair trade chocolate go beyond the “good neighbor” aspect. Luckily for the ethically inclined, chocolate produced this way tends to offer a more nuanced taste profile. Don't take our word for it- Corinne DeBra, the woman who ate 13,000 chocolate bars, was kind enough to stack chocri up against her impressive stash and in our conversation- she had this to say about the taste of fair trade and organics:

"Fair trade and organic is more difficult. There is a correlation to a certain type of taste, sometimes related to texture, but it's unpredictable. Often fair trade and organic chocolate are more artisanal, and that affects the texture."

So there you have it- you can read a little more about chocri and fair trade chocolate here.