Christmas Treat Gone Wrong

Happy Holidays, everyone!!

It's that time of year when the aromatic scents of fresh baked cookies, fudge, and cakes fill every room in the house. It's that time of year when diets are excused for the season. "It's the holidays." And it's especially the time of year of giving and sharing.
So recently, a co-worker had received chocolate truffles and decided to bring them to work to share. Anyone would think, 'how thoughtful and generous' and rightly so. Naturally being a chocolate lover and on a diet, it was hard to resist when the dark chocolate truffle was mentioned. My mental argument lasted all of a minute before blurting out, "I'll try the dark chocolate one", as if I was doing everyone a favor for volunteering my services to help empty the festive,tin can from whence it came.
So there it was in my hand, the truffle. The size was relatively compared to a jaw breaker with a thick coat of chocolate silk. Handcrafted to near professional perfection, as elegant as the name. With quick admiration and zero hesitation, I sink my teeth in and discover more chocolate underneath hiding like a velvety nugget of treasure. My tastebuds are now working into high gear and then...it happens. Instead of a sweet flavor filling the insides of my mouth, it was bitter. And the more I was chewing, the worse it was tasting. The sensations on my tongue were casting bad images in my mind. The best way to describe it, it was like biting into a chunk of fuzzy mold. Yep, that's right, MOLD.

It quickly reached the point when all courtesy and etiquette flew right out the window. I found a napkin and the nearest garbage can and disposed of the nastiness. All the while sparing another co-worker from taste-testing it to simply justify that it didn't taste right. But any guilt I had about spitting it out (which I very rarely do) was gone when two others, including the one that offered the Quote--End Quote Truffles, did the same thing before tossing out the remains.

Suffice it to say, I've now become very hesitant on gourmet concoctions. It's like what Forrest Gump said, "...like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get."