Mothers Day is one of those holidays that it’s all too easy to forget. And if you have forgotten, then you’d better get your skates on because it’s this Sunday! Luckily, we’re here to remind you with the help of this little selection from Liverpool’s Chocolate Cellar.
What we have is a hessian tray with a large “Happy Mothers Day” milk chocolate bar and some dark, milk and white mini chocolate buttons, a small assortment box, a milk chocolate shoe and a dark chocolate… handbag, I think!
Oh – and a little book of Quotations for Chocolate Lovers – “There is no love more sincere than the love of chocolate”. Quite.
Unfortunately, that little book also contains less flattering quotations like “Destiny shapes our ends, calories shape our middles” and “Some people grow up and spread cheer. Chocoholics just grow up and spread”.
I’m not sure why a chocolate company would send me (or anyone) that. It’s not really the kind of thing I’d want to read along with my gift of chocolate. And unfortunately, it’s representative of this little selection as a whole. First impressions are favourable, but things go down hill a bit when you look beneath the surface.
As this is intended as a Mothers Day gift, I wanted a female opinion of this little selection, so I took them over to our friend Jennifer Earle to get her impressions. Jen runs London’s Chocolate Ecstasy Tours and definitely knows her chocolate.
Her first impressions were similar to mine. They’re pretty enough if you’re going for the home-made look, but they’re more arts-and-crafts than artisan. Nothing wrong with that though.
We then started tasting and were immediately disappointed. The chocolate was universally too sweet and lacked any real flavour. That wasn’t as much of a problem for the milk and white chocolate, but the dark chocolate pieces tasted of nothing much at all.
The little box of six assorted chocs looked rather appealing, but again, the chocolate lacked any real flavour the shells were too thick. Neither of us were fond of any of the overly sweet fillings either. There was a nice pecan filling, but the rest tasted a little artificial. Unfortunately, we had no way of confirming that as there were no ingredients listed anywhere, but that could just have been our review samples.
So as chocolate lovers, we were both a little disappointed by this selection. The average mum who doesn’t eat chocolate every day might not notice some of the shortcomings, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are higher quality alternatives available on most High Streets. I know The Chocolate Cellar can do much better than this.
Buy Chocolate Cellar Mothers Day Selection Online
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High quality Belgian
chocolate gifts and e-chocolate from Soufflon
Geminus, Inc., to my surprise, is a local company (to me, that is), coming out of Scottsdale, Arizona. The chocolate people usually don’t flock here too much; they must not be keen on their hard work melting away in the Valley of the Sun. Geminus, however, isn’t exactly a chocolate company: headed by Jovan Van Drielle, they make specialized items you can have your logo/name put on. As far as chocolate goes, they make custom bars, boxes, molds, and edible pictures. Their Chocolate Diamond Bark is what I was given.
From the outside to in, you can tell Geminus works to please the eye. In a gold wrapping is a plain brown box like those The ChocolateSmith uses. This one is completed with a thick, cream and brown polka dot bow, whose ends are finished with not a straight cut, but a ridged one. The brown tissue paper inside has a sparkle to it, sealed shut by a sticker label. Now the actual bark. Large pieces of chocolate are scattered with “diamonds” or rock candy and small, circular pictures, similar to what is printed on cakes. On the Geminus site, there is a sample bark dressed up for a wedding. It seems it would make a nice addition to a wedding table, a little sparkly while still not overdone, with pictures of the couple that can be eaten instead of stashed away and forgotten.
I first assumed this to be dark chocolate: its color is a middle tone that lends a bit more to dark. It tasted dark, too, at first, of a better quality than novelty chocolates tend to be. It reminds me slightly of the Original Beans Cru Virguna bar – sweet and pleasant chocolate. Then I realized that the flavor was also rather milky. This is, in fact, a combination of milk and dark chocolate. You get the best of both sides, making it something to appeal to most everyone. Its flavors are warm with cinnamon and coffee.
The diamonds come into a bit here and there. The effect is like finding salt in chocolate, only with sugar instead of salt. Little sections of crunch make for a break from letting the chocolate melt, without much influence on flavor. I’m glad to come across a chocolate whose unique looks I can compliment, then enjoy eating rather than finding barely tolerable.
Buy Geminus Chocolate Diamond Bark Online
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If writing for Chocablog were a proper job, it would probably be the best job in the world. I mean… how many of you have a postman that brings you cake for breakfast with a friendly smile?
After seeing our cheap off the shelf Flake Cake that we celebrated our 4th birthday with, Abigail Phillips at The Cake Nest took pity and decided to bake us some proper cake. Awesome.
Thankfully, for the sake of my bathroom scales, Abi just sent a couple of slices of this chocolate cake, because it really is very good and if she’d sent any more I know I wouldn’t have been able to help myself.
Rather than being a light sponge, this is a denser, moister cake with two thick layers of dark chocolate icing. But rather than being heavy, that just makes this cake more satisfying. Combined with the rich dark chocolate flavours, it adds up to a slice of cake that leaves you happily full without being too sweet or sickly – something that was a definite problem with our Flake Cake.
Based on this small sample, I’d happily recommend you check out The Cake Nest if you’re looking for something a little more eye-catching and upmarket than the mass produced Cadbury cake I bought.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another slice to get through…
Buy The Cake Nest Chocolate Cake Online
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Chocolate Gift Baskets full of Ghirardelli, Godiva, Belgian and other fine chocolates.
We have fresh figs on the tree at the moment. And that gave me an idea. We’ve reviewed chocolate enrobed figs here before. How about fresh figs with something chocolatey?
There’s something about figs, summer time and fig trees – or more particularly, the aroma of the tree. Ours starts getting a distinctly figgy smell about a month before the fruit is ready – and you can smell it a good 10 or more metres away. This, of course, just gets the anticipation going. So today, we’re doing fresh figs with a chocolate sauce. This is dead easy, and takes all of about 10 minutes.
Ingredients
For this, I used (and you can scale up or down accordingly):
- 6 fresh figs (I used green figs but any kind will do)
- A dribble of balsamic vinegar
- About 25g of 70% dark chocolate (I used 2 squares from a 100g block of Lindt. Don’t use cooking chocolate or milk chocolate)
- 2 teaspoons thickened or double cream
Method
Cut the very tip off each fig where the stem was – you want to just tidy it up a little.
Make 2 cuts in the fig from top to bottom, in a cross shape, cutting almost all the way through – so you have 4 segments but they are joined at the bottom.
Push with the fingers (it’s a bit fiddly) on the 4 segments, pushing in and down, so the fig opens up at the top. The result should look a bit like this (even more open would be better – my figs were very ripe, making this quite difficult):
Drizzle a little balsamic vinegar through the centres of the figs. A little spilling out on the dish is fine – its just more yumminess to dab up later.
Break the chocolate up into smallish pieces, then melt it in a bowl or cup over some boiling water (I cheat and just fill a cup with boiling water, and sit another cup in the top). When the chocolate has about ½ melted, add 2 teaspoons of cream. Allow that to warm as well, and gradually stir and mix. This is your chocolate sauce – which is so delicious by itself that I amazed myself that any was left for the figs.
Spoon the sauce over the figs, making sure to get some down into cut centres. As you can see from my photo – its not pretty. The sauce is quite thick and its really hard to make arty, restaurenty swirly patterny thingies. Just spoon and dob it on so each fig has plenty. It’s chocolate we want here, not elegant looks!
Allow the chocolate cause to cool a little, and then eat as quickly as you can.
Verdict from the teenage son: Ohhh Om Nom Nom!!!
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If you live outside of Canada, you may never have seen one of these, but I’m sure you can tell exactly what it is just by looking at the wrapper.
Yes, it’s a Cadbury Bounty!
I’ve not been able to find out much about this bar, and as far as I can tell it’s a Canadian-only thing, but I managed to pick one up in CyberCandy’s London shop.
As you can see, rather than the two-small bars of a Bounty, Cadbury have gone for the shockingly radical option of three bars. Nobody will be able to accuse them of copying now!
There’s no hint of the kind of chocolate used, although it looks a little darker than Dairy Milk. It does however have a full set of ingredients in English and French which describe it as “unsweetened chocolate” which doesn’t sound very Cadbury like, but the same ingredients list also mentions “…modified palm oil, modified vegetable oil, palm oil, vegetable oil…” which sounds much more like Diary Milk to me. So it could be anything.
Inside, it looks quite like a real Bounty bar, if perhaps not so pristine and white. In that sense, it’s more like the M&S version of a Bounty.
Like the M&S bar, it’s also not quite as moist as the real thing. That could be partly down to the fact that this particular bar embarked upon a long and arduous journey across the atlantic to reach my stomach, but I suspect it was made that way.
Still, this is quite edible and a tasty little snack. I think I prefer the three-bar format (I have TWO friends now), but it’s just not quite as good as the real thing.
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