Canadian winters are impressive. Snow falls in substantial amounts and it stays for a long time – four months where I live – and it can also be damned cold even when the snow isn’t falling. So it makes perfect sense that Canada would be one of the biggest producers of something called icewine.
For the uninitiated, icewine is made by taking grapes that have actually been frozen on the vine; not really a problem in Canada. It freezes all the water in the grapes and helps to create a very, very sweet dessert wine that is a bit of an acquired taste – that’s a good thing because it is also rather expensive. So it makes perfect sense that some Canadian chocolate company would do something with the wealth of icewine made in this frozen wasteland I live in.
Enter Rogers’ Chocolates. I had seen they had been making boxes of truffles using Prospect Winery’s icewine which is also located in BC. The problem was that I hadn’t seen any of them on my side of the continent, but Rogers’ started making the same truffle in bar form and I have a local stockist for their bars so everything worked out just fine in the end.
The bar isn’t huge – just 75g which is Rogers’ standard for their range of Gourmet Bars – and it also has the distinctive Rogers’ look too with their logo and maple leaves. The chocolate is dark in colour, but not particularly dark in taste. It is a meagre 54% cocoa solids, but that actually turns out to be a good thing. Any lower, the sweetness would get overwhelming when combined with the icewine. Any higher and it would likely dominate even above the cognac. So it is a really well balanced bar where the featured ingredient is the star of the show – you get exactly what it says on the label.
The filling is really lovely. There’s an initial burst of sweetness that comes from the wine, but as it fades there’s something waiting to take its place; cognac. The very clever addition of cognac is why this is so delicious – it means the booziness hangs around for a satisfyingly long time.
There really isn’t anything to complain about here at all – this is a tasty bar of chocolate which I would happily eat again. Or rather will happily eat again.
Another bar from our favourite Lithuanian bean-to-bar chocolate makers, Naive. This time, as you might have guessed from the title, we have a 43% organic milk chocolate. The simple pale green wrapper tells us that this uses Naive’s House Blend chocolate (Haitian and Ugandan beans) and that the chocolate was conched for 60 hours.
There’s also a lovely little story about the chocolate maker’s attempts to milk a cow called Marigold. Luckily for us, his attempts were unsuccessful and he went back to making chocolate instead.
The format of the bar is the same as the other bars – it’s a very thin, glossy slab that looks great. Despite the lack of chunks, it’s very easy to break off pieces in any size
There’s a slightly grainy texture to the chocolate and the flavour is a bit unusual. For me took a moment to get used to, and my instant reaction was that I didn’t like it too much. The chocolate has a nice flavour, but it doesn’t quite sit with the creamy flavour of the milk. The result is that you can taste the chocolate and you can taste the milk, but they don’t immediately sit well with each other.
I did find that after my first couple of pieces, the flavour seemed to come together more and I picked up a lot of caramel notes, and after not being keen on it at first, I ended up really enjoying it. Within a very short amount of time, half the bar was gone. Coming back to it the next day, my experience was similar – I enjoyed each piece a little more than the last.
As with their other bars, you can’t buy this online yet, but you might be able to pick it up from the Real Food Market and Fernandez & Wells.
It’s been a little while since I indulged in any of Josef Zotter’s creations, so when I came a cross this cryptically-named bar from the ‘hand scooped’ range I was a little excited. Being Zotter, ‘A Piece Of Forest’ could mean almost anything but fear not, it’s not a lump of wood covered in chocolate – this bar is composed of a cranberry ganache sitting on a home made nougat made with walnut oil, all covered in chestnut milk chocolate.
As one might expect, it’s a sweet, fruity little number. Zotter’s hand scooped bars have a much higher ratio of filling to chocolate and the chocolate coating is probably the least sweet part of this bar. The cranberry ganache is both sweet and acidic, with mouthwatering high notes from tiny pieces of cranberry. The walnut oil nougat that sits beneath the ganache is an earthier counterpart to the sweet ganache, but it doesn’t stop the ganache from being the overarching flavour. In fact, I’d say this was possibly the sweetest Zotter Bar I’ve tried. It’s part of a whole new range of delicious/strange/amusing sounding bars released last year and like all of Zotter’s creations, organically farmed and fairly traded ingredients are used wherever possible.
As well as being about as organic and Fairtrade as it’s possible to get, Zotter decided that a small proportion of the profits from sales of this bar should go into a reforestation project in Laos – another reason to go out and buy one of these for yourself, but be warned, there’s nothing dark and mysterious about this bar. It’s light, fruity and sweet and as such fits very well with this time of year (a week of rain excepted!)
Red, white & blue marbles! Sir Hans Sloane are quite well known for their patriotic chocolate novelties, so it’s no surprise that this little bag of ‘marbles’ has been produced to coincide with the Jubilee. Now personally, I don’t know anyone who is celebrating that, but clearly some people do or there wouldn’t be a market for them. Me? I’m just in it of for the chocolate.
As you might have guessed, these are really white chocolate, but rather than simply being coloured, the white chocolate is conched with strawberry and blackcurrant. The result is a very pleasant glossy, marbled effect, and a hint of flavour to the red and blue marbles.
But these aren’t just solid balls. Inside each one is a small piece of speculoos biscuit that gives a very satisfying crunch, not unlike a malteser, although there’s more chocolate than crunch here.
Combine the crunchiness with the subtle flavours and the result is a tasty snack that’s quite difficult to stop eating.
So despite not celebrating the Jubilee, I’d be quite happy to munch on these all day. Thankfully, for the sake of my own health, they only sent me this one bag.
Finally, here’s a short interview with Sir Hans Sloane’s chocolatier Bill McCarrick, talking about his marbles and the rest of their current range.
