Time for some more Valentine’s chocolates! Chococo sent us this 200g milk chocolate heart with freeze dried raspberry, meringue pieces. It measures a healthy 18cm across and comes wrapped in cellophane, tied with a simple red ribbon. It looks great, but it’s not easy to photograph, hence my heart being completely naked here.
The heart is decorated with white chocolate sploges and dark chocolate piping, and as you can see, the decoration is deliberately haphazard, with large areas of freeze dried raspberry showing through the chocolate in places.
Like most of Chococo’s products, the chocolate is sourced from the über-ethical Grenada Chocolate Company. If your sweetheart is into ethical and sustainable food production or simply supporting a small British chocolatier, then it’s definitely worth considering this as a Valentine’s gift.
It’s a healthy 44% cocoa solids, and it’s pretty tasty, so while I can’t guarantee that eating a 200g milk chocolate heart will be good for you, it will certainly make you feel good.
The raspberry and meringue give a lovely biscuity crunchy texture to the chocolate, and the random distribution of flavours means that every mouthful is slightly different. It’s very difficult to put down once you start eating it.
So while this doesn’t have the impact of zChocolat’s £100 box of Valentine’s chocolates or the amazing flavour combinations of Matcha’s Valentine’s Selection, it does have the quality and visual impact that would make a great gift for a real milk chocolate lover.
I’ll say it straight out. This is the prettiest chocolate box I’ve ever received. By far.
It’s also the first time I’ve ever been sent chocolates in a solid mahogany box. Finished with a gold heart and a brass clasp, and wrapped in a beautiful cloth bag, I don’t think you could hope to find a better example of stylish packaging.
Inside the amazing looking box is a gold lined lid and two simple card boxes containing the chocolates themselves. zChocolat have a wide range of options to choose from, but mine contains an assortment of 12 chocolate hearts on the top layer and 15 signature milk, white and dark chocolates on the bottom.
Looking at the website, there are a variety of customisation options available for the packaging, including an optional engraved brass plate, USB key and even a concierge delivery service. This is how to make a real impact on Valentine’s Day.
The chocolates are handmade in Aix-en-Provence in France by chocolatier Pascal Caffet and shipped worldwide by DHL. Mine arrived promptly and in perfect condition.
I’m not going to go into lengthy description of the individual chocolates, as frankly there’s too many. Included with the box is what amounts to a small, glossy paperback book with photos and descriptions of each of the chocolates in English, French and Spanish, along with a short biography of Pascal.
They’re made from 70% Venezuelan dark and 40% Ivory Coast milk chocolate, and helpfully the signature truffles (which all look the same) have numbers on them, so you can easily tell what’s what. As you’d expect with French chocolates, there’s lots of pralines and nuts along with some ganaches and a caramel.
There’s no really unusual or challenging flavour combinations, but each chocolate is very well made and very tasty.
So you’ve decided this would make an excellent Valentine’s gift and you’d like to know how much they cost, right? Well, this box of 27 chocolates will set you back a cool £100. That makes them one of the most expensive boxes of chocolates I’ve ever had. If you go for all the optional packaging and delivery extras, you can expect to pay closer to £150.
So this is not your average Valentine’s gift. For the average person, something like Matcha Chocolat’s selection is better value. But if your budget can handle it and you really want to make an impact, this selection will leave your loved one with a beautiful mahogany jewellery box that will forever remind them of how thoughtful (and rich) you are.
The last of the items from HS Chocolate Co. is from their collection of Candy Bars, which are designed to have an adult and gourmet theme. Rather than being a version of an existing bar, this one is its own composition. The Figgy Blue comes in wrapping similar to the kind on the filled chocolates, this time in a shade of blue just darker than that in the logo.
As with those, the chocolate here is of a refreshing degree of quality. Its deep, rich, and earthy aroma expresses itself right away. The bar is layered in a way not so unlike a Snickers bar, with a fluffy white nougat on the bottom, then walnuts, and then a fig ganache. Inside the nougat is the interesting ingredient Bayley Hazen Blue Cheese. Apart from the layering, all of these add up to something very different indeed from both a candy and an average chocolate. The taste from the cheese isn’t strong, but it is noticeable. Taken from fig preserves, the fig is also not the most frequently found flavor in chocolate. Enter the gourmet scene.
Imagine a fruit and cheese plate with a creamy dip, a few walnuts, and some thin slices of chocolate or fudge. Place all of those individual effects together into one 3 oz. chocolate bar and you have the Figgy Blue. It isn’t a bar to be eaten quickly, but one to take in slowly in order to give time and attention to the four elements. It took me a moment to get used to this bar; however, it has proved itself to me with the fresh, tasteful ingredients that I now associate with HS Chocolate. This one also shows that HS Chocolate is capable of doing more than just ordinary confections, maintaining a creativity that keeps the products exciting while still familiar.
Fudges is a Dorset based bakery that makes a wide range of sweet and savoury products. I particularly like the sound of their Marmite biscuits, but of course we can only talk chocolate here on Chocablog. So they sent us these florentines and flapjacks to try instead.
The flapjacks are simply made from oats, sugar syrup and butter and are half dipped (actually more like three quarters dipped) in dark chocolate of unspecified cocoa percentage or origin.
Leaving aside the fact that I don’t generally like eating chocolate when I have no idea where it’s come from, I do quite like the design. The one corner free from chocolate means you can easily hold it without getting melted chocolate all over your finger.
The texture is a little hard, and they are very sweet, but I happily made my way through the whole box over the course of a few days.
The florentines are equally sweet. Made from discs of dark chocolate covered with almonds, sugar syrup, ginger, sultanas and mixed peel, they do have a very nice flavour. First a hint of orange, then the warmth of the ginger. They’re chewy and quite moreish.
That said, I’m just not a big fan of this kind of thing – I usually prefer my chocolate to be in bars, truffles or even cakes, rather than biscuit form. The packaging just doesn’t quite do it for me either. While I’d be quite happy with savoury biscuits packaged in thin cardboard boxes with plastic inserts, it doesn’t scream high end chocolate.
But at just £2.29 and £3.25 a box, they’re not expensive, so probably worth trying if you’re looking for a change from your regular chocolate biscuit.
