Thirty years after being attacked by a Bengal tiger, Janet Coghlan has gone into business making chocolates under the name Tiger J’s. Part of the proceeds of sales go to the Born Free Foundation. The truffles come in boxes or the smaller, six truffle grab bag (not eight as the site promises) I got hold of, which retails at £4.00 (or 50p a chocolate). Tiger J’s only make four different chocolates – Spiced Nutmeg and Cinnamon, Earl Grey and Lemon Sugar, Passion Fruit and Banana and soft caramel.
Inside the box there’s a cellophane bag with the chocolates loose inside, mine had one each of the Earl Grey and Passion fruit, and a pair of Banana Caramels and Nutmeg & Cinnamon. The banana caramel was the most obvious. A thick milk chocolate shell with a really gooey liquid caramel centre and a hint of banana. The caramel was excellent – so much so that I could happily have forgone the banana element, which also seemed to have a hint of passion fruit about it.
The dark chocolate Passion Fruit truffle was well balanced. The fruit flavour sat nicely underneath the smooth, creamy filling and the shell was thick enough to mean that once the centre had melted away there was enough of it left for a long dark chocolate finish.
I found the Lemon Sugar and Earl Grey truffle a bit lacking in Earl Grey flavour. The Lemon Sugar was a good introductory flavour with the citrus sweetness working well with the milk chocolate, but there just wasn’t enough of a bergamot kick in there to really justify the name.
The Nutmeg and Cinnamon truffle is dusted in cocoa powder which gives the first taste a nice dark, acidic note before the softer shell and filling come into play. Again, the flavours are quite subtle – a hint of cinnamon and an undercurrent of spice.
Of the four truffles the Banana Caramel exhibits the strongest flavours, which didn’t come as too much of a surprise given my previous banana/chooclate experiences. The caramel is extremely runny, so much so that when I bit into it I had to pop the whole thing into my mouth in order to avoid covering myself in caramel.
Overall I’d say that these truffles err on the side of caution. The flavours are generally quite subtle, and I couldn’t help but think that having them in a bag together resulted in the flavours mingling a little. The web site has the full range of chocolates as well as chocolate raisins and ginger with the added bonus of a mail order facility, and 2.5% of your money goes to the Born Free Foundation, which can’t be a bad thing at all.
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- Contains dark chocolate, milk chocolate.
- Filed under assortment, banana, caramel, cinnamon, lemon, nutmeg, passion fruit, tea, tiger j, uk.
The Speciality Chocolate Fair is part of the Speciality & Fine Food Fair that’s currently underway at London’s Olympia. The fair is a trade show and not open to the public, but they do allow bloggers in, so I thought I’d bring you some of my personal highlights.
One of the first stands I visited was Zotter’s. Neatly organised with every flavour on the wall, it really brings home the size and strangeness of the Zotter range.
Both the lovely Amelia Rope and Sun & Stephen from Lauden Chocolate insisted on feeding us an endless stream of samples. They both have interesting takes on flavour, at different ends of the spectrum. Many of Amelia’s bars have very subtle and delicate flavours, but Lauden’s eye catching filled chocolates are tangy, zingy and literally bursting with flavour. Unsurprisingly, both did well at this year’s Academy of Chocolate Awards.
Someone else who did well at the Awards was Duffy Sheerdown, who won the Golden Bean Award for the best bean-to-bar chocolate. He was there, displaying his award and a couple of new flavoured bars; A 43% Ecuador Milk Chocolate with Oak Smoked Salt & Nibs (amazing!) and a 72% Ecuadorian Dark Chocolate with Nibs & Ground Coffee (crunchy!).
The country’s only other bean-to-bar chocolate maker, Willie Harcourt-Cooze was also there, and was also showing his first flavoured bars. A ginger & lime, fruit & nut and an orange, all in eye-catching packaging. Not on sale yet, but you should be able to buy them soon. Willie was also handing out tasty hot chocolates, and talking at length about his passion. He’s the kind of person you could talk to all day, if only there wasn’t more chocolate to see.
Launching at the show, The Grown Up Chocolate Company are producing a range of bars that look a bit like like upmarket versions of something you might find on your newsagent’s shelf, but taste fantastic. Also making their debut were Manor Chocolates, the new wholesale brand of Demarquette.
We also had lovely chats with Rafaella Baruzzo, who had some amazing new creations including a ‘curry’ almond and popcorn chocolate, and a fantastic looking chocolate Christmas tree. We saw everything from Prestat’s insanely brightly coloured range of products to Baravelli’s simple, elegant range and everything in between.
Overall, a great show, with lots of exciting new chocolates to look forward to this winter! It’s certainly worth paying a visit if you do get the chance, and there’s so much more to see than just chocolate. If you’re into that kind of thing.
Photo Gallery
A year or so back, a lucky chance find turned up Delicaseys chocolates.
The trouble is, getting hold of these is difficult, especially in the corner of Australia where I live – no local retail outlets. So a recent trip to Sydney was an excuse to pick up some more, as well as to visit the Paddington Markets on a Saturday morning – to see the full range, taste, talk to Casey, and of course buy a few to take away.
Casey doesn’t much like having a photo taken – he’s the shy retiring sort. But when it comes to talking about chocolate, and comparing what works and what does not – he’s happy to have chat. Perhaps even more interesting, he has a stash of competitor products. When I introduced myself as “that reviewer” he was only too happy to drag them out and say “what do you think of this?” – well… when not trying his own products.
The chocolate used in his product range is Callebaut, which he points out is used for about 80% of all the Australian chocolate products using Belgian chocolate. And there is variation in Callebaut around the world, because it comes from different production sites. Casey thinks the different sugars used have an effect on flavour, and this would not surprise me at all. A little digging shows that “Belgian Chocolate” actually means “Belgian craftsmanship” – the production site need not be in Belgium.
I asked how Casey got into the chocolate business. The answer was a little surprising: he used to be a chef, but had difficulty with the unsocial hours and the creative / presentation side – as he says “Look at my packaging, you can see I’m not artistic”. Chocolate dipping, on the other hand, was something that he enjoyed. The chocolate business got started with the Orange Bliss – an accidental creation that turned out to be a masterpiece, and things have not looked back since.
And that packaging? Well, it might be simple but this clearly has not stopped the business expanding, nor was it the slightest deterrent to the crowd around the stall in the market on a Saturday morning. As one gentlemen explained: “I’m here every Saturday to stock up. I can’t get enough.” A ringing endorsement if ever there was one.
As it was, I dragged Casey away from paying customers for way too long. But I learned a lot, enjoyed the discussion, and came away with a wonderful haul.
So, here’s a selection of three – with three more to follow another day.
Limone
As the label says, slow cooked lemon slices in a 70% dark chocolate.
Each bite-size piece contains a generous slice of lemon which is luscious, juicy, and has that special flavour which comes from cooking a whole lemon. The chocolate and lemon complement each other well, there’s a nice balance. The lemon is still soft, and has a flavour that lingers long after you’ve finished eating a piece.
If you like chocolate and lemon, you’ll love this.
Bean Rush
This came as something of a surprise, I was expecting whole chocolate coated coffee beans – much like you can buy elsewhere. This is not like that at all. It’s more of a slab that has been broken up, with coarsely ground coffee beans in.
Opening the pack lets out a huge whiff of coffee, and my first reaction was “wow”. And the tasting didn’t disappoint either. Using a ground coffee bean gets the flavour all through the chocolate so instead of the whole bean that you crunch up to get a face full of grit, this has the small pieces of coffee bean through giving a much better flavour combination.
I can see I’ll have trouble stopping myself from scoffing this down.
Cranberry Clumps
Cranberries are one of those strange things that has suddenly appeared on the scene in Australia – but 10 or 15 years ago we’d never heard of them. I still don’t really know what a fresh one tastes like, we only ever seem to come across Cranberry Juice – and that seems to be imported from the USA.
So I had no idea what to expect of these; the Cranberries seem to be dried but nevertheless biting onto one has a curious crunch, and whack of berry flavour, and of course… chocolate. I think I still don’t really know what a Cranberry is like, but I’ll happily eat a stack of these little beauties.
Do you ever just get good vibes from something you’re eating? Okay, so admittedly people usually talk about “vibes” in reference to other people, not what they’re eating, but opening up a packet of Sifers Valomilk made me happy.
Understand that, while Valomilk has its own following, many of whom love it for the nostalgia, this was my first encounter. This may also be a regional thing: whereas I live in the Southwest, Valomilk was born in the Midwest. Many of you are probably wondering by now what exactly Valomilk is. “Creamy flowing marshmallow in two milk chocolate cups” is the official tag, and they aren’t exaggerating about the “flowing” part, which I quickly discovered when I tried to take a knife to one of the chocolates. But my picture does still show the marshmallow in the form of a great tear on the surface of each cup–I take it that the formation of this peace sign design is not a normal occurrence and that usually the marshmallow stays put until such time as you break open the chocolate shell and release it forth.
Flow the marshmallow certainly does, which is an intriguing thing of itself. I’m also pleased to say that it tastes of real sugar, not whatever it is regular marshmallows taste like. In fact, as I was sitting there, breaking off pieces of chocolate with helpings of marshmallow on top to eat like an array of chips and salsa, I was thinking to myself that it really was rather nice stuff. As I casually picked up the white wrapper to look at, my eye caught the phrase “distilled water” out of the ingredients list. That’s one I’m not used to seeing. It was followed by “pure vanilla.” It could always just be particular wording, but still I wanted to believe that the makers of Valomilk care about the quality of what they put into their candy.
It turns out that they do try and pay attention to details. The company is family-owned and has their factory in Kansas; they started in 1903 with penny candy, later adding five cent candy bars. Valomilk itself came in 1931, when it was just one cup instead of two, though still two ounces total as it is today. It’s probably much better as two cups–after all, one cup would be both too messy and too sweet. The rather random sounding name has this story: “V for real vanilla, ALO for marshmallow, MILK to describe it as creamy and DIP because it was hand dipped” (the full name used to be Valomilk Dip). Today, Valomilk is the only product Sifers makes, still using the original recipe and most of the equipment. They also make the chocolate themselves now, using Ivory Coast cocoa beans. Which reminds me that I haven’t yet commented on the chocolate portion.
Well, it’s milk chocolate. And it isn’t very strong. What it is, though, is the right force of containment for both the physical being and taste of the marshmallow. What’s notable about Valomilk is that it managed to win me over, especially given that while some people really enjoy marshmallows, I’m more likely to pass them by. As far as where to physically buy a Valomilk, your best option is probably Cracker Barrel, where they still like to display such old-fashioned and less trackable confections as Valomilk.
