Åkesson’s is a Swiss company run by a Swedish guy, who – somewhat unusually – specialise in both chocolate and pepper grown on their own plantations in Madagascar and Brazil. They did rather well at this year’s Academy of Chocolate Awards, scooping three awards in total, including a silver for this particular bar.
As you can see though, the beans for this chocolate come from Bali – the Sukrama Farms plantation to be precise. Just reading the description on the back of the box makes me hungry…
At 45% cocoa solids, it’s nice and rich for a milk chocolate (particularly when compared to something like the Lindt dark chocolate we reviewed yesterday that only has 2% more), so I expected this to have a decent flavour.
As it turns out, it was even better than I’d hoped for.
This milk chocolate is packed with flavour – at first taste, you might think it was flavoured with more than simple fleur de sel.
The first thing I noticed was the sweet caramel notes, but as the chocolate melts, the tiny flecks of salt come into play and lift the flavour to a different level. There’s hints of liquorice and toffee, but it’s all backed by a delicious creaminess. It would be very easy to lose yourself in this chocolate and for the entire bar to disappear in seconds.
If you’re looking to get into quality chocolate, but you’re still addicted to the milk chocolates, then I’d highly recommend seeking this bar out. It’s sweet and creamy enough that everyone will be able to enjoy it, but really demonstrates some of the range of flavours that can be found in fine single origin chocolates.
It’s not difficult to see why this is an award winning chocolate, and I’m certainly planning on buying more!
We at Chocablog have the occasional sacrifices to make. These are times when we save you, the readers, from the pain and suffering of finding and trying some truly awful products. Sometimes we find these things, and serendipity sings at us, leading us in the path or temptation and evilness.
Today has been one of those days; a day when something came up that I have to keep you away from.
Over the years, we’ve had a variety of reviews of some very good Lindt caramelly chocolates, such as the Creation 70%, and the milk chocolate Excellence Crunchy Caramel. We’ve also had the Green and Blacks Butterscotch, which whilst not exactly caramel does have a bearing on what follows.
What we’ve missed, though, is a nice dark chocolate with crunchy-caramel slightly-burned-sugar yumbliness inside. So imagine my surprise on wandering through my local Foodland to see a Lindt Excellence Dark Caramel with “New” screaming at me from one corner. I bought it purely on impulse, curious to see what it was like and fully expecting that it was not new at all, and had been reviewed here some time ago.
That’s the moment that Mr Serendipity struck. It had not been reviewed here. And I got it home and tried it. And then tried it some to confirm my suspicions. And then had trouble getting any work done because I needed to try a bit more as well. And then decided I had to write it up as a warning to others.
This chocolate has lumps of crunchy caramel toffee stuff through it. Decent sized bits that you can feel as well as taste. You can let the chocolate melt away and the caramel is left as a crunchy sticky gooey toffee kind of mass (yum!) or you can just crunch the pieces up and get a bit hit of chocolate and a delicious slightly burned sugar, golden toffee whack of yumminess.
Either way, this is no chocolate for kiddies. It’s way too good for that. In fact, this is so yummy that I’m warning you all off. You really do not want to try this. You need to leave it all for me. Mine, I tell you… all mine!!
When this little box arrived unannounced on my doorstep last week, I knew immediately that someone at Sainsbury’s had a fairly good grasp on my baking skill level.
A mug, an egg and a microwave. Sounds complicated, but luckily the back of the pack gives detailed instructions.
Inside the box, we have two of these large, fairly unappetising looking sachets of brown powder with the odd chunk of chocolate.
So I beat my medium egg in the mug, added my tablespoon of water then thoroughly mixed in the powder. At this point it didn’t look promising, so you’ll be pleased to know I didn’t take any pictures.
Finally, I zapped the mug in the microwave for for a minute and a half (this is how proper bakers do it, right?) and let the mug stand for a minute before revealing my cuppa cake in all its glory!
So it doesn’t look quite like the picture on the box. Despite using a large mug and following the instructions exactly, mine seems to have risen a little more.
But the proof of the pudding mug-cake is in the eating. So next came the simple task of removing it from the mug and slicing it in two. It does say each cake serves two people and can be served on plates.
Unfortnately, removing a moist spongey thing from a mug is easier said than done.
That bit on the right? That’s your half.
The taste is… well, it’s a litle like hot rubber and egg. There’s a bit of chocolateyness to it, and it has a vaguely sponge like texture, but it’s a bit chewy, to be honest. Don’t expect a light, fluffy sponge here.
Would I buy it? Personally, no. I guess kids might enjoy it as some kind of kitchen science experiment (probably best served with plenty of ice cream and chocolate sauce). At 99p for two sachets, I guess it could be used as emergency cake rations for when there’s nothing else around. At a stretch.
Overall though, it’s silly and fun. But it’s not really cake.
Information
- Buy it online from:
- Filed under cake, mix.
It must be Bakewell Tart week in the chocolate world, as both Thorntons and Paul A. Young have released their own takes on the old classic.
I love the fact that Paul and Thornton’s head chocolatier Keith Hurdman have come up with entirely different formats for their interpreations. Where Paul’s creation was a single chocolate filled with ganache and raspberry, this as you can see is a solid chocolate bar.
Obviously, Thorntons are limited by the standard format for their blocks of chocolate, but if anything I think that squeezing all the elements of a dessert into a bar of solid chocolate may be even harder than making filled individual chocolates.
As with all the Thorntons blocks, this one is made with decent chocolate – a 37% Costa Rican milk chocolate, to be precise. I love the fact that Thorntons consistently manage to source great chocolate for their blocks, but in this case it doesn’t actually make much difference. Because this chocolate doesn’t taste of chocolate at all. It taste of 100% pure Bakewell Tart.
Perhaps because the flavours all happen at once, it brings the childhood Bakewell Tart memories flooding back, something I just didn’t quite get with Paul Young’s version. It’s quite amazing a few flavours in a bar of chocolate can come together to capture the essence of something so accurately.
But much as I love the flavour of this bar, there is a bit of a problem with the texture.
Pre-release versions of it I tried some time ago, had tiny biscuit pieces in that gave a subtle crunch and texture to each piece. This retail version has the same biscuit pieces, but it also seems to have raspberry seeds.
The result is a slightly gritty texture that can be a little annoying when you bite into one expecting it to be a soft biscuit piece. There seems to be only a few seeds per chunk, but it would be so much better without them.
I really hope this is just a minor glitch that can be corrected, because I simply adore the flavour. The early version I tried would probably go down as one of my all time favourite flavoured milk chocolates.
This is a limited edition though, so it’s possible that Thorntons have made all they’re ever going to. Personally, I’d love to see them keep it on – just without the hard seeds. Please?
