It’s sort of funny that I say positive things about the changes going on with Godiva lately: while I feel that the greater leaning towards informality suits their products, wouldn’t it be better for them to instead tweak up product ingredients and such to suit the high quality image they have set up for themselves? Perhaps so, yet I found myself only delighted to stumble across rows of their Ice Cream Parlor line while in another store, the chocolates looking like high-end sweets rather than couture truffles.
That does seem to be the aim of something packaged in a plastic drink container: it isn’t as if that looks very classy. In fact, it isn’t entirely fitting with the Ice Cream Parlor theme, either, even if you can buy drinks at ice cream shops, too. But it gets your attention in the right way for what the chocolates themselves offer.
The Ice Cream Parlor flavors (vanilla, mint, and orange cream are some others) are available in a couple of different forms, including bars. And of course, part of the idea behind the Gems (which isn’t limited to Ice Cream Parlor flavors) range is to walk into a Godiva store and fill a bag yourself with as few or as many as you like. They aren’t proper truffles, no, nor are they exempt from frightful ingredients. But I really don’t much mind, after all. If the goal is to recreate an ice cream experience in terms of chocolate, I would say there is success. These chocolates are quite different from the Strawberry bar I had before: not only does the filling (thanks to some Red 40 and other friends) look rather like ice cream (though it appears more orange in the picture than pink), it also has that particular milky, creamy taste. The strawberry tastes just as it would as part of ice cream.
These are very edible. They really are the sort of thing I would be glad to buy while out picking up other things rather than to make a specific trip to a Godiva store for. They’re the right level above the Snickers bags, while still essentially fulfilling the same kind of sweet tooth craving.
I always love hearing about new chocolatiers, so when Sunshine & Butterflies got in touch and asked if we’d like review samples, I wasn’t going to refuse.
Sunshine & Butterflies are based in London, but sell their chocolates exclusively online. Owner & Chocolatier Martin Hopper sent me a selection of six chocolates from their House Collection to try.
As you can see from the box, the chocolates are simply presented. The handmade feel continues to the chocolates themselves, which while not perhaps the most elegant or sophisticated looking, are at least distinctive.
One that particularly ands out is this ‘Bumbleberry’. Made with a mixture of in-season fruits (presumably meaning it changes through the year), it’s a simple white chocolate ganache with three large pieces of freeze-dried fruit on top. The white chocolate is a little too sweet for me, but those tangy fruit pieces help to cut through the sweetness.
On the darker side, we have the Dark Truffle, which is a simple 53% dark chocolate ganache & shell, decorated with nibs. Again, very simple, but the ganache is smooth and fresh, making this a very enjoyable chocolate.
The Pistachio & Orange was a bit different. A dark chocolate ganache infused with orange oil in a white chocolate shell, decorated with flaked pistachios. I liked the subtle flavours here, but like most things in life, I think this could have benefited from a few more pistachios.
Everything is better with pistachios.
The other chocolates in my little box (vanilla milk chocolate truffle, honey hazelnut & caramel pecan) were of the same high quality. A little rough around the edges in terms of looks, but the use of well chosen, fresh ingredients makes the difference here.
The flavours are all quite simple, but they just work. If you’re giving a pretty little box of chocolates as a gift, you want to know that every chocolate is going to be enjoyed, rather challenging flavours. At £5.99 for a box of six, they’re not the cheapest chocolates in the world, but I do think they represent good value.
Something from one of the big names in Belgian chocolate, and to my surprise a quick search of Chocablog shows that in five years none of us has had their hands on any Leonidas product (well, at least not long enough for it to have been photographed and reviewed).
This is one of a brace of 50g bars I bought in Brussels earlier this year, and chosen for the Fueilletine as much as anything else – because I happen to really enjoy the combination of slivers of crisp wafer and chocolate.
This is 30% cocoa milk chocolate, and it’s exactly what you might expect. Slightly sweet, creamy with a full bodied flavour. There are plenty of feuilletine pieces in there to provide crunch and texture. The wafer pieces are crisp and light and the chocolate is creamy, but it is definitely on the sweet side.
A look at the packaging tells me that 26g of this 50g bar is ‘sugars’, and that’s a heck of a lot of sugar by weight. I’ve become a bit of a fan of higher cocoa content milk chocolate of late, and for me there was just too much sugar and not enough of the cocoa for my liking, but if you’re a fan of ‘ordinary’ milk chocolate then you’re quite likely to enjoy this bar, but with that level of sugar I can’t help but wonder whether this qualifies as chocolate or confectionery.
Last week I was invited to a somewhat unusual PR event. Unusual because it was a very small event, with just three bloggers in attendance, and particularly unusual for me because it was all about coffee and ice cream rather than chocolate.
The nice people from Philips wanted to show off their Gaggia coffee and ice cream makers, so I went along to La Cucina Caldesi to find out more. Nobody should ever turn down an invitation with “ice cream” in the title.
You might think that ice cream and coffee have little to do with chocolate, and apart from the fact that they all go together quite well, you’d be right. But I’m really interested in the whole coffee making process, because there parallels with chocolate at almost every stage.
I’m a complete novice, though. Chloe, my Faeritale Foodie friend has been educating me and helping me explore London’s coffee scene lately, but I still know very little.
So I was listening intently to everything coffee expert Paul Meikle-Janney said as he explained the history of coffee and how it was (allegedly) discovered.
Coffee is grown in similar parts of the world to cacao and in some regions, the two are grown together. I’ve spoken to chocolate makers who believe that growing coffee in close proximity to cacao, can impart a coffee flavour into the chocolate, so it was interesting to hear Paul say that coffee is similarly sensitive to soil conditions (something which made me wonder if the coffee also tastes of chocolate!)
Coffee beans are found inside cherries, in a similar way to how cacao beans are formed inside a pod. In both cases, the raw beans aren’t very appetising and require a significant amount of processing before becoming a recognisable product that you’d buy in the shops. Both cacao and coffee beans are dried, roasted and ground, with every stage of the process having a significant effect on the final flavour.
Of course, it’s much easier to grind coffee beans at home than it is to make chocolate from the bean, and Paul demonstrated how simple the Gaggia coffee grinder was to use. What struck me was how much of an impact the size of the grounds had on the flavour of the coffee.
A coarse ground coffee had lots of gaps between the particles, allowing the water to flow through quickly. Setting the grinder to a finer setting meant the water flowed through more slowly and picked up more flavour from the coffee.
Of course, all I really wanted to do was to replace the coffee with cacao beans, but luckily for the Gaggia folk, I didn’t have any to hand. Next time…
After the coffee, it was time to move on to ice cream! The room was full of awesome looking ice cream makers, and food writer and all-round kitchen goddess Jo Pratt was on hand to demonstrate how easy it was to make ice cream.
Jo showed us how to make a simple but utterly delicious caramel ice cream from scratch. Even with making a custard from scratch, adding cream and making a caramel, it only took a matter of minutes to prepare. It’s then just a case of throwing it into the ice cream maker and setting the timer. Less than half an hour later, you have amazing ice cream! Just enough time to make some delicious toasted cinnamon pecans to go with it.
But for me (not being much of a cook), the best part was that you can make ice cream using any shop-bought custard and cream. Just throw them into the ice cream maker, and add whatever flavours you like!
After Jo’s demonstration, we had the opportunity to have a go ourselves. The range of flavours we had was a bit limited, but luckily there was plenty of chocolate. I used some Monin chocolate syrup, Grand Marnier, roughly broken milk chocolate and some Jo’s toasted cinnamon pecans which I stole while she wasn’t looking.
It’s the kind of thing you can make without even thinking about it. The machine freezes the mixture while keeping it moving and makes it almost dangerously easy to make ice cream at the drop of a hat. But if you do have a little extra time, you can make something very special indeed. Between us, we made about six different ice creams, and they were all excellent.
Gaggia have generously offered to lend us one of the ice cream makers to experiment with, and I’m really looking forward to trying out some chocolatey flavour combinations, so expect to see lots of recipes very soon! I can already sense an ice-cream-maker-sized hole appearing in my bank account.
Our evening was rounded off with Paul demonstrating coffee cocktails and latte art while the rest of us ate and drank ourselves into a caffeine and sugar coma. I seem to be experiencing a lot of those lately.
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