To celebrate reaching 5000 fans on our Facebook page, I’m giving away a stash of my own chocolate worth over £50 to a random fan!
To be in with a chance of winning it, all you need to do is head on over to Facebook and click ‘Like’ on any of our posts between now and Saturday 7th May. The winner will be picked at random and will receive the chocolate pictured above.
This competition is open to anyone worldwide, as long as you have a postal service (or can get to North London to collect it!) Only one entry per person will be counted, but you can ‘like’ as many things as you want, I’ll sort out all the duplicates.
Good luck!
We don’t often write about Nestlé products – partly because we’ve already written about most of the important ones, but mostly because we just don’t like manufacturers who lace their chocolate with palm oil. But I have to admit to having a bit of a soft spot for these weird Japanese KitKats. They’re just so… ridiculous.
I picked this particular one up from Cybercandy in Islington. It was the only KitKat they had (probably a good thing), but as someone who had a bit of a thing for cola cubes as a kid, I thought I’d invest my hard-earned cash in one. Yes, I actually paid money for this.
Inside the box are two fingers of cola flavoured KitKat and two of lemonade flavour.
As is often the case with these Japanase KitKats, they’re simply white chocolate with added flavouring and colouring. The English translation of the ingredients list does include cocoa powder, but I’m not sure I believe that. Suffice to say, the top two ingredients are “Sugar” and “Vegetable Oil”. That, I can believe.
How do they taste? Exactly like you’d expect them to.
The Cola variety has that artificial cola taste that instantly brings back memories of the vast quantities of hard boiled cola cube sweets I consumed as a child. And the lemonade flavour is half way between a lemon cheesecake and sherbet lemon sweets.
Try as I might, I just couldn’t dislike this. I want to hate it so much, but the flavours brought back so many childhood memories that I’m ashamed to say I liked it. Obviously, it’s completely artificial and packed with sugar, but I still felt a little sad when it had all gone. I’m a bad person.
Travelers in the world of chocolate fondue since 2003, Sephra sells both the fountains (in commercial and household varieties) and the chocolate. A nice fact about the chocolate is that it is designed to not need oil, yet still flow right. Since I don’t own a chocolate fountain myself, when Sephra sent me a few bars of chocolate, I went for the coating and candy making uses instead. I received the Premium Chocolate in Milk and Dark, the Belgian Milk Chocolate, and the Melano Milk Chocolate; all three of these varieties come in dark, milk, and white chocolate. (I also got a Belgian Dark Chocolate Mousse mix, which conveniently only needed water and mixing; the fluffy and semi-rich result was about average, but certainly nothing to complain about.)
Worth noting is the size of the chocolate pieces. While other melting chocolates I’ve used have been in larger blocks, the smaller size of these means that they would be easier to combine into certain recipes, like ones where they take the place of chocolate chips, for instance.
Sephra has a long list of recipes on their website, but being too lazy perhaps to track down more than a few ingredients, I only tried the hot chocolate recipe. It takes some of the Premium Dark Chocolate, milk, brown sugar, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper. The last ingredient I was forced to leave out, but I nonetheless ended up with a tasty cup of chocolate.
I also dipped some pretzel sticks and poured melted chocolate countless times into heart-shaped molds from Valentine’s Day (plus a Thanksgiving turkey–I couldn’t resist). So the majority of the many bags I had found themselves in bunches of hearts that I sent away with family members, bidding them to share with whomever they pleased in exchange for feedback.
This feedback can really be quite entertaining. “I’m not a dark chocolate person, but this did not have that bitter taste that dark chocolate has.” “That chocolate was so good!” “I had a piece of that chocolate–yum.” From the more analytical to the less, it was all pretty positive. And I think it is the general statements from the crowd that matter most here, on a product that, whether used in a fondue fountain or a candy mold or a cookie recipe, is ultimately going out to the crowd.
For myself, I will say that Sephra is of better quality than your average melting chocolate. The Belgian Milk Chocolate, for instance, I found a surprising level of depth in. Perhaps just the fact that there are the different varieties (Belgian, Premium, and Melano) evidences that they try to pay attention to the chocolate itself, not just how it gets dressed up.
Amano is one of my favourite chocolate makers, with their Madagascar bar being amongst my all time favourite dark chocolate bars. They’ve come a long way in the last four years, and now even sell fresh chocolates and truffles. But I’m always excited when I get to try one of their bean-to-bar creations for the first time, as I did with this bar at a recent Chocolate & Love tasting.
Dos Rios (Two Rivers) is a 70% dark chocolate made with beans sourced from the Dominican Republic. These beans were apparently is difficult to work with as they were to source; according to the Amano website:
“These are some of the most difficult beans with which we have worked. While making this chocolate, the flavors shifted wildly. We had to bring our entire repertoire of skills to highlight the beans incredible flavor. Even so, we had to develop new techniques to make this chocolate — some of which we believe are ground breaking and we are looking forward to applying while working with other beans.”
The packaging and presentation of the bar is every bit as good as you’d expect from Amano. In fact, one of the main problems I have with Amano chocolate is that they are so beautiful, that they’re objects I want to own as much as I want to eat. I’m always a little sad to have to open the box and unwrap the thick gold foil for the first time.
But the reward for doing so is a beautiful, rich dark chocolate with a rich, deep aroma. There’s a hint of orange in the aroma, but it’s not as fruity and sweet as the Madagascar bar, but just as inviting.
When you taste it, the first flavour that comes through strongly is bergamot. It’s strong enough if you didn’t know better, you might think the chocolate has additional flavourings in it. It doesn’t of course, and all the flavour comes from those unique cocoa beans.
As the chocolate melts, the more fruity and spicy notes make themselves known (I picked up orange, grapefruit & cloves), before more subtle flowery flavours like jasmine and rose come through at the end. It’s certainly one of the more unusual chocolates I’ve tasted recently, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.
The Madagascar bar remains my favourite from Amano, but this is a must-try too, partly because I’ve never tasted a chocolate quite like it. The range of flavours that real artisans like Amano manage to entice from the simple cocoa bean never ceases to amaze me.
