The second in a trio of bars from The Chocolate Cafe is this milk chocolate with honeycomb.
It’s a 33.6% cocoa solids chocolate that describes itself as “premium” for some reason. I’m not convinced that’s a great way to describe chocolate, as it’s the kind of wording that supermarkets use to describe products that are marginally better than their “value” ranges.
As with the other Chocolate Cafe bar, the presentation is simple, but effective. A good quality wrapper, and a nice looking bar of chocolate, divided into 24 chunks.
The one thing I noticed immediately is that there’s very little sign of honeycomb when you break a chunk off. Even on close inspection, it’s very difficult to see anything but the occasional air bubble inside the chocolate.
But if you can’t see the honeycomb, you can certainly taste it. The particles must be microscopic, because the chocolate has a pleasant crunch to it, but it’s more about the flavour than the texture. It’s sweet, with that distinctive caramelised honeycomb taste, but you still get all the rich creaminess of the milk chocolate.
At £3 per bar, it’s more expensive than the Butlers Honeycomb Crisp that Simon reviewed recently, but I think they’re aimed at similar market – big kids who never quite grew out of Cadbury Crunchie, but want something a little more sophisticated.
Like the Butlers bar, this is definitely only one for those with a sweet tooth, but if that’s your thing, you’ll love it.
A hot and sunny day in early July may not be the obvious time to launch your Christmas range to the press, but that’s exactly what Hotel Chocolat chose to do yesterday.
After having hired (or broken into, we’re not quite sure which) a swanky penthouse apartment in central London, the Hotel Chocolat team hid all the furniture and decorated the place with chocolate. Given the amount of chocolate in the goody bags invitees were handed on leaving, that’s something I’m sure many of us will be doing with their own places too.
The reason we were invited, of course, was to get a sneak peek at Hotel Chocolat’s Christmas Range. I was slightly confused then, when I was told that I shouldn’t photograph any of the range close up. It was all very friendly, but it’s a little odd to invite the press and bloggers to a product launch, but expect them not to talk about what they’ve seen. I think it’s unlikely any of us are secret spies for the competition.
Quick note to Keith, Peter, Emma & the gang at Thorntons: Hotel Chocolat have truffle filled advent calendars, 580g dark truffle Christmas trees, solid festive wreaths (large fruit & nut, small cookie & caramel), tiddly reindeers, mini Christmas dinners, and of course, chilli penguins. If you want more information, please arrange to leave payment in a suitcase under Waterloo bridge this Friday at 7pm. Thanks.
But the Christmas collection was just a small part of what was on display. Of much greater interest to us was the revamped Purist range. This is Hotel Chocolat’s high end range of products, much of which comes from beans grown on St. Lucia where the company have their own estate.
The new range comes in simple, attractive, colour coded packaging, which Angus Thirlwell, Hotel Chocolat’s co-founder, hopes will make it a little more accessible to those who are new to higher end chocolates. The strategy seems to be a winning one; use the fun, sweeter, seasonal ranges to draw people in, then gently direct them to the good stuff without scaring them away.
The products looked and tasted great. Simon has already reviewed the 50% Island Growers bar and we’ll be reviewing much more of the range soon.
While we were hearing about all this the exciting new chocolate, the team were busy in the kitchen preparing a range of chocolate-based dishes. These are the kind of things you can find at the company’s Rabot Estate shop in Borough Market, and they were, without exception, delicious.
The were salads, meringue sticks and gazpacho, all made with nibs for flavour and texture, but my favourite was the beautifully smooth ice cream, made in minutes with a little help from some liquid nitrogen.
All in all, a great event. Founders Angus & Peter were both there and happy to talk about the company and the direction they’re headed. I’m quite certain being asked not to photograph the range we had been invited to see and report on was simply a minor miscommunication and although it looked like a lot of fun, we were actually more interested in other things – The Purist range, the people… and the ice cream.
Check out the gallery below to share in our joy.
It’s a lovely sunny July evening here in Vienna, and about an hour or go I sat down at the Sacher Café for a taste of the Original Sachertorte.
Conceived by the owner of the hotel (oddly enough) Sachertorte is sold the world over, but only this establishment makes the authentic Sachertorte. It’s one of those ‘secret family recipe in a vault’ stories – oft imitated, never bettered and so on.
So, for €5 I sat down to this.
My first thought was that the whipped cream was ‘squirty’ cream. Possibly not authentic, or perhaps nitrous oxide cream dispensers were invented a lot earlier than I think?
My next thoughts were that it was a lot more cake-like than I had expected. The texture seemed to be fairly dense, and the layer og what appeared to be some sort of jam between the chocolate fondant icing and the cake itself looked interesting. The chocolate seal sitting atop the torte was very tempting – one of those things you either eat first or save until last. I opted for the latter.
When I tasted my first forkful I was immediately aware of a light citrus tang from both the jam and possibly the cake itself. The chocolate icing wasn’t as full of chocolate flavours as I had expected, but this is a torte to have with a good strong European coffee, and that little extra sweetness works perfectly with a good quality espresso. When I segregated a piece of the icing with the jam I got a mouthful of sweet, sugary chocolate cut with orangey (but still sweet) notes.
The torte itself was beautifully cooked. Fairly dense, with that brown/muscovedo sugar treacle element in conjunction with a lovely firm texture.
The chocolate ‘Seal of Authenticity’ was a disc of good quality dark chocolate. It could have been from almost anywhere in Europe, and it did round things off in a very satisfactory way.
This was one of those ‘things you really ought to make time to do’ that I decided I’d get on with, and I’m rather glad I did. I’ll quite happily go back for Sachertorte next time I’m in Vienna. Especially if the weather is as good as it was today.
I know how some of you feel about white chocolate. You don’t regard it as proper chocolate and you get all hot and bothered when we write about it. But this bar has a special place in my heart, and I’m going to review it. And I think you might even like it yourself.
I should start by saying that this particular sample got rather hot and bothered itself – so much so that it melted and reformed into a somewhat curvier version of its former self. But I don’t think that will have any effect on the taste or texture of this bar, so I’m going to solidier on. It’s a tough life, being a chocolate reviewer.
I say this chocolate has a special place in my heart, because I first tried it in Keith Hurdman’s development kitchen during our Thorntons factory tour. It’s made from beans from the Dominican Republic, toasted dessicated coconut and natural lime flavourings – although there’s no information about the origin of the coconut or lime on the packaging.
But what makes this bar a bit special is the way the white chocolate, coconut and lime work together and produce something greater than the sum of its parts.
The first thing you notice is the texture. The chocolate is soft and breaks easily, but the toasted coconut is crispy and crunchy, giving the chocolate an almost biscuit like texture. The flavours work equally well together, with the chocolate and coconut having a subtle, creamy taste, with the citrus lime cutting through the creaminess, without being overpowering in any way.
The result is a light, fresh, crispy and creamy white chocolate that’s far too easy to eat – this 80g block disappeared entirely in the 30 minutes it took to write this review.
I say this every time with white chocolate, but the hardcore chocolate lovers who frown on anything but unadulterated dark chocolate will, I’m sure, disown me for giving this such a glowing review. But I don’t care. I know what I like, and I like this.
