The Chocolate Café is a chocolate shop and café in Ramsbottom, Lancashire. As you can see from the picture above, they don’t just sell other people’s chocolate, they also have their own label.
They sent us three bars to try, and this is the one I picked to try first. A strawberry chocolate sounded just the thing for a warm summers day.
I wasn’t expecting this bar to be quite so pink, so I got a bit of a surprise unwrapping it. It’s like strawberry milkshake in a bar, and has the aroma to go with it.
This is a 28% cocoa solids chocolate, and for those of you who don’t think of white chocolate as “proper” chocolate, that’s a third more than, say, Dairy Milk. And I would much rather have a bar of this stuff any day.
The bar is flavoured and coloured with real freeze-dried strawberries, and it’s no surprise that strawberry is the overriding flavour. It’s sweet of course, but it’s also fresh, fruity and light.
The tiniest hint of black pepper helps to lift that flavour even more, but this bar isn’t hot in any way. The casual consumer might not even notice the pepper at all. I have to say, I prefer this to Chocoholly’s take on the white/strawberry/pepper theme.
Finally, a quick word about the packaging. I really like it. It’s eye-catching, yet simple. Printed on quality paper with a sliver foil lining. It feels like a quality bar of chocolate from the moment you pick it up, and if you’re a strawberry lover, then it more than lives up to the promise.
From the self-styled Irish ‘Purveyors of Happiness‘ comes this 32% cocoa milk chocolate bar with both honeycomb bits AND crisped rice (10% and 5% respectively). Not normally my cup of tea, but I found myself quietly appreciating it as I ate my first chunk. Moreso the second, and definitely the third.
You see, the chocolate itself isn’t spectacularly different from any other milk chocolate, but the major difference here is the texture. Not only is the honeycomb light and VERY crispy, but the addition of cisped rice gives the bar and extra dimension of crispiness. The rice adds a lighter, less sweet crispy element, which serves to make a square of this chocolate bar eminently munchable.
The chocolate is sweet, with a good, rounded flavour, but of course the sweetness of both chocolate and honeycomb precludes any serious appreciation of whatever cocoa Butlers chose for this bar.
I can see this bar appealing to adults and kids alike, but I’m willing to bet that adults who buy this won’t be thinking of their offspring when they do – far too good for kids, but a definite treat for the bigger kids among us. Particularly those with a bit of a sweet tooth.
Having recently written about this Edinburgh company and their excellent chilli chocolate, I was obviously keen to try another one of The Chocolate Tree’s bars. This time it was their milk chocolate bar with seeds. The bar contains sunflower, pumpkin and hemp seeds. Looking at the bar, you can see that there is rather a healthy distribution of them along the back, which looks quite attractive and promising.
Similarly to the other bars, the packaging is simple, but the design of the bar has that same slightly mismatched look that makes it look homemade and a little bit arty.
I’ve been told The Chocolate Tree often have stalls at festivals, selling from a large geodesic dome. I can imagine a bar like this that’s got obvious hippie appeal would sell quite well at a music festival because of the whole organic and healthy angle. The genuinely alternative feel of the packaging would also go down well.
Packaging and blurb aside, I must say that I personally am not always a fan of mixing healthy stuff with my treats, but in this case I found the saltiness of the seeds blended quite well with the sweetness of the chocolate. In fact, it took the edge of the sweetness rather nicely.
I like the fact that The Chocolate Tree are generous with the quantities of the added ingredients. I’ve had bars before that only had a tiny bit of what they promised, but with this bar you could certainly feel a significant amount of seedy goodness with every single bite.
The Chocolate Tree’s milk chocolate has a really good texture. It’s neither heavy nor greasy but is nonetheless rich enough to be flavoursome and creamy enough to melt quite nicely in your mouth.
This is another surprisingly good, understated but very palatable bar and it’ll make you feel like you’re not being totally unhealthy by indulging. I’m not sure quite how true that is, but seeds are meant to be good for you, so that’s the line I’m taking.
I picked this little selection up from the Auberge stand at Taste of London last week. I asked the girls to pick out a selection of their favourites, and they chose to go with this “Dairy Free” selection.
I use the words “Dairy Free” in quotes, because one of the chocolates is a Goats Cream Caramel. Now it may not have come from a cow, but that still counts as dairy in my book.
That aside, a quick glance at the web sites tells me the other chocolates I have are “Cosmopolitan”, “Orange and Cointreau”, “Espresso” and “Ginger”.
As you can see, all the chocolates have the same format – a Lauden-esque square of chocolate with an edible transfer on the top. Unfortnately, the Auberge version just doesn’t quite have the refinement of Lauden. Perhaps they’ve been through the wars on their journey to the show, but they look a little battered and a couple of the transfers are wonky. Still, they’re quite pretty.
The goat’s cream caramel was quite pleasant, but was more like a fudge, with a soft wand slightly grainy texture. The other chocolates were all quite dry and of variable quality. In a few cases, the chocolate on the base was so thick that there was hardly any room for a filling. In fact, they were all quite average – something which drained any enthusiasm I had to write about them individually.
It seems as though they’ve been put together without much attention to detail, which doesn’t fill me with joy, given that I paid £1 each for them.
I think part of the problem with these chocolates was that I reviewed them straight after having tried Nicky Grant’s chocolates. Ordinarily I might be more upbeat about these, but they just don’t come close to Ms Grant’s fresh chocolates, despite being roughly the same price. It may be comparing apples and oranges, particularly as there are special considerations with dairy-free chocolates, but these just didn’t excite me.
