Bellina Chocolate House, Cambridge

Whilst out and about on my travels a while ago, I tracked down the Bellina Chocolate House in Cambridge. Located in newer premises on Bridge Street (having moved from a small side street which is also home to a fantastic cheese shop), Bellina sell a wide range of novelties, bars and individual Belgian chocolates.

I decided to select a small handful of their Belgian chocolates – some unusual, some more common – to see how their ‘top end’ products measure up to others we’ve reviewed here.

First up is a dark chocolate filled with pineapple cream – still something of a rarity (which is why I chose it). The shell is goos and thick (as you can see) and the filling is light, soft and very creamy and carries the pineapple flavour extremely well. When you bite into this chocolate the initial flavour comes from the soft, light centre, but as you chew it, the darker flavours of the cocoa start to mingle with the pineapple. A very pleasant take on what is still quite an unusual pairing.

Next up we have a milk chocolate (the only one I chose) which is home to that modern classic, the salted caramel. Having tasted some of London’s finest salted caramels I was interested to see how this Belgian version measured up, and I’m pleased to say it does pretty well. Obviously the choice of milk chocolate makes the overall taste somewhat sweeter than the darker efforts I’m used to, but there’s enough salt in the caramel to deliver that salt/sweet tongue teaser that’s an essential part of a good salted caramel. Okay, so it’s not up there with a Paul A Young dark salted caramel, but I’m pretty sure it’s my first enrobed in milk chocolate, and it’s pretty good.

I can’t remember if I chose the next chocolate for the flavour, or for the bright red adornment on the top.

It’s not often you come across something this bright on a chocolate, but the reason I wanted this one was because it was a coffee praline, and coffee can be a bit tricky to get right. I’ve tasted very good coffee chocolates and downright awful ones (a Ukranian bar springs to mind) so this was chosen as a benchmark chocolate, as it were. I have to say, it was okay. Not stunning or spectacular, but certainly not terrible, the coffee flavour was natural, full flavoured and didn’t overpower the overall taste of the chocolate, but I didn’t fall in love with it. Perhaps I’m just not a big coffee/chocolate fan after all.

Last up was a lemon cup.

The top part was a strange greeny yellow colour – not the most attractive colour for a food, particularly confectionery. It looked like white chocolate gone wrong, but as it turned out it was just there to stop yet another soft, smooth filling from escaping.

And what a filling. Bite down on this and POW! – lemon comes zinging out to play over your tastebuds. Of course lemon and dark chocolate isn’t such a novelty, but it’s been a while since I sampled something like this, and I did enjoy it quite a lot. Good balance between citrus, sugar and chocolate, with the citrus/chocolate balance being held throughout. Jolly good.

So overall the chocolates are pretty good, if a little pricey (well they are handmade and imported from Belgium) but it isn’t that I have an issue with. The shop itself is pleasant enough, but I did rather feel as though I wasn’t exactly welcome. Perhaps it was a bad day, or maybe I took the proprietor by surprise, but I didn’t feel as though my attempts to extract information were welcome. Attempts to gain more information from the website were a waste of time, since the site is down (and has been foe a while) and ‘Belgium Chocolates’? Really? Oh dear.

Overall, I’d say decent chocs, done well by someone in Belgium but being sold at a premium by people who really need to brush up on their customer relations if they want to get any return business. I know Cambridge is one of those towns with an awful lot of passing trade, but there’s a Hotel Chocolat shop down the road selling an enormous variety of products, and the staff there are considerably more welcoming.

Sugah! Retro Bars

Now that all things old are new again, and there’s money to be made from nostalgia, it isn’t really a surprise that some smart people are trying to capitalize on that. The Sugah! Retro range of bars are an attempt to return to simpler times when chocolate was guzzled rather than savoured. Back when it was an uncomplicated sweet treat and that’s definitely reflected in the suitably whimsical wrappers.

The Shortbread bar is like a very generously coated chocolate biscuit. One of the things that makes the Sugah! range so good is that they don’t shy away from using rich ingredients that others might avoid. So that means the shortbread is nice and buttery, and is the perfect compliment for the milky chocolate.

The Pretzels bar is equally straight-forward – chocolate with some chunks of crunchy, salty pretzels. Kind of like chocolate coated pretzels which have been covered with an excessive amount of chocolate, then formed into a bar. Good stuff.

The Peanut Butter bar is the odd one out here simple because I was anticipating the peanut butter to come squirting out the sides of bar after the first bite. But instead, it is just solid milk chocolate which has had a big dollop of peanut butter mixed in with it. That makes for a bar which is definitely not short on flavour.

And if none of these three tickle your fancy, there are also some other choices like Smores, Coconut and Caramel Corn. They might not be a high-class gourmet experience, but they are a lot of fun and eating three or four in quick succession will result in the kind of sugar high you probably shouldn’t had since you were seven.

Academy of Chocolate Tasting Event

Ever wanted to go to a chocolate tasting event, but never had the chance? Well if you’re in London next Wednesday 30th June, then you can!

The Academy of Chocolate have got together with Slow Food London to organise a tasting evening with chocolates from Rococo, Paul A. Young, William Curley and Duffy Sheardown. We’ll be there, and you can come too!

Tickets are £25 (£20 for Slow Food members), and need to be booked in advance. If you’d like to come, email kate@nudgepr.co.uk to book your place and for payment details.

You can find out more about the event on the Slow Food London web site.

Hotel Chocolat The Purist 50% Milk Island Growers

I happened to pass by one of Hotel Chocolat’s stores recently and decided to pop in for a look, since we’ve not been sent anything from them for a while. While Hotel Chocolat continue to bring out ever more outrageous, quirky and downright strange looking products, they’ve also been developing new ranges of bars and i was delighted to see a whole slew of new ‘Purist’ bars on display.

This bar is a very close relative of the 42% cocoa milk chocolate bar I was sent last year, and it was for that very reason that I selected this one. At almost £5 for 70g of chocolate, this is a fairly pricey purchase, but you’re buying the equivalent of a vintage wine – indeed, the wrapper does have the words ‘rare and vintage’ under the ‘Purist’ tag.

The beans for this bar are Trintario, grown on St. Lucia as part of Hotel Chocolat’s ‘engaged ethics’ programme. Beans are harvested and collected at the Rabot Estate, where they are fermented and dried under strict controls before being conched for only 48 hours. Once the cocoa is ready, all that’s added is the ‘dash of milk’, a touch of vanilla, and a minimal amount of sugar.

And the chocolate? Fantastic. Smooth, mellow cocoa with hints of caramel, a creamy, rich texture with a hint of citrus top notes, and enormous depth and character. If your normal choice is milk chocolate but you occasionally enjoy a good quality dark chocolate, then this bar will tick many boxes.

If you’re still eating Cadbury’s Dairy Filth this might just be the bar that turns you away from cheap, fatty, oversweetened fake chocolate say ‘milk chocolate’ to me, and I’ll say ‘Hotel Chocolat’s St Lucian Purist Bar’ back to you, It’s phenomenally good, even if the price will make you wince. It’s good enough to mean that I’ll more than likely be sampling more from this range – even if I have to pay for them myself.