We first encountered Chococo’s husband and wife team Andy and Claire Burnett at the Academy of Chocolate Awards, and were lucky enough to be able to snag a mall selection of their chocolates at Chocolate Unwrapped on Sunday.
Chococo are based in Dorset and produce all their chocolates by hand in small batches, using local, organic and ethically produced ingredients where possible. As you can see, they also have some incredibly pretty packaging with lots of bright colours.
The chocolates inside the box are equally pretty, and looking at their web site, they seem to do a vast array wonderful looking creations. I’ve got just nine of them here to look at.
Wild Thing
A rather beautiful marbled dome of dark and white chocolate with a smooth ganache and kirsch soaked cherry. Divine.
Bob’s Bees
Local honey ganache dipped in dark chocolate. Very subtle honey flavour, smooth, rich dark chocolate notes. Might not have even known it was honey if it wasn’t for the honeycomb transfer on top (which is a good thing for a non-honey-fan like me!).
Enchanting Elderberry
Another beautiful dome of dark chocolate with local elderberry jelly and elderflower liqueur. For me, the flavour of the elderberry jelly didn’t quite work with the dark chocolate and liqueur, but it’s an interesting combination nonetheless!
Pure Kakawa
A pure Dominican Republic dark chocolate truffle. Not much to look at when unwrapped from its shiny purple foil, but an instant favourite! The intense dark cocoa power dusting quickly gives way to a beautifully smooth and sweet truffle.
Melting Milk
A completely divine milk chocolate truffle infused with vanilla, covered in milk chocolate flakes. Smooth and delicious!
Chilli Tickle
Chilli infused dark chocolate truffle dusted in cinnamon icing sugar. Another wonderful combination of flavours. The cinnamon and chilli are both quite subtle, but still noticeable, and the truffle is soft, smooth and rich.
Blackcurrant Beauty
A shiny, embossed square of fruit puree and dark chocolate ganache. Looks almost like a hunk of metal. The rich flavours make this a real man’s chocolate!
Blackstrap Harry
Another first for me – organic molasses in a dark chocolate ganache. The texture of the smoothest, softest truffle but with the flavour of treacle! Very rich and very yummy!
Gorgeous Ginger
Another dark chocolate dome – this time filled with dark chocolate ganache with stem ginger. I love ginger, and this was one of the best ginger ‘hits’ I’ve had that didn’t involve shoving a large, whole piece of the stuff into my mouth!
All in all, these are some of the nicest chocolates I’ve had in ages. Fantastic flavour combinations and quality ingredients, put together by some genuinely lovely people. I simply can’t recommend them highly enough.
This slender little slab was part of the goodies Dom & I were given at the Chocolate Week / Mexican Tourist Board Event. The rear appears to be sealed with wax (which it isn’t, but it’s an interesting touch).
Now, whether the picture and information is there to tell us that this cocoa was made from the 2007 harvest, or whether it’s just there for decoration I couldn’t say, but the inside of the wrapper features a couple of models in a cheesy pose that I’m guessing is designed to hint at the sensual pleasures chocolate can bring. To me it just looks like another art director has made some more money decorating a product with an expensive and irrelevant photo. Ambiguous packaging design aside, I wanted to know how the light, crisp flavours I’d encountered in the 100% stick from the AOC Awards translated into ‘proper’ chocolate.
Cheesy photos aside, this 40% cocoa milk chocolate bar carries many of the flavours in the 100% cocoa stick we received at the AOC Awards. This chocolate has a great mouthfeel and packs great cocoa taste without being in the slightest bit cloying. It’s milky, creamy, light and far too easy to eat. Well rounded cocoa without a trace of sharpness underpinned by the creamy dairy tastes that define good milk chocolate. It’s as good as any milk chocolate I’ve ever eaten, and I wish there were more companies producing bars to this standard.
Shame about the inner photo though.
Last year when we wrote about the future of Thorntons and spoke to their head chocolatier Keith Hurdman, we talked about how careful the company has to be when introducing new ranges that they don’t alienate their traditional customer. Since then, we’ve reviewed some fabulous new Thorntons products, but this one – part of their Continental range – is clearly aimed at keeping the traditionalists happy.
“Paris” is part of Thorntons new “City Box” collection of chocolates supposedly inspired by particular city. They also do a “Milan” box of dark chocolates, which I’ll be looking at later this week. Paris, it turns out, is all milk.
Inside the attrictive box, there are two layers of 14 chocolates, with a total of eight different ones to choose from.
Mousse au Chocolat
This is described as a ‘light fluffy chocolate mousse finished with sprinkles of dark and white chocolate’. A chocolate flavour chocolate, with chocolate on top then. A little bland for my liking.
Caramel de Café
A coffee-caramel milk chocolate square, topped with a chocolate ‘coffee bean’. I liked the flavour combination here. The coffee wasn’t so intense as to overpower the caramel, which was nice. I think I would have preferred the coffee bean to have been real though!
Praline Feuilentine
Praline with pieces of feuillentine waffle. I don’t really know what that is, but the chocolate is soft and creamy with crispy bits – like a lot of the chocs in this box.
Pain d’Épices
“Caramelised hazelnuts with a hint of gingerbread” is how the box describes this one. And that’s exactly what it is. A little bit of ginger and a little bit of a crunch make this one of my favourites.
Hazelnut Croquant
A large, round chocolate with a tastey hazelnut filling. I particularly liked the texture of this one. It’s nice and light, but the croquant pieces give it an interesting crispy texture when you bite into it.
Ganache au Marc de Champagne
An interestingly designed diamond-shaped milk chocolate ganache, with a hint of marc de champagne.
Parisian Truffle
A classic truffle with French brandy brandy, decorated with dark chocolate flakes. Very subtle flavours here. Needs more brandy!
Amour
Heart shaped chocolate with marzipan and French orange liqueur. The only one of this collection to have a fruit filling, and probably my favourite. There’s more orange than marzipan flavour going on, and the overall effect is really rather nice.
The general theme of this box seems to be soft centres with subtle (too subtle) flavours and assorted cripsy bits. There isn’t a great deal of variation within that theme, and you might be hard pressed to tell some of them apart.
A couple of years ago, I might have ranted about how dull this collection is. But it’s clearly not aimed at me, and now that I have a better idea of Thorntons strategy, I’m OK with it. It’s a nicely presented box and is the kind of thing that the ‘traditional’ Thorntons shopper will be attracted to – and while they’re there, hopefully they’ll discover some of the new and exciting products on offer.
As it stands, this would make a perfectly good gift. I would be more than willing to get my dad a box… if it weren’t for the fact that he seems to have inexplicably developed a taste for Valrhona lately…
Having been thoroughly impressed with Galler’s ‘Les Marines‘ box of salted and seaweedy chocolates, I find myself deemed worthy of a chance to sample the entire range (including one which is only just available this month).
Les Florales was Jean Galler’s initial foray into this particular style of chocolate, and as the name suggests, these discs are filled with one of four quite different flower flavours.
As you can see from the information offered up on the inside of the box lid, these chocolates came about when Daniël Öst presented Jean Galler with the four different flowers – (clockwise from top left) Violet, Orange blossom Jasmine and Rose. (Interesting mingling of English and French in the title, by the way).
So, what of these fragrant little beauties? Well, for starters the chocolate used in the shells is excellent. Creamy, buttery milk chocolate rich, slightly tangy dark chocolate, and a creamy white chocolate to accompany what is already the sweetest of the quartet, the Rose. The filling doesn’t hold back on Rose flavours for a moment, flooding the mouth with its distinctive taste as the chocolate melts and mingles. A sweet treat for sure.
The only milk chocolate on offer here is the Jasmine, and I found myself liking this much more than the Rose. The floral part of the pairing is beautifully balanced with the buttery milk chocolate. It’s not so subtle as to be understated, but neither does it ever become too much for the taste buds. As the chocolate melts away the mouth is left with a lingering floral freshness which is very pleasant indeed.
As a young lad I would often buy Parma Violets but a recent(ish) nostalgia experiment proved that I’m a little beyond sugar-based, artificially flavoured sweets, so I was quite looking forward to the Violet chocolate. The disappointing showing from the Moon Estates violet choc also had me hoping that M. Galler and co. had managed to pull it off.
The use of dark chocolate serves as an excellent counterpoint to what is undoubtedly a quite sweet and powerful flavour. It’s a balance which is held to the last melting moment of the dark chocolate, and like the Jasmine chocolate, this one left my tongue awash with summer flavours. Once again I can appreciate the flavour of violet without feeling as though I’ve licked a sachet of pot pourri found in an old lady’s sock drawer.
The final member of the Florales quartet is a dark chocolate disc flavoured with Orange Flower. – something of an old favourite in the world of chocolate, but of course this is a floral orange rather than a fruity flavour. As soon as I popped the disc into my mouth the flavour began to spread., and as the chocolate shell melted and released the creamy filling the flavour of oranges reached its peak. Never cloying or artificial in character, as the orange reached it’s height the dark chocolate released its flavours, the bitter sweetness of the cocoa tempering the sweetness and making the finish more cocoa than orange, with the final lingering tastes being a combination of dark, rich cocoa and light, fragrant orange.
These are definitely sweeter in nature than the ‘Les Marines’ (naturally – sea salt and seaweed are never going to be THAT sweet) and the use of flower essences puts one in mind of a summer’s afternoon. These are apparently very popular with female consumers, and I can see why. If you enjoy the occasional Chocolate Orange, have a penchant for light, slightly sweet and fruity flavours with your chocolate, or just fancy enjoying something fragrant and floral, then you could do a lot worse than to check out these well thought out and carefully constructed little discs of delight.
