Get ready to experience truffles as you never have before. Much like wine flights, Godiva Truffle Flights are an exploration of flavors, textures, and aromas. Our Executive Chef Chocolatier Thierry Muret personally selected the truffles in each of our Truffle Flights, placing them in order for the ideal tasting experience. The concept is thoroughly groundbreaking – we know because we invented it! – and deliciously Godiva.
Explore all of our Truffle Flights at Godiva.com/truffles. Enjoy your journey!
Last year I reviewed a Valentine’s chocolate box from zChocolat, the luxury French chocolatier, and called it the prettiest chooclate box I’ve ever received. It was a beautiful Mahogany box, packed full of equally attractive chocolates.
You can imagine then that I was quite happy when zChocolat got in touch and offered to send a Christmas box for review. So what’s inside the fabric bag this time…?
Well it turns out it’s not another wooden box this time. It’s a simple, but elegant and well made card box with a snow flake on the box and… my name on the front!
To be perfectly honest, I had mixed feelings about the Mahogany box anyway. It was absolutely beautiful, and it’s a box I still have and use every day, but it felt a little over the top for a box of chocolates – even one designed to be a high end gift.
This box I like. It may be made of card, but it still feels like a quality product. And did I mention it has my name on the front??
Inside are two individual boxes, each containing 15 chocolates. The actual chocolates are largely unchanged from the box I received last year, and to tell you about them individually would take until Christmas next year. Suffice to say, they all use the same mould, but have their unique identifying number on the top, making the flavour easy to pick out from the little book that’s included.
The flavours are all typically French. There are lots of pralines, caramels, ganaches and subtle flavours. There’s nothing wildly experimental, just well tried, sophisticated flavour combinations.
Some of the textures are quite firm, and there are a few too many nutty chocolates in the collection for my own taste, but again, that’s quite typical of French chocolates.
Would I buy them as a gift? Potentially, yes. But I still think it’s a gift better suited to those with a sense of style rather than a taste for the finest chocolate. The presentation is immaculate and opening the box is sheer joy, but if you’re gift buying for a true chocolate connoisseur, you might still find more interesting chocolates at your local artisan chocolatier.
I consider zChocolat to be something akin to Hotel Chocolat on steroids. It’s a gift that has the wow factor and will be sure to make a good impression, but at £50 for this box – and that’s without the personalisation options – it’s certainly not cheap. But if you want someone to know you spent a bit of money on them, it’s a great option.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Chocolate & Love. The British chocolate company has been fairly quiet since the successful launch of their “Choc Stars” brand of character chocolate bars, which I guess is what’s been taking up most of their time.
But they’re back with a new single origin bar and they were kind enough to send us a sample to review.
This 80% dark chocolate is made in Switzerland. I’m not sure who makes it for Chocolate & Love, but it’s most likely to be Felchlin, one of the better large chocolate makers, who also produce some fantastic bars for Original Beans.
As with all their own label dark chocolate bars, Chocolate & Love make a big deal about ethics and the inside of the wrapper is packed with information. The chocolate made from 100% fairly traded and organic ingredients, and the wrapper even tells you that the beans come from the COCABO cooperative.
Chocolate & Love is even part of the WeForest.org scheme, and has so far been responsible for planting an impressive 18,000 trees.
The chocolate itself is a fairly ordinary looking bar. As you might expect from an 80% chocolate, it has a deep, rich colour, and that’s something that’s reflected in the taste.
The flavour is intense and chocolatey, but not especially complex. There are’s a strong cocoa powder note, but it’s also surprisingly sweet for an 80% chocolate, so it’s really quite accessible.
If you imagine a really strong hot chocolate drink but in bar form, you’ll get a good idea of the flavour of this chocolate.
So despite the lack of complexity, I enjoyed this bar. It’s the kind of chocolate you can just keep by your desk at work and break off a chunk every now and then as a pick me up. If you need a little intensity in your life but don’t care too much for subtle flavour notes, then this is worth picking up. And remember, the more you eat, the quicker you’ll save the planet!
I saw these newly redesigned Valrhona bars at The Speciality & Fine Food Fair earlier this month, but didn’t manage to try any. Thankfully, Valrhona took pity on me and sent me a few samples to try, including this high cocoa content milk chocolate that I’d not tried before.
Valrhona Bahibe is a 46% milk chocolate made with beans from the Dominican Republic and is named after the Bayahibe Rose, a cactus flower that grows there.
As you can see, it’s a great looking bar of chocolate. Valrhona tend to make their chocolate in a variety of different formats, depending on the target market. These 70gram bars are clearly aimed at the consumer market, and they’ve done a really good job with the design. Both the packaging and the bar feel like a quality product.
The milk chocolate is slightly matt in appearance. Perhaps not as glossy as I would expect, but still very well finished.
For a 46% milk chocolate, it’s surprisingly sweet and creamy. If you had to guess blind, you might think it was closer to 36%. But it’s also very well balanced. Neither the sugar or milk overpower the warm chocolate notes. It’s not a particularly complex chocolate though. The tasting notes on the pack claim an “essence of nut, enhanced by a fruity acidity”, but I think that may be pushing it a little.
What you have here is a very enjoyable, creamy & comforting milk chocolate that will disappear in no time.
