Picture a chocoholic running to a store’s register, already holding chocolate with a couple of other items, trying not to see any more chocolate before paying. And then she sees a tiny sign, “The Ultimate Dark Chocolate Fix.” Back up. Is it a hoax? Is it true? Then I saw this tin. Needless to say, I grabbed it and went on my way, despite the four dollar price tag.
I’ve been wanting to buy some cacao nibs recently, but they’re usually even more pricey since they’re sold in greater quantities. Plus, these are dipped in 70% dark chocolate with espresso and come in this cool little tin.
In fact, it’s a very unique tin. It refers to the coated nibs as ” ‘peaces’ of intense yum.” So I just had to check out Sweetriot’s website, which is equally unique. It defines “Sweetriot” as “a joyful celebration of culture, diversity, and understanding — it is the opposite of a civil riot, which is dangerous, violent, and oppressing.” In keeping, they call themselves “rioters,” saying that “employees is an uninteresting word”. Uninteresting Sweetriot definately is not: their site has interesting tin reuse ideas, a cacao story, and a list of how much you could buy with cacao beans when they were used as money.
It seems I bought the darker of their three chocolate-dipped nibs. The other two are 50% and 65% instead of 70% and don’t have espresso. The chocolate is a bit sweet, but with the bitter taste of the nib coming through. The espresso taste comes in just before it melts, leaving the slightly fruity, bitter nib to chew on. Which, by the way, if you haven’t yet tried them, cacao nibs have the most wonderful odd texture. This progression of the senses is all very well, but if you start chewing right away, all of the flavors meld in a miraculous combination of sweet and dark that will be a bit more friendly to those with some fear of the dark.
Sweetriot ensared me, starting with the tricky way this tin snuck up on me. Not that I mind: this is a great emergency chocolate fix. Small enough to even fit in a pocket, mostly immune to melting, and filled with chocolatey goodness.
(Also great fun to play with… make shapes with… pretend they’re pearls for necklaces…)
I’ll confess, I actually had to look up the word ‘bezant‘ to discover its true meaning. For those who are as uneducated as me, it’s a form of medieval gold coin. But I’m glad I took the time to look it up, because the illustration in the Wikipedia article is, coincidentally, of the coat of arms of the Duchy of Cornwall which features 15 bezants.
And if I’d taken the time to read the PR material that came with the chocs, I would have known that the 15 bezants symbolise the ransom paid by Cornish people to secure the release of the Duke of Cornwall during The Crusades.
For those that don’t know, the Duchy Originals is a company run by Prince Charles (the current Duke of Cornwall) on his estate – The Duchy of Cornwall – so it makes perfect sense to make chocolate in the shape of bezants.
As you can see from the photo, Duchy Originals were kind enough to send me a box of each of the four available flavours, which are:
Organic Milk Chocolate with Spanish Orange Oil
Milk chocolate and orange is such a tried and tested combination, and I’ve had so many variations on the theme – most of which weren’t that great – that I was quite prepared to dislike these.
In actual fact, I quite enjoyed them. Firstly, the chocolates actually look appealing. They’re rounded and curvy on the front and flat on the back, with a shiny finish. They’re not too thick, so provided you don’t go stuffing 13 into your mouth in one go, they’re not going to become sickly.
The 34% milk chocolate is smooth and tasty without being overly sweet, and the orange is subtle, but unlike the Hotel Chocolat chocs I reviewed a while back, you can actually taste it.
Organic Milk Chocolate with Ground Arabica Coffee Beans
Coffee, like orange, is one of those flavours that it’s all to easy to get wrong. Often, the coffee is either completely overpowering, hardly noticeable, or else it has a grainy texture like instant coffee.
But in this case I think we have another winner. There’s hardly any coffee aroma, but when you bite into them, you’re greeted with a flavour more like a rich coffee cream. Despite being a thin, solid milk chocolate, it taste like real coffee.
There is a bit of graininess from the coffee beans, but personally I think that adds to the effect. I really enjoyed these.
Oragnic Dark Chocolate with Mitcham Mint Oil
As you can probably tell, they’re going for the tried and tested flavours here. Coffee, orange, mint… no fancy experimental “mongoose and olive” flavour from Duchy Originals. That just wouldn’t be British!
The look of the 72% dark chocolate here is just as nice as the milk chocolate bezants. It’s bright and shiny and tempting looking… just a darker shade. And it tastes good too – not too sweet, not too bitter – but the mint flavour is really quite subtle. It’s a little too subtle for me, and it felt a little like these were missing something.
Organic White Chocolate with Madagascan Vanilla Extract
Vanilla and white chocolate is another tried and tested combination, and again it’s done quite well here. They are a little sweet, but there’s a fair amount of vanilla and creaminess in there too, with the result that the overall flavour taste a little like a good quality vanilla ice cream.
One thing I found a little odd was that the ingredients list the Madagascan Vanilla Extract as “approved non-organic ingredient”. Now obviously I have no objection to non-organic chocolates, but I’m not sure how the box can call these organic chocolates when one of the main ingredients isn’t organic at all!
Still, I did enjoy these. They’re much sweeter than the others, so I wouldn’t want more than a couple in one go, but they are very pleasant.
Summing Up
I’m really quite impressed with these. Clearly they’re meant for sharing, and I think if you’re having a Christmas party, then buying a box of each is the way to go. That way there’s some for everyone.
But there’s a twist in the tail here. You see Duchy Originals don’t actually make anything – they just license the brand to other companies. And in this case, the chocolates are made by House of Dorchester. We have reviewed four of their products in the past, and our opinion has been universally negative.
So I don’t know whether House of Dorchester have turned a corner or if they’re just better at making chocolates for other people, but I enjoyed all of this Duchy Originals range, and would recommend giving them a try.
Update:
I had a response from Duchy Originals regarding non-organic ingredients in chocolates labeled as organic. This is what they said:
Under Soil Association standards in order to be Organic, more than 95% of a product’s ingredients must be organic. In fact, our Chocolate Bezants contain over 99% organic ingredients, as the natural flavours we use are less than 1% of the total ingredients.
Because flavour profiles vary greatly and change with the different foods that they are used with, it is allowable under Soil Association standards to use non organic flavours. The use of flavours in chocolate is particularly problematic due to its high fat content and many other organic brands also use non organic oils in their chocolates.
The natural flavour ingredients used in our chocolates are as follows:
Mint
The Mitcham Mint oil is from a UK mint farm and an organic alternative is not available.
Orange
This oil was chosen over an organic oil as the flavour was far superior and the oil was from a known source and not a blended as the organic orange oils we tried were.
Vanilla
During product development we sampled the product with both organic and non organic Madagascan vanilla flavours and the one that was superior in flavour delivery was a non organic variant.
Coffee
We obtain the flavour from organic rainforest alliance Arabica coffee beans sourced from single estates, these are separately slow roasted in Dorset before being ground and blended.
Information
- Contains dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate (34, 72% cocoa solids).
- Filed under coffee, dark chocolate, duchy originals, house of dorchester, milk chocolate, mint, orange, organic, uk, vanilla, white chocolate.
To complement Cadbury’s sexing up of the Old Gold chocolate block range (think 70%, liqueur centres and rum-n-raisin), this nice looking box of chocolates has just arrived on the shelves at the same time as the tins of short bread, Lindt bells and Christmas decorations.
When I opened these I had some guest tasters over for afternoon tea. Two of them were my parents, John and Pauline, and their two friends over from Scotland, Alastair and Lynne. None of the bespectacled quartet are on the right side of sixty but all are dark chocolate fans and very eager to ‘help’.
Lynn likes soft centres, and pronounced the Caramel Chante with smooth flowing caramel a winner. Alastair is a brazil nut fan and loved the ones he tried covered in Old Gold. He and Dad also tried the Hazelnut Royale but both considered that the flavour was difficult to detect. Mum was still chewing away on her Caramel deluxe and was therefore unable to comment legibly.
Amongst these eager amateurs, I kept on tasting. The strawberry fondant was delicious. Normally I don’t like strawberry fillings as they always veer towards the chemically-enhanced, overly fake flavour, but this had a layer of strawberry jam on top of the fondant and was a great foil to the bittersweet dark coating. The chocolate orange truffle was also a winner – there were only two in the box and I reluctantly let someone else have the second one. Caramel Mousse consisted of a white marshmallow layer on the bottom topped with a thin layer of caramel – unexpected but very nice. Unfortuntely the crème de menthe was green inside and rather grainy which spoiled the smooth coolness I normally expect from white mint fondant centres.
Still their Parisienne Crunch made up for mint misfire. Not that there was anything particularly French about it – it was merely a small square of Cadbury Crunchie honeycomb covered in dark chocolate. I wish they’d release it as a bar instead of a tiny chocolate hidden in a box with a dozen other flavours.
Others included cocoa deluxe which was just Old Gold chocolate in a blob and Truffle Delight which was just softer in the middle and the faithful old Cadbury chocolate box filler, Viennese fudge. On the whole it’s a step up from their ordinary Dairy Milk Tray selections but they could still use a few more imaginative fillings in this fancy-looking selection.
Here we have another John Lewis special. One of those things that comes in a pretty box but invariably ends up not being worth the money. But in this case, the box was particularly pretty and I’m a fan of ginger so I decided to give these a go.
Inside, we have 25 simple, square dark chocolates packed in tightly. Each with a small piece of crystalised ginger on top. The aroma when you first open the box is almost overwhelming… if you’re not big on ginger you’re really not going to like these.
Inside each chocolate we have a soft, truffley centre with small pieces of ginger. strangely for something purchased from John Lewis, I’m still tempted by these. So I bit into one…
Wow. These are chocolates with a punch. The ginger flavour is very strong and the chilli starts to hit you just as the ginger flavour is fading. They’re delicious, but they’re not subtle. In fact, it’s hard to tell anything much at all about the actual chocolate as the other flavours are so strong.
Personally, I found the combination of ginger and chilli a little too much for my tastes, so I took them around to some (predominantly South American) friends to get a second opinion. The result was a unanimous thumbs up – everyone loved them. And after 4 or 5 more I decided I quite liked them too.
I think whether you like these is going to come down to whether or not you’re a spicy food person. Once I got used to them, I found them a tasty treat, but I don’t think I would want to eat them every day. Still… they’re a pleasant surprise. Maybe I won’t give up on John Lewis for chocolates just yet.
