It’s Hotel Chocolat time again, and this time we have an upmarket take on the classic (if a little naff) Chocolate Orange format.
Rather than attempt to create an actual orange shape, Hotel Chocolat have gone for a much more elegant box with 16 generously sized circular chocolates, each made to look like a slice of orange rather than an individual segment.
But the first thing you notice when you open the box is the aroma – it’s a subtle, natural orange smell and nothing like the almost overpowering orangeyness that hits you when you open a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. This is much more natural and appealing.
The chocolate here is 74% cocoa solids and has a smooth texture and rich taste. The orange flavour comes from Valencia orange oil and is very nice, but it’s also very subtle. So subtle in fact, that if you eat one quickly, it’s hard to detect at all. At times, the dark chocolate flavours seem to overwhelm it completely.
This is clearly another product made for sharing, but for my tastes, there’s just not enough orangeyness or sweetness. Hotel Chocolat do also do a milk chocolate version of this which I think I’d prefer. But what I’d really like to see is just like a little more of that Valencia orange oil in this dark chocolate version to give a bit more zing.
Thanks to everyone who entered our Yorkie competition and congratulations to Jim Moore who won himself a box of 36 Rasisin & Bisicuit Yorkies.
And of course huge thanks to WeLoveYorkies.co.uk for helping out with Chocablog’s biggest ever competition!
If you subscribed as part of the competition, please stick around – we’re already planning our next great competition…
I purchased this in Spain but the wrapper is printed in German and I’ve yet to see this albino Twix in the UK. Perhaps it’s going to be a ‘Snow Twix’ Xmas gimmick? Oh, and if it wasn’t before but it is now, please pay me for the idea!
As you can see, it’s a Twix, but covered in White Chocolate. I haven’t had a Twix in a good while, and I’d forgotten just how sweet they are. I certainly couldn’t manage the second bar.
Sugary biscuit base topped with overly sweet caramel, and now available with an even sweeter white chocolate coating!
It’s a nice twist on an old favourite. Or another way to keep selling product without having to invent something new. Probably a good stocking filler, or a neat way to put a roof on your Manger Cake. Not for me though.
Not to be outdone by the surprising taste of Whittaker’s Favourite Kiwi Fruit milk chocolate block, we returned from a day sightseeing the joys of Auckland and stumbled upon a long-held dream choco-combination of mine – top notch dark chocolate and caramel, humbly lurking in a mini-market next to the hotel.
Whittaker’s have used their bittersweet dark chocolate – at a not-too-shabby 62% cocoa content – as the serious outer coating for their frivolously flowing caramel filling. I was so excited I rushed back to the hotel room, flung it on the bed and took a photo of it. No other niceties were observed as this chocablogger was even more eager to strip it of its inviting gold wrapper:
The chocolate is almost black in colour and my first square (which admittedly was munched eagerly and not slowly savoured) failed to provide anything but the barest hint of caramel right at the very end of swallowing.
Learning from this, I took my time eating the second, third, tenth and twentieth square. Letting the dark, gritty chocolate establish itself amongst my receptive bitter and sweet taste buds was the first step to heaven; the second was the release of the sweet, honeyish caramel after the chocolate surrounding it had warmed and dissolved. A blissful double bonus. Bittersweet chocolate coupled with a sickly-sweet inside is as nice as I’d always dreamed it would be.
What a bugger, then, to turn over the wrapper and read the ingredients list. The chocolate components were all fine, but the caramel, making up one third of the block, was a fair bit dodgier. After the usual suspects of glucose and sweetened condensed milk was invert syrup and confectionery fat. What on earth is confectionery fat? Isn’t that what my butt becomes after eating confectionery? Why add it before?
Perhaps I’ll ponder it in more detail after I finish the entire block…
