The recent truffle kerfuffle reminded me that we’ve not looked at any Thorntons choccies in a while, and as I happened to pass one of their shops today, I picked up a couple of bags. This is the first.
The first thing you notice is the rather cheap, thin plastic packaging. Combined with the pastel colours, it reminds me of something you might have found in a sweet shop circa 1975.
As for the chocolates themselves, well as you can see, they look OK, if nothing special.
These chocolates are billed as a mixture of 30% milk chocolate and 60% dark chocolate, but looking at them it’s not immediately obvious which is which.
But having said all that, they’re really quite tasty. They’ve obviously been mass produced, but the chocolate is quite nice and the fillings are really quite fruity and refreshing. The lemon ones in particular have a distinct sherbety-taste that takes me straight back to my childhood.
But as with the last time I reviewed Thorntons chocolates, I can’t help thinking they’ve lost their sense of direction. The specialist chocolate market has changed beyond recognition in the last 5-10 years, but Thorntons don’t seem to have changed since the day I first walked into one of their shops in the early 80’s.
When I went into their shop today, there were a couple of nicely packaged items, but the majority of what was on offer just looked a bit cheap. I think that’s a bit sad, and it makes me wonder how much longer this British institution will survive in its current form.
So, you may already have read about the recent incident involving a Thorntons chocolatier and the squashed Hotel Chocolat truffles. Maybe you read it on the BBC site. Maybe you read it in the Independent.
Or maybe you read it on a blog.
But as amusing (and bemusing) as the incident may have been, it seems Hotel Chocolat aren’t quite as keen to “just move on now” as they would have us believe.
You see, far from moving on, their PR company (Immediate Future Ltd) has been emailing bloggers and casually asking them in passing what they think about the whole incident.
In fact, they are quite clearly trying to stir the whole thing up to generate some positive PR in the blogosphere.
Now, here at Chocablog, we’re happy to review Hotel Chocolat’s wonderful chocolates. We don’t even mind helping them to run competitions free of charge. But we draw the line at being manipulated by a PR company to try to make a rival chocolate company look stupid… because if you ask me, that’s even more childish than going round squashing your competitors’ chocolates in the first place.
This was an impulse buy. Something random picked up from the shelf of my local sweet shop. Aside from being Green & Black’s, I didn’t even know what it was until I got home.
So this “Dark chocolate with orange and spices” came as something of a pleasant surprise when I got home.
According to the label, Maya Gold was the first ever product to be awarded the Fairtrade Mark back in 1994, and it’s made from organically chocolate grown organically by Mayan farmers in Belize.
Now I’m a bit wary about “mass produced” organic and Fair Trade chocolates. Too often I’ve found this gets used as a marketing gimmick to sell some rather average quality chocolate. But this stuff is nice.
It’s 55% cocoa solids, but it doesn’t taste that strong, and it’s not at all bitter. I think this is partly down to the sweetness of the orange and the spices. The orange complements the chocolate flavour perfectly without overwhelming it, and the spices are very subtle.
The result is a very moreish bar of chocolate that was gone all to quickly.
Now I’ve no doubt serious chocolate connoisseurs will prefer the Conscious Chocolate Essential Orange that Simon reviewed last week. But for us old-fashioned chocoholics that like to buy our chocolate in Tesco, this is definitely worth a try.
Time to review another brace of wholesome raw chocolate bars, courtesy of Emma at Conscious Chocolate. This time I chose a couple of fruity little numbers, namely the Best Ever Citrus Zest bar and the Best Ever Essential Orange bar.
The first one I tried was the essential Orange bar. Now if you’re a fan of Terry’s Chocolate Orange, I wouldn’t recommend this to you, but I’m not, and I found the orange flavour very agreeable. It lends a subtle citrus zing to the raw chocolate flavours, and without the unnatural intensity I generally associate with ‘flavoured’ chocolate.
Having enjoyed nibbling the Essential Orange bar, it was time to crack open it’s sibling, the Best Ever Citrus Zest bar. It came as something of a surprise to find that this one was shot through with long, fine strands of Orange, Lemon and Lime zest and I have to say that it was delicious. The zest adds much more of a citrus kick to the whole thing, and nibbling on the zesty bits after the chocolate had melted was lovely. This is my favourite Conscious bar to date, and I think the addition of a little fruitiness to Emma’s recipe is a great idea (assuming of course that you enjoy citrus flavours). Definitely a couple of winners here – both recommended, but if you’re on a tight budget then I’d say go for the Citrus Zest.
Footnote: Well, I’m just over halfway through my Conscious collection, and enjoying every mouthful. Next time I’ll be reviewing a couple of the more unusual bars – Goji & Coconut and Love Potion Number 9.
