The first ‘conventional’ Easter egg I’ve reviewed this year is something a little special.
Paul Wayne Gregory is one of the UK’s top chocolatiers, but he’s best known for his amazing chocolate sculptures. We interviewed Paul for World Chocolate Guide a couple of years ago at Chocolate Unwrapped, and you can see one of his amazing bespoke pieces in this video.
Obviously, creating bespoke artworks out of chocolate is incredibly time consuming, but Paul also makes his own delicious range of chocolates, not to mention some rather fantastic salted caramel lollipops with popping candy. This is the first Easter chocolate we’ve tried from him though.
I should say from the start that my photos don’t really do this egg justice.
Presented in a simple transparent box, it looks amazing. Very different from your average High Street Easter egg. The entire egg is hand painted (I assume with coloured cocoa butter, is that’s usually how colour is applied to chocolate). Everything but the bottom of the base is covered, so you might be forgiven for thinking this egg is still wrapped somehow.
Unfortunately, once again, I have to destroy a chocolate work of art in order to prove it to you…
Paul exclusively uses Cacao Barry chocolate in his creations. Cacao Barry was one of the two chocolate companies that came together to form Barry Callebaut, the largest chocolate company in the world, back in 1996. Being so large, Callebaut are better known for quantity rather than quality, but they do still make some pretty good chocolate if you know where to look.
The chocolate in this egg is a very pleasant, if uneventful, 38% milk chocolate to which I believe Paul has added natural vanilla. The press release that came with this egg also mentions added spices, but that’s not something I picked up. I did pick up the vanilla though. I’m not sure how I feel about that – while I enjoyed it, I do generally prefer less vanilla.
That said, I think most people will enjoy the flavour, and this egg is much more about making a statement anyway. Giving someone a handmade gift like this is so much nicer than giving them a mass produced egg. It comes in at just under £25, but that’s absolutely worth it for the work that has gone into it – and the brownie points you’ll get on Easter morning.
Paul’s Easter range is available to buy online from his website (link below), or from Harvey Nichols, Forman & Field, and his pop-up shop in Brixton.
Ah, the salted caramel. Once considered to be something a little wild and crazy, this particular chocolate has come a long way in the past five years or so, from being something one could only find at high end chocolatiers to this supermarket assortment. Yes, salted caramels have gone mainstream.
So what have Sainsburys done with this little ball of gooey loveliness? Well for a start they’ve opted to use surprisingly low-cacao content chocolate for the shells. The milk chocolate has a mere 30% cacao while the ‘dark’ version weighs in with a weedy 49%, which in my book makes it bittersweet, not dark. (White chocolate is not chocolate, of course.)
The shells are quite thick, which was a pleasant surprise, and the salted caramel was in no way offensive. I could have done with a little more salt, but other than that it was a good caramel with a smooth mouth feel and good flavour.
The problem is the chocolate. It’s average at best. Very average, and of course less cacao in your chocolate can only mean more of other things, mainly sugar. Every 100g of these chocolates contains 50.5g of sugar.
How much oil can they cram in here? Engine Oil? Tanning Oil?
To be frank, at this point I was quite happy not to eat another, and I understood why they were so reasonably priced. It’s because they’re made with a lot of cheap, nasty stuff that I’m quite keen to avoid eating. This is the sort of fat & sugar laden chocolate that is contributing to our national obesity problems, and as such I would personally avoid these like the plague.
As I mentioned before, this year I’ve been looking for Easter gifts that are just a little bit out of the ordinary. Plain old 200g hollow chocolate eggs just aren’t doing it for me any more.
And that’s why I’m reviewing these chocolate Gloucester Old Spot Pigs from Bettys. For those who really want to push the boundaries, Bettys are also doing a chocolate badger, but I’m just not ready to take that step yet.
This happy little scene weighs 170g and consists of a milk chocolat mummy pig with dark chocolate and white chocolate piglets.
I can only presume multiple daddy pigs were involved.
The milk chocolate is 38% cocoa solids and is really rather nice. It’s rich and creamy and so much nicer than the average mass produced Easter gift. I could happily eat it all day. I was less keen on the 65% dark chocolate and white chocolate piglets, but they’re Ok, and it’s nice to have a bit of variation in flavour.
Of course, with such a cute object, breaking into it is the difficult part. I genuinely felt a little sorry for my piggies as I was about to tuck in. It’s hard enough to crack a pretty egg, but when you break into this, you’re immediately confronted by what looks like a crime scene..
Yes, reader, I killed her in front of her children. And I felt so bad about it that I ate her head.
If you can handle the horror of it all, then I highly recommend this as an alternative Easter gift. It’s handmade with quality chocolate and a healthy dose of love, and it’s really rather tasty too.
Last week, Dom and I were invited down to Central London for a sneak preview of Hotel Chocolat’s Easter range. You may have seen some photos, in which case you will already know that Hotel Chocolat have an Easter mascot in the shape of Beau Bunny, who added a slightly surreal element to the evening’s proceedings (especially if you’ve ever watched James Stewart in ‘Harvey’).
This ‘quintessentially English, slightly eccentric’ character can be found across most of the Easter range, on packaging and even on the eggs themselves (of which more later, as we say) and his adventures across Europe will be available to watch on YouTube.
This box is home to a selection of Hotel Chocolat’s Egglets, which are available in a variety of packages (of which more later!) with this being the flagship Egglet box. Egglets? Yes, Egglets, because this Easter Hotel Chocolat is very much about the Egglets – slightly elongated, thick shelled chocolate eggs containing a variety of flavours.
There are eighteen egglets – two each of nine flavours – and a slightly random lemon truffle placed squarely in the centre of the box. The emphasis here is pretty much on milk chocolate. Indeed, I was mildly disappointed to discover only two dark chocolate Egglets in the box but that’s just me.
So what do we have? A brace of white chocolate Egglets with either Vanilla Truffle or Classic Praline, five milk chocolate Egglets which include a Salted Caramel, Pink Champagne and Honey & almond, and the two dark chocolate Egglets – Irish Coffee and Chilli Praline respectively.
If you know Hotel Chocolat’s products then you’ll be familiar with the actual chocolate itself. If you’re not THAT familiar with their goods there are plenty of helpful reviews contained within this blog, so there’s no real need to go into too much detail. Suffice to say that as someone who prefers the ‘more cacao, less sugar’ approach, I found the overall style of the box to be a little sweet for my tastes.
The predominance of milk chocolate (and HC’s milk chocolate is on the sweet side) really puts this box squarely in the ‘family chocolates’ bracket – albeit a slightly posh family who don’t mind spending £25 on a box of chocolates!
The fillings are really the crux of the matter here, and I found most of them to be very agreeable. The Salted Caramel was well balanced, the Pecan & Praline delivered rich, deep nutty flavours, the Cherry Bombe was bright and zingy, and the Irish Coffee was a bit of a surprise with it’s boozy coffee punchiness.
I did find the Lemon truffle a bit incongruous, sat there in the centre of the box with it’s spherical shape and lemon sugar dusting. In fact it was probably my favourite of the white chocolates due to a really lovely tart lemon burst which cut through the sweetness of the white chocolate a treat.
There’s nothing dangerous or eccentric here (other than a man with a rabbit head on the box) but there are some good combinations of flavours which would satisfy the majority of chocolate lovers, and it’s definitely a cut above your average Easter chocolates although at £25 a box it would have to be!
