This little lot was sent to us by Italian company Go*Do who will be launching in the UK in September.

According to the company web site, they take their ethical responsibilities seriously, with the cocoa and cane sugar coming from “selected plants in Ecuador and Peru, totally managed by local people with our both economic and professional support”.

There’s no ingredients printed on the bars, but I did manage to get hold of a separate list which confirms they seem to be made with organic ingredients, without any nasty additives.

There are six small bars in all. First up is a 34% milk chocolate.

The bar has is fairly pale in color with a slight reddish tinge, and looks quite tempting. Like the rest of the bars, it’s divided into 9×3 chunks which are far to small to be useful, but they are rather cute.

This bar is rather sweet and milky (the kind of thing that Galaxy lovers will go for). A pleasant alternative to every day milk chocolates, but my bar was very soft and a touch too sweet for me.

Next up, the 60% Dark Chocolate.

Following exactly the same format as the milk chocolate version, this dark chocolate version has one slight oddity – it tastes of coffee. It’s actually quite nice, but I think it’s been stored little too close to the coffee bar at some point.

Aside from that, it’s a good little bar of chocolate. Perhaps slightly soft, and covered in small flakes of chocolate which detract from its appearance a little, but still enjoyable.

60% Espresso Coffee

The real coffee bar, and this one has a very strong coffee aroma when you open it. I’m fairly sure this is where the coffee flavour in the unflavoured dark bar came from – hopefully the final packaging will prevent this cross ‘contamination’ of flavours.

The bar contains ground coffee beans, which gives it a slightly gritty, dry texture, as well as a bit of a crunch. The flavour is strong, without being overwhelming. It’s certainly not as harsh as Gren & Black’s 70% Espresso bar (which is entirely a good thing).

White Chocolate With Vanilla

When vanilla is used in chocolate, it’s often simply to cover the flavour of poor quality beans, so I’ve never been overly fond of it. This little bar has lots of flecks of black vanilla scattered throughout it though, and that distinctive flavour comes right to the front.

It’s a respectable 30% cocoa solids. Although it’s quite soft it’s not too sweet and the flavours come through well. All that vanilla gives it the flavour of a good ice cream – but one that you can carry around with you. I surprised myself by enjoying this one.

Milk Chocolate With Hazelnut

The same 34% milk chocolate as the first bar, but this time packed with hazelnuts. Tasty and crunchy, but I think there may be more hazelnuts than the chocolate could cope with. Very soft and practically fell apart around the nuts rather than breaking along the chunks.

Dark Chocolate With Sicilian Almond

Apparently the same dark chocolate as the plain version, with added nuts. Interestingly though, this one does not taste of coffee at all, but rather has a pleasantly sweet and fruity flavour. It’s also much firmer that the hazelnut milk chocolate and has far less nuts in it. The almonds themselves are pleasant with a nice crunch, but nothing spectacular.

All in all, an interesting bunch, but attention to detail is lacking – at least as far as these sample bars go. The flavours are simple and well chosen (despite the inexplicable non-coffee-coffee bar), but the milk chocolate is soft, and the dark chocolate bars are covered in small flakes of chocolate that makes them look messy.

I’m sure the final packaging will improve things, and Go*Do seem keen to listen to as much feedback as possible. They certainly have potential, but I’m going to reserve final judgement until I see the final product on sale here in the UK.

One of the peculiar things about working for Chocablog is that I rarely have any idea what any of the other writers are up to until I read their reviews. Dom and I will occasionally consult as to what we have ‘in the pipeline’ but generally it’s a mystery. Sometimes I’ll read a review and think “Oh, I wish I’d had that.” or “I wonder where I can get some of that from?” and Dom’s recent reviews of Zotter’s bars had me thinking those exact thoughts.

As you know Zotter are an Austrian company, so you can imagine my delight when, whilst strolling through Vienna airport I came across a chocolate shop selling a huge range of their bars. I still had to exercise some restraint (what with the hot weather and a good week of travelling left), so I restricted myself to a small handful of bars, and this is the first I’d like to draw your attention to, and I think it might be the most conventional Zotter bar we’ve reviewed on Chocablog.

The bar is as you might expect (especially if you’ve read previous Zotter reviews here. An impressive looking slab enrobed in Zotter’s 50% organic ‘Dark Mountain’ chocolate filled with ‘butter-caramel cream’. Sounds yummy, no?

I believe Dom has already made mention of Zotter’s Organic & Fairtrade credentials, and this bar is no exception. The milk is provided by organic Tyrolean mountain farmers and almost every ingredient is organic, with a good deal of them also being Fairtrade. What surprised me was when I started to break into the bar.

Not what I had expected at all (although I’m not sure what I actually expected). What we have here is a layer of butter caramel sitting atop a softer bottom layer made with nuts, cocoa and more butter.

The bar gives off waves of intense nut-and-cocoa aromas, and the caramel contains small fragments of what taste like butterscotch, making the overall flavour very, very buttery with hints of nuts and cocoa, topped off with a thin layer of dark chocolate. I’d kind of expected more chocolate and less filling, but I have to admit I wasn’t too disappointed. This bar delivers tons of buttery, crunchy, creamy flavours, and while the chocolate purists among you won’t necessarily approve, those who enjoy a sweet nibble with lots of buttery, rich caramel will adore it.

This is the last of the three Chocolate Tree bars I picked up on my recent trip to Edinburgh. It has crushed black peppercorns and dried strawberries, which struck me as an interesting and unusual combination.

I’d had chocolate with fancy peppercorns in before, but not one with crushed pepper, as far as I can recall.

Like the other bars I tried from the same company, the chilli one and the seed one, this bar has quite a generous helping of both pepper and dried strawberries.

The dark chocolate is rich but neither bitter nor brittle and the pepper is highly noticeable, giving the bar a distinctive kick. You can tell these guys take their chocolate very seriously and I think the combination of the richness of the chocolate and the spice is certainly not your average after dinner treat.

The strawberries I’m less wild about. To be honest, I am not actually a big fan of dried strawberries in the first place, so maybe choosing a bar full of them was a recipe for disaster. I find them a bit lifeless in flavour and rubbery in texture and these were no different. They were also sort of floating oddly inside the chocolate and made breaking it into pieces quite difficult. I’ve noticed before that the bars don’t always break evenly into squares as marked and the addition of large chunks of fruit certainly didn’t help.

The strawberries did provide a bit of extra sweetness to the bar which was an interesting contrast to both the dark chocolate and the pepper. In a way, it’s almost as if the bar would have been seen as too “serious” with just dark chocolate and pepper and the pink strawberries showing its more fun side so it’s less of a chin-scratching “oh, this is interesting” eating experience. I sort of wish those bursts of sweetness and fun belonged to more exciting fruit like cherries or cranberries though I am not sure those would go well with pepper (and can cranberries be seen as a fun fruit?).

Askinosie is an American bean-to-bar chocolate maker, based in Springfield, Missouri. Shockingly, in over four years of writing about chocolate practically every day, this is the first time we’ve reviewed one of their bars. That just goes to show how much amazing chocolate there is to talk about these days!

Askinosie pride themselves in their Fair Trade ethics, and it’s clear from word go that this is a bit different to your average chocolate. The packaging is made out of a distressed wax paper, held together with strings made from the sacks that originally held the cocoa beans. I just can’t decide if I like it or not.

Askinosie bars certainly look different from anything else on the market, but they don’t have the feel of a luxury food item. The packaging is more about the message than the experience of consuming the chocolate, and it just doesn’t quite sit right.

San Jose Del Tambo is the plantation in Ecuador where the beans for this bar are grown. Entering the ‘Choc-o-lot” number printed on the front of the bar into the Askinosie web site allows you to track the production of your bar from the time the beans arrived in the factory, to when the bar was packaged.

It also informs me that of the 70% cocoa solids in this bar, 2% is added cocoa butter from the same batch of beans. This is useful to know, because when cocoa butter is added in, chocolate makers rarely say how much or where it comes from.

The texture of the chocolate is interesting. It’s not completely smooth and has a slight graininess to it, but in this case, it seems to help coat the inside of your mouth as it melts, releasing a burst of intense flavour.

It’s quite bitter at first, with an short, sharp, citrus burst at the end. Not as overtly fruity as a Madagascan chocolate, but interesting nonetheless. Although my first reaction was “I don’t like this much”, I soon found myself having another piece… then another, until most of the bar was gone.

And yet I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it. I did enjoy the flavours, but I can’t get away from the feeling that it’s just trying a little bit too hard, especially when compared to the elegant simplicity of other American bean-to-bar makers like Amano or Mast Brothers.

Thanks to Judith Lewis for supplying this bar.

One of the nice things about World Market is that, besides the occasional snow-cone or cookie samples, there are always coffee and/or tea in the back of the store. Perfect to pick up while browsing the chocolate shelves, not to mention effective in selling products. This Chocolate Jasmine tea was one of their samples for a while; having very much enjoyed it, I picked up a tin to bring home.

Zhena’s Gypsy Tea – you have to love that name, and the tin? Its background of world maps completes the gypsy feel, and its much preferable to the regular cardboard box as it’ll keep the tea fresher longer. The label-rundown includes Fair Trade Certified, USDA Organic, Kosher, and gluten and allergen free (the round sachets are also termed “eco-friendly”). Good start. This particular tea blossoms from a partnership with World Market. Though it’s labeled as green tea, there is also some black tea in it, along with “dark roasted cacao and jasmine blossoms.” The result is refreshing.

From when you pop open the tin, which is a charming nest for the tea’s aromas, and get hit by the chocolate’s presence, to the first brewed up, everything works in calm symbiosis. Especially for having the additional flavors from the green tea itself and the jasmine, the chocolate side holds its own remarkably well. I would have expected it to fade more in their presence. It also has such an enchanting, inherent sweetness to make it just the tea to brighten your day.

Understandably, not everyone may be looking for tea in the middle of summer, but I still recommend giving this a try. You can always have it iced, after all. It’s still nice cold — just slightly less endearing.

Wow. I suspect that there might be some coffee in this here chocolate because I can smell it before I even open the bar and I feel more awake by just looking at it. Impressive. Or maybe that has something to do with the fact that the wrapper states that it has been infused with massive amounts of Sugah’s Fog Burner coffee, ensuring nobody gets caffeinated by accident.

Good thing too because this really isn’t a very subtle at all – it slaps you in the face with coffee flavour immediately and there really isn’t much room for the chocolate to join the party. It’s just a mere 54% and could use a little higher percentage to balance out the coffee without too much sweetness. It comes close to getting it right, but it isn’t quite there.

What is really great about the bar is the texture – it isn’t really, really smooth by any means, so it won’t be a favourite of those who like their chocolate conched within an inch of its life. Some of the graininess comes from the bits of coffee which are also sprinkled on the back of the bar, but for some reason it just works.

Ultimately though, this is all about the coffee and if you like it strong then you will like big bold bar.

Freia is a long established Norwegian chocolate manufacturer, with a shop in Oslo since the late nineteenth century. Rebranded in Sweden and elsewhere as Marabou (due to existing copyright problems), Freia was bought out by Kraft some years ago. The shop still sells handmade chocolates under the Freia name but the bars and pre-packaged chocolates are all branded Kraft as well.

Sad to say that this ‘premium’ filled dark chocolate bar doesn’t carry information about cocoa content, and the passion fruit element is actually a mixture of passion fruit juice and banana puree mixed with sugar and crystallised. Thankfully the fruit flavour is nowhere near as aggressive as a certain German passion fruit bar I reviewed a long time ago, but everything about this bar is sweet. The filling is sweetened, and the fruity ‘bits’ add more sugar to the taste. The chocolate is slightly greasy, with very little in the way of depth of flavour. The finish is mainly fruit and not much cocoa although I could detect elements of dark, slightly bitter chocolate sitting between the sweetness of the filling and the extra sweetness of the fruity pieces.

I’ll be frank. This bar did nothing for me at all. None of the elements were in any way exceptional and it offered virtually nothing in terms of good flavour. The fruit was dulled by virtue of the way it was presented and the chocolate (with lovely extra vegetable fat) left me wishing I hadn’t popped a piece in my mouth. I just wanted a clean palate, and to forget this one altogether.

This bar is at best dull and at worst an appalling attempt at quality confectionery – the sort of thing British consumers might have considered sophisticated in 1972. I didn’t even keep the remainder to offer to friends and colleagues. It’s in a hotel bin in Portugal.

We’re always being sent chocolate to review here at Chocablog, so when the good folks at Prezzybox.com asked if they could send us something, we didn’t think twice about it. We weren’t expecting kitchen gadgets!

This “Chocolatiere” costs £19.95 and does just one thing; it melts chocolate without the hassle. No saucepans of boiling water on the stove top, just a simple pot nestled inside a heated base. Plug it in and go.

The pan is a little on the small side, holding a maximum of 250g of chocolate. I would have preferred something bigger, but I do like the fact that the whole thing can be put away after use and takes up very little cupboard space.

The base has two temperature settings, cleverly named “1″ and “2″, which the instruction leaflet tells me roughly correspond to around 43C and 60C. It recommends melting the chocolate on setting 2, then keeping it melted in the pot on setting 1, but in reality, you’re probably going to burn the chocolate if you do that (something I tried and succeeded at), so I recommend keeping it on the low setting and adding a small amount of patience into the mix.

The instruction leaflet does have a few recipes that involve putting other ingredients into the pan which makes the 60C setting useful, but I would have preferred a lower range myself.

The melting pot comes with a variety of (somewhat flimsy) tools including forks for dipping fruit and truffles, a plastic spatula, plastic skewers and some very thin polycarbonate moulds. Despite the sharp spiky things and base that gets quite hot, this is clearly aimed at kids – or at least for kids to use with adult supervision.

Despite coming with chocolate moulds, one thing that is completely omitted from the instructions is any information about tempering. If you want to make chocolates with a shiny finish and a nice ‘snap’ to them, then the chocolate needs to be tempered. The process involves cooling the melted chocolate to around 27C (depending on the kind of chocolate), then reheating to around 31C.

The single temperature control on the melting pot doesn’t make that easy, particularly if you don’t have a thermometer, but by taking the pan out, stirring, and briefly adding it back, I was able to achieve fairly decent results. Probably more by luck than judgement though.

Despite its shortcomings, I find myself loving my little chocolate melting pot.

Although it’s not big enough and the temperature controls aren’t accurate enough for serious use, if you just need to melt a small amount of chocolate for a recipe or make chocolates with the kids it’s perfect. Personally, I think I’ll just be taking this to barbecues and setting it up next to a supply of good quality chocolate and a bowl of fruit for dipping. It’s significantly simpler than setting up the chocolate fountain that requires four tons of chocolate and added vegetable oil to get going.

Yes, it looks a bit cheap. It’s more of a toy than a serious tool, but considering it’s under £20, I think it’s great value, and something that I know will see regular use.

Gianduja, for the uninitiated, is a mixture of chocolate and hazelnut paste. It’s sometimes sold in blocks (great for creating delicious desserts), used as a filling for individual chocolates, or as in this case, simply cut into small squares and served in its pure, unadulterated form.

These individual gianduja squares are made from Piedmont hazelnuts and Hotel Chocolat’s 50% Island Growers “Dash of Milk” chocolate which Simon has already reviewed and loved.

As you can see, they’re very simple looking affairs. As with the rest of The Purist range, the emphasis on the quality of ingredients, rather than weird and wonderful presentation.

Cut through one of the squares with a knife and you’ll see that this is simply a solid block of gianduja. It’s soft and smooth all the way through.

And it tastes wonderful. I’m not the world’s greatest fan of hazelnut, but this I really enjoyed. The texture is incredibly soft and smooth (particularly on a warm July day), and the flavours are perfect. The initial creamy, nutty flavour soon gives way to a more intense chocolate hit.

Even though these little blocks are 45% hazelnut paste, all the chocolate flavours still come through strongly. If anything, the texture of the gianduja enhances the flavour of the chocolate, as it melts much more quickly and evenly in the mouth. This stuff is Nutella for grown-ups. Highly recommended.