It’s been quite a while since I reviewed (or even ate) any Lindt chocolate, so I thought I would give this one a go.

On reflection, it probably wasn’t the best idea. The name ‘Lindt Excellence Blueberry Intense’ should have been a clue. Blueberries are a lot of things, but one thing I wouldn’t describe them as is “intense”.

A quick glance at the ingredients on the back of the packet confirms my worst fears. Not only is is a paltry 47% cocoa solids, but it’s also packed with other ingredients. Mmmmm, Vegetable Anthocyane E163!

Feeling a little concerned about what I was about to let myself in for, I opened the pack. Rather than the pristine looking Lindt chocolate I had expected, this is what greeted me.

It appears to be covered in ‘dents’, but I can only assume that those marks are some kind of moulding imperfection, as there are no marks on the packaging. It’s quite odd.

Under the surface and on the underside of the bar, lots of bits of ‘fruit’ are visible, along with some fine slithers of almond. It’s not that it looks unappetising, it just looks like it’s been put together in a bit of a hurry.

The chocolate itself is very soft. There’s no ‘snap’ to it, but it bends a little before it breaks. That’s partly because of the fruit, but the poor quality chocolate doesn’t help.

The taste is overwhelmingly one of sugar and artificial fruit. There’s really nothing chocolatey here at all, unfortunately. Bizarrely, the fruit tastes more like apple than it does blueberry too. That long ingredients list have apple (and pineapple) on it, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

The texture of the fruit pieces isn’t particularly pleasant either. They have a jelly like texture on the outside with a slightly crunchy, grainy texture in the middle. I’m not a fan.

I always like to think of Lindt as a ‘stepping stone’ from confectionery chocolate to ‘real chocolate’, but this is so sweet and packed with unnecessary ingredients, I would have to put it firmly in the ‘candy’ category. Unless you really like the taste of sugar and artificial fruit, you should probably avoid it.

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Ingredients (to make 4 Chocolate Mille Feuille)

• 12 square wonton wrappers
• 50g butter, melted
• 3 tbsp icing sugar
• 450ml cream
• 100g drinking chocolate powder
• 250g raspberries

Chocolate Sauce Ingredients

• 100g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
• 150ml cream
• 2 tbs brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

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I’ve been meaning to review this bar for a while. In fact, this is the third bar I’ve had. The previous two bars simply didn’t last long enough for me to write about.

Why? To put it simply, this is the best milk chocolate in the world. Bar none.

Duffy’s Venezuela Ocumare Milk Chocolate won a gold medal in this year’s Academy of Chocolate awards in the milk chocolate bean-to-bar category. It won a silver and a gold medal for the chocolate maker in this year’s International Chocolate Awards. Seventy% described it as “the best milk chocolate that has ever been produced”. I could go on, but really, the chocolate speaks for itself.

At 55% cocoa solids, it has an intensely chocolatey flavour. There are notes of banana and red fruit in there with some nutty notes toward the end, but this isn’t a complicated chocolate, it’s just perfectly balanced and faultlessly executed.

But don’t go thinking this is a chocolate bar just for awards judges and chocolate reviewers. This is a bar that everyone can enjoy. Every day milk chocolate fans will love the creamy, chocolatey flavour as much as anyone.

I’m not going to go into too much depth here, because it really is something you need to try for yourself.

I have a small 30g bar here which comes with this very attractive moulding pattern, but you can buy the larger 80g bars on Duffy’s website for a very reasonable £5.80. You couldn’t buy a half decent bottle of wine for that, let alone the best bottle of wine in the world. So what are you waiting for? Go buy it before I do.

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Do you like chocolate? Do you like beer? Well you’re in luck!

As part of my ‘day job’, I help out with the Sambrook’s Brewery website, and we thought it would be a great idea to bring beer and chocolate together in one fantastic event!

We’re holding a beer and chocolate pairing evening at Sambrook’s Brewery in Battersea on Thursday 30th May, and we’d love you to come! Jennifer Earle of Chocolate Ecstasy Tours and our sister site World Chocolate Guide will guide you through a selection of chocolates from some of London’s finest chocolatiers and beyond. Jo Miller from Sambrook’s will talk about the beers we’ve paired with them.

You’ll get to try five exciting chocolates and five amazing beer samples, and you’ll even get a welcome pint on arrival. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about chocolate and beer, to chat to the experts or just get a look inside a working brewery.

Tickets cost £25 or £20 for Sambrook’s Brewery members, and you can buy them online now. Hope to see you there!

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Opened in August 2012, my local coffee shop DeRosier Chocolate And Coffee is coming up for its first birthday so it seemed a good time to talk to founders Leona and Andrew.

Named after Leona’s maiden-name, DeRosier offers gourmet eats and drinks to the residents of Southfields and Wimbledon Park. The selection is based on artisan coffee, Hot Chocolate (praised by Time Out), home-made cakes and of course, handmade chocolates.

DeRosier is a second career for Leona, whose interest in fine chocolate was inspired by not being able to find anything locally she really liked to give on Mothers day four years ago. The Barry Callebaut Chocolate Academy Course and a long search for premises followed. Initially Leona looked for a small shop but she and Andrew decided to combine chocolate with coffee to reach a wider audience.

All the chocolates are hand made by Leona using couvertures from Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Venezuela. She tends to eschew “wacky flavour combinations such as bacon and egg” in favour of more traditional products such as Gianduja, honeycomb and Champagne truffles. The most popular filling is passionfruit, with customers buying her entire production for dinner parties. Cocoa bean origin is not yet a hot topic in leafy SW18, although customers do ask about their single-origin hot chocolate.

Considering DeRosier’s proximity to Wimbledon a range of tennis-related items makes sense, and Leona has also been commissioned by the All England Club to make over 1000 small boxes of chocolates which will be offered to guests in the Royal Box during the Championships.

So if you are coming to the tennis this year or if you just want to check out Wimbledon Park’s new Beach Volleyball courts, DeRosier is well worth a visit. And with Leona and Andrew already looking at other locations DeRosier is a name to watch.

DeRosier Chocolate And Coffee
81 Revelstoke Road
Southfields
London SW18 5NL
www.derosierchocolates.com

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If you’ve followed any of my own experiments with chocolate making, you’ll know that tempering chocolate is a difficult but necessary step. Without tempering, your chocolate will be soft, crumbly or bloomed. Temper it, and it will be glossy and crisp.

Tempering involves heating, cooling and heating the chocolate to very specific temperatures. Professional chocolatiers have expensive tempering machines or marble slabs to spread and cool the chocolate with.

They also have large quantities of chocolate to work with. As you might imagine, if you’re working with very small quantities of chocolate, it’s much more difficult to control the temperature precisely.

On our recent visit to Halen Môn in Anglesey, Green & Black’s Head Of Taste Micah Carr-Hill demonstrated a quick and simple method for tempering chocolate in a microwave. It’s the method Green & Black’s use in their development kitchen when they want to quickly experiment with a small amount of chocolate.

The key to this method is that you use chocolate that is already tempered (such as a bar straight out of the packet), and during the process, the chocolate never actually leaves a tempered state. You heat it in a very controlled way, so the temperature never goes about 30C for milk chocolate, or 32C for dark chocolate

Microwave Tempering Method

To temper chocolate in the microwave, take a couple of bars of unflavoured milk or dark chocolate and break them into small chunks in a plastic bowl. Plastic is best for this method, as it doesn’t retain the heat as much as other materials, so you’ll have better control of the temperature.

Start by giving your chocolate a 30 second blast in the microwave. If you’re using larger quantities of chocolate, you can probably increase that, but when in doubt, keep the time low. Remember, the key to this method is not to get the chocolate too warm.

After 30 seconds, take the chocolate out and stir it thoroughly. Initially, the chocolate will still be in chunks, but stir it anyway to make sure it’s heating evenly.

Give the chocolate a 10 second blast in the microwave, stir and repeat. When you’ve done this 2-3 times, you’ll notice the chocolate starting to melt. Initially, it will look a bit of a mess, but that’s Ok.

When the chocolate reaches this stage, start giving it 5 second bursts instead, stirring after each blast in the microwave.

If you have an accurate thermometer, you can start using it when parts of the chocolate start to flow. You want the chocolate to be able to flow, but to stay below 30/32 centigrade. If you don’t have a thermometer, you can touch a small dab of chocolate to your lower lip – one of the most sensitive parts of your body. The chocolate should feel cooler than your body temperature.

You’ll notice that some of the chocolate melts, but you’re left with some solid chunks, so stirring thoroughly is the key. You don’t want to overheat it, but you do want all the lumps to be melt.

You can probably do a better job than I did of keeping the chocolate off the sides of the bowl. That thin layer of chocolate on the side will heat more quickly!

As the chocolate melts further, you can reduce the microwave blasts to 3 seconds at a time. That may not seem like it would have much of an effect, but after each blast, you’ll notice the chocolate becomes thinner. The smaller the quantity of chocolate you have, the more careful you’ll need to be.

When the chocolate is all melted, but remains cool to the touch, it’s ready to go. It should be smooth, glossy, and pourable without being too thin.

If you do overheat the chocolate slightly, you can stir in a few unmelted chunks of chocolate to cool it slightly and seed the tempering process. On the few occasions I’ve used the microwave tempering method, I’ve had to do this once, and it worked well.

And if it all goes horribly wrong, don’t worry. Even Micah says he occasionally overheats the chocolate. That’s why he has an assistant.

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It’s been a long time since I tasted anything made by Green & Black’s so finding this Crispy Milk chocolate bar in the ‘reduced price’ section of a local supermarket seemed like a prompt for me to reacquaint myself with their chocolate.

In typical Green & Black’s style, the vast majority of the ingredients for this bar are either organic, Fairtrade or both. The ‘crispy’ part of this bar is made up from five different organic grains and the chocolate has a healthy 37% cacao content. As you can see, there’s plenty of crunch in the bar, which works really well with the sweet milk chocolate.

In many ways this bar is a tastier, better made version of similar milk chocolate/crispy bits bars. The higher cacao content obviously makes for a better tasting chocolate, and the cereal does exactly what it’s supposed to. It’s crisp, crunchy and adds both texture and subtle flavour to the mix.

I’m not a big milk chocolate eater but I found myself going back to this bar, which is probably the best recommendation you can make. The organic & Fairtrade content plus Green & Black’s wide availability also make this one of the more accessible bars I have reviewed recently.

If you like your milk chocolate then you really owe it to yourself to go for something with a higher cacao content, and this is a good place to start.

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Until now, the only thing I’ve seen on my side of Canada from Vancouver’s Hagensborg Chocolates has been their Truffle Pig Bars which are shaped like 3 pigs and come in a multitude of flavours. I should probably write about them sometime. That’s why I was surprised to see they had expanded into making single origin bars although I’m always happy when a Canadian company starts making some good chocolate. They make three varieties: a 39% Ecuador Milk Chocolate, a 70% Santa Domingo and the one I picked out – a 64% Madagascar.

The outer box is very jolly. I’m overlooking their terrible Wild B(o)ar joke on the outside because I didn’t notice it for a few days – if you drop the o from boar, it spells bar. Hagensborg are a little pig fixated. It is definitely a little more light-hearted than most single origin bars though.

The bar itself is adorable. Really. I was just expecting a normal bar but as soon as I took it out of the box still wrapped, it felt a little unusual in the shape department. Unwrapped, the strange shape explained itself – the bar looks likes someone took three sneaky bites out of it. In addition, the bar’s surface is decorated with the company’s signature pig and some appropriate chocolate eating sounds. I must admit, it made me smile because almost every bar that I cross paths with is plain and businesslike and while I wouldn’t want every bar to go for my funny bone, I really liked this one.

As for the chocolate. Well, the first mouthful was a bit on the disappointing side because it was sweeter than I was anticipating. That appeared to be more about my adjusting my expectations because subsequent bites were better. Like most Madagascar bars, the predominant notes are fruity and there’s plenty of them to go around but it stops short from being a really bold bar of chocolate which is what I want from my bars, even if they are cute.

It isn’t really meek as such, but it needs a bit more punch which could come from a boost in percentage or a pinch of salt. It does succeed as being a well-balanced bar of easy-to-eat chocolate and is a nice gentle introduction to the world of single origin bars.

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Ingredients (to make the chocolate hedgehog slice)

• 100g butter
• 100g dark chocolate
• 395g condensed milk
• 40g cocoa powder
• 250g plain biscuits (such as digestive or shortbread), roughly chopped

Ingredients (chocolate topping)

• 50g butter
• 200g dark chocolate

Method

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Mitzi Blue is a brand of Zotter, the slightly mad Austrian chocolate maker. The Mitzi Blue range all follow a standard format – discs of chocolate, usually flavoured with spices and petals. They’re often just as wacky as the main Zotter range. Some of them even have nipples.

Thankfully this bar is nipple-free, but it does come with a healthy dose of spices and rose petals.

I’ll say it right out, I’m not convinced by the look of the Mitzi Blue bars. Sure, decorating chocolate with petals is going to make it look exotic, but the prospect of eating flowers with your chocolate isn’t going to appeal to everyone.

The texture can be a little off-putting too. I don’t mind it in general, but sometimes you’ll get a slightly harder pieces of dried rose petal stuck in your teeth, which detracts from the whole idea of an indulgent chocolate experience somewhat.

That aside, I did enjoy the chocolate. It’s a rich, 39% milk chocolate, and like all Zotter chocolate, it’s organic, Fair Trade and bean-to-bar. It’s flavoured with almond, cardamom and orange blossom oil. The almond gets a little lost, with the cardamom winning the battle for flavour domination here – and rightly so. I actually love the flavour of the chocolate, and find myself breaking off chunk after chunk without realising.

But the more I have, the more I find those petals annoy me. They just don’t add anything to this smooth, creamy and gently spicy chocolate.

I know the petals are the Mitzi Blue trademark, but I’d rather have it without.

That said, they’re really just a minor annoyance. Whether or not you like this bar really comes down to how much you like cardamom in chocolate. I’m a bit of a fan, although it’s not something I’d want every day. That’s something that could be said for a lot of the Zotter range though.

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