We. Love. Chocolate. We can’t even begin to tell you how much we adore chocolate. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Belgian, Swiss or a British choccie bar, we love them all. Our reputation is starting to worry us, as every birthday and Christmas at least one of our friends or family sends us a chocolate gift in the post. One Christmas we ended up with 12 boxes of Matchmakers. By New Year they had all gone.
Our slight obsession with all things chocolate reached new heights last birthday, when our brother handed us an envelope. Inside the voucher read ‘Go chocolate making on a one day course nationwide.’ Ingenious! We had the choice of a whole load of chocolate making workshop venues across the UK and had a whole day to eat…sorry, make chocolate. True heaven and an experience we wouldn’t hesitate to buy as a gift idea for our girlie friends, or even for a hen do.
For us Brits, one of the most famous names in chocolate has to be Cadbury. Founded by err, Mr Cadbury in 1824, the factory in Bournville, Birmingham churned out the choc. We think it’s sad that Cadbury’s is now part of Kraft Foods and no longer in British hands, but the name still goes strong and there are even Cadbury’s chocolate tasting clubs that will indulge you in choc. We’ve signed up to get chocolate delivered to our door from one of the companies linked to Cadbury – no need to even head to the shops for our choc fix! Perfect.
As well as just eating chocolate, you can bake and make desserts with chocolate in them. These chocolate recipes are fantastic as they are inventive and make a change from the usual cupcake recipe. What’s more, the site encourages you to use Fairtrade products (which we’re all in favour of) from the likes of Divine chocolate. This company is half owned by the Kuapa Kokoo farmers in Ghana and ensures they get a fair price for the cacao beans. A nice little feature of the site is the fact that you can upload your own recipes as well to share with other cocoa fiends!
If you want to get back to basics with chocolate and want to learn how to create your own chocolate (as opposed to recipes using chocolate or just transforming the chocolate into shapes and adding flavours) these raw chocolate recipes are for you. The gooey, brown chocolate we know and love is made from mixing cacao powder with cacao butter and this website takes you through all the steps you need to get creative in the kitchen yourself. You can buy all the ingredients you need in a ‘starter kit’ – another superb gift idea we thought and one kids will love too.
Lastly in the name of balance, we should write a few lines giving you the lowdown on the fact that choc can be bad for your health. It’s not actually the cacao beans themselves that are the problem (although on their own they are way too bitter to eat) it’s the fact that we mix sugar and fats with them to create the tasty stuff we know and love. If you want to read more on the affects of chocolate, we’ve found a website telling you how to eat chocolate in moderation. We’ve read it. It’s painful and we have to confess we’ve done nothing about our addiction yet….
