You know what good chocolate tastes like. Bright, deep, sometimes even fruity. The kind that quenches a craving in one. Chocolate that gets straight to the point.
This Christmas, we wanted to create a collection of chocolates that earn their place in your home. For those quiet moments when only chocolate will do, accompanied by a cup or glass of something comforting.
Our 65% dark chocolate has notes of blueberries and sweet, woody cinnamon. We've used it to coat nuts, candied fruit and crunchy honeycomb. You'll also find two bars: salted caramel and another with roasted buckwheat. The bars and bags are perfect as a gift, or for the drawer you don’t tell anyone about.
The chocolate itself comes from XOCO – our friends, collaborators and members of our Craft Community. XOCO grow and ferment the cacao in Nicaragua, then make the chocolate themselves. Rather than buying in cocoa butter like most chocolate makers, they press their own from beans sourced and fermented directly with partner farms.
XOCO are as particular about flavour as we are. They graft their trees from cacao chosen for taste, which makes theirs the world’s first single-variety cacao. Our 65% dark chocolate is made from their Nica Brown variety, discovered on a mother tree in Nicaragua. Its notes of fruit and spice are just right for festive treats.
Our Toasted Buckwheat Chocolate Bar uses 48% milk chocolate from Mayan Red, another single-variety cacao. “Mayan Red has all this complexity to it, with the flavour potential of red fruits, like cherries or plums,” founder Frank Homann told us. “We call this chocolate a little bit punk because it gives some acidity.”
Mayan Red is also the variety in our new white hot chocolate range. We first tried XOCO's white chocolate on a visit with Frank to Nicaragua. We were instantly obsessed. White chocolate is made with cocoa butter, and because XOCO press their own, their white chocolate actually tastes like their cacao.
We had to get in our bakeries, but there was no way XOCO could supply our volume. So we had an idea. Frank had plenty of Mayan Red cocoa butter – if not the white chocolate itself. Working with our central kitchen, we made our own white chocolate: a ganache-like syrup that carries all the flavour of the original cocoa butter, which has become the base of three of our new white chocolate drinks: Salted White Chocolate, White Chocolate Mocha and White Chocolate Matcha. All three are available in our bakeries now. Rich, buttery and silky in texture, they’re perfect for a festive pick-me-up.
We hope you’ll pop by and try them soon, along with our new bags and bars.
