A month ago, if you had asked me what my dream job would be, I would probably have replied with something flippant like Johnny Depp’s personal secretary or a chocolate taste tester. Well, my friends, be careful what you wish for, because sometimes dreams do come true!
Thanks to the magic of Twitter and the British Mummy Blogger community I heard that Green and Blacks were looking for blogging taste testers. Without hesitation I volunteered my services and several weeks later, quite unannounced, a large jiffy bag arrived in the post, bursting at the seams with scrumptious chocolate! Since then I have been on a culinary chocolate journey, using my Green & Blacks bars to nibble, suck, scoff, melt and bake.
My surprise parcel contained 11 bars of chocolate – 8 to eat, and 3 bars of cooking chocolate. First off I ate the ‘flavoured’ bars – Butterscotch, Cherry and Almond. Now I am a firm fan of Milk Chocolate so found both the Butterscotch and the Almond bars quite divine – both creamy and sweet with the perfect amount of burnt toffee flavour crunch in the Butterscotch and whole almonds in the other. Last up I tried the Cherry bar. I normally find dark chocolate too bitter for my taste, but the bittersweet tang of the whole cherry pieces made this bar really enjoyable, and not harsh in the way I normally find dark chocolate – in fact it’s definitely a combination I could get used to!
Onto the plain bars – Milk, Cream Milk, White, Dark 70% and Dark 85%. Now I could have just eaten these – no problem – but I thought I’d be a bit more creative and use some to bake with (although I’m ashamed to say the Cream Milk did disappear in a single sitting!). The Dark 70% was lovingly turned into Valentines Molten Chocolate Pots (see right) by being melted down and mixed with butter, ground almonds, 1 egg, 1 yolk, caster sugar and Baileys liqueur. Once melted the 70% Dark was like pure, black silk and the resulting pudding was incredibly rich but not in a sickly sweet way. Needless to say, my ‘Valentine’ was very impressed!
The Dark 85% was both eaten and baked. I felt I had to try the 85% because I don’t think I have ever eaten chocolate with that high cocoa content before. However the 85% Dark is ‘softened with Madagascen Vanilla’ which you could really taste and did take any bitter edge away from the chocolate. The rest of the bar, along with a bar of G&B cooking chocolate, was melted down and turned into Best Ever Brownies (see left). When I make Brownies I normally use cocoa powder so I needed a recipe that used real chocolate – and boy could I tell the difference! When I got them out of the oven I was too impatient to wait for them to cool down completely so cut them up while they were still warm. The insides of the Brownies were still gooey but they cooled to an absolutely perfect velvety chocolate consistency which was met with lots of appreciative “ooohs” and “aahs” when I took them along to one of our Mum’s The Boss meetings for some of our members to sample. And to make them even better they also contained chunks of the Milk Chocolate and White Chocolate bars for good measure – chocolate cake heaven personified!!
Which just leaves me with 2 bars of cooking chocolate left. One of these is earmarked to make some chocolate cornflake cakes with the girls and the other will be used to make our signature cake at meetings, and the most popular search phrase that leads people to our blog – Chocolate Fridge Cake!
When I excitedly posted on Facebook that I would be taste testing for Green and Blacks one of my friends replied “What’s to review? It’s chocolate. ‘Nuff said!” Turns out though, that there’s more to this chocolate lark than meets the eye - and I’m more than willing to learn!
 |
