I was recently contacted by Patrick from Chocolates Para Ti, a Bolivian chocolate manufacturer, asking if I wanted some samples of their bars. Obviously the answer to that was yes, so about a week later a big box arrived on my doorstep straight from their factory, with their entire range of 11 bars inside!

I wasn’t sure what to start with so I decided to go with the order they’re listed on the Chocolates Para Ti website, and that means I go with the Intense Dark Chocolate bar first, considering that dark chocolate isn’t a favourite of mine, this may not necessarily be the best idea.

Now you can read up on Chocolates Para Ti on their website, but to cut a long story short, they’ve just recently opened up their online store and are currently shipping to the United States only. Obviously being based in Bolivia they employ local people and pay them competitive wages as well as having a supplies store on-site that allows their workers to buy essential goods at reduced prices, which is pretty awesome. The website is basic and friendly looking, no frills which is just my sort of thing. They also source nearly all their ingredients from around Bolivia, making this as purely Bolivian as possible, which is a region I’ve not had chocolate from before, so it’s quite exciting.

Like a lot of dark chocolate bars, the wrapper for this is black. There’s a big stamp on it showing that it’s 75% cacao, so while not the most intense bar I’ve ever had, it’s certainly up there. The ingredients are in both English and Spanish which is a nice touch, and the bar itself is 100g. Interestingly the first ingredient listed is not sugar, but instead chocolate liquor, not something I see often in ingredients.

The bar itself comes in a fairly ordinary tablet form. The initial taste is quite sweet and fruity, almost surprisingly non-bitter really. It carries a very strong chocolate taste with just a hint of sweetness. It melts very slowly in the mouth, though I wasn’t able to detect anymore flavours as the piece got smaller and smaller, except for the chocolate flavour getting more intense and bitter towards the end as it melted on my tongue.

I really enjoyed this bar, I won’t deny that I still vastly prefer milk chocolate, but it’s got me quite excited for the rest of the range. I’m not the kind of person to give this bar the justice and attention it deserves, but as a milk chocolate lover, I still found this very pleasant.

Does this remind you of anything? Of course, the comparisons are obvious to my recent Chocri reviews. I was contacted by Nick from Chocomize who offered me a bar, and I’m not one to turn down free chocolate.

The website looks very similar to Chocri’s, same layout and in terms of ingredients, almost identical. You choose your base (dark, milk or white) and then chuck as many ingredients (maximum of 5) onto it as you can, and hope for the best. I went with peanut butter drops, toffee, butterscotch, coconut flakes and gummi bears.

There are a few key differences between Chocomize and Chocri which I will get into now. The first is that Chocomize give you the nutritional information of your bar on the back of it. I thought this was pretty ingenious, my bar has 124 calories per serving, which is 1/5 of the bar. They also tell you the best before date, which is 30/03/2010, so it only lasts a few months before it starts to lose its touch. Another difference is that Chocomize donate some of the proceeds to charity, I had to look on the website to find information about this but here it states that 1% of all profits go to Doctors Without Borders, the Michael J Fox Foundation and Action Against Hunger.

So the bar itself. Well, in terms of box design, it’s identical to Chocri’s, simply a different colour and with a different logo. The bar is housed within a plastic wrapper within the box, and it looks the part. Loads of peanut butter drops, loads of coconut, and gummi bears and toffee thrown in for good measure. The bar is, as expected, sweet as hell. It basically tastes of a mix of peanut butter, toffee and chocolate, which is a downright tasty combo. Putting both gummi bears and coconut on the bar was, on reflection, not a great idea. The gummi bears are chewy and have to be almost pulled off the bar, causing coconut to fly off, and to be honest neither of them added much flavour what with all the peanut butter and toffee. As for the butterscotch, I forgot it was there until I looked at the back of the box and remembered I put it on there. Perhaps it’s too similar to toffee and I couldn’t tell the difference between them, but again it didn’t seem to add a lot.

I’ll put it simply, this was delicious. It’s very chunky, there’s a lot of chocolate here and someone with a real sweet tooth would get some joy out of this. Like Chocri there’s a whole host of ingredients and combos to play around with, but what I chose here was excellent.

Edit: It has since been brought to my attention that Chocri have also donated to charity, notably DIV Kinder, an organization that supports kids on the Ivory Coast (the biggest exporter of chocolate bars), since they were founded, and also give customers the opportunity to donate at checkout themselves, collecting over $30,000 since they started up, so apologies for that mistake!

The final bar in my Chocri series, here we have dark chocolate with honey wheat flakes, anise, multicoloured pepper, walnuts and orange pepper. So while not strictly nuts and spices, I wasn’t sure how to describe this bar, so this works.

When I first got this bar I looked at it and thought “what the hell? Did I put wasabi peanuts on this too?”, but I didn’t. After tasting them though they are indeed wasabi peanuts, so I think Chocri made a mistake there. I don’t really mind, they taste nice, but it skewed the bar a little bit.

Now I’ll be honest, I don’t know what I was going for when I made this bar. The white chocolate and fruit went well, milk chocolate with nuts and spice made sense, but for this one I just looked through all the toppings they had and added whatever sounded interesting. I love aniseed, honey wheat flakes sounded quite nice, and I thought the orange pepper would add an interesting flavour.

The bar is definitely very peppery, you can smell it, you can taste it, it tastes of pepper. When I spice foods up myself I usually use various hot sauces so I’m not used to the taste of pepper, and as it turns out I’m not quite as fond of the flavour of it as I had hoped. The honey wheat flakes are quite interesting though, they look and taste like some kind of breakfast cereal.

The anise is my favourite part of this bar. Throughout the entire thing it’s there, just in the background, and when the bar was finished the taste still lingered in my mouth. There was definitely a hint of orange throughout the bar too, as well as the strong pepper taste, though this is to be expected considering I added two types of pepper.

I’m quite impressed with Chocri overall. The quality of all their chocolate is good, the quality of the ingredients are good, everything here is very good. The only downside is the price, each of these bars would cost you around $10 each, which is a lot for a bar of chocolate, but this isn’t everyday stuff, and you certainly get what you pay for.

After the success of the white chocolate Chocri bar, I go into this one with higher expectations than the previous one, and I decided to experiment a little bit too.

I’ve always been a little disappointed with bars which call themselves spicy, as I’m a man who can handle a bit of spice and I always find them to be more a poke in the shoulder than a kick in the balls. So I thought I would make a bar with lots of nuts and plenty of spice.

What I ended up with is a milk chocolate bar with wasabi peanuts, organic salt pretzels, jalapneos, pecans and coconut shavings. It’s a bit of a wild mix but I was going for a salty, nutty, spicy bar with the coconut to just loosen it a bit, and I think I created something great (I’m modest too).

First of all, it’s spicy. Very spicy. The jalapenos look really good, and the wasabi peanuts are huge! When you get a peanut or two and a jalapeno you will feel it, this bar kicked my ass with the spice. I added pecans because I feel they’re very under-represented when it comes to chocolate bars, and they’re one of my favourite nuts. Sadly they didn’t add as much as I hoped they would, and the same goes for the pretzels. I was hoping they’d give the bar a salty kick, somewhat akin to the Vosges bar I had over two years ago, but it didn’t really happen.

What did impress me though was the coconut shavings. They have a lot of flavour and compliment a bar like this very well. I’d be careful with the spices though, as they are no joke. Throughout the entire bar my mouth was on fire and it got into my nose at one point, which is the effect wasabi usually has. Seriously hot stuff.

The quality of the chocolate is very good though, and so are the ingredients. Chocri have impressed me again. Like the cranberries of the white chocolate bar, I feel the pecans can add something to a different bar, just not this one. Overall though, this was great, spicy as hell and very tasty to boot.

It’s been awhile since I did one of these! A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a lady called Carmen from a company called Chocri, who, according to her, “is a German startup that allows the customization of chocolate bars”. So basically, it’s a build your own chocolate bar, what a great idea!

I’ve had so many bars where I’ve felt little tweaks, removing one thing or adding another would make it just right, and here we have a company who gives you the opportunity to make whatever bar you like. The way it works is that you pick your chocolate base – white, milk or dark – and then you can add up to five toppings. They range from various fruits, nuts, spices, grains, decor and “extras”, which are things like gummi bears, flavoured chocolate drops, toffee, etc.

Each topping has its own price, to lace your bar with strawberries will cost you an additional $1.10, to then add mango cubes to that would be an extra $1.20, and so on. I won’t lie, these bars aren’t cheap, the bar that I chose here would in practice cost you $12.85.

When you pay that kind of money, you expect quality, and these bars look the part. The chocolate is fair trade and organic, though there’s no mention of the ingredients (can you get organic gummi bears?). The packaging is quite nice, like most fair trade companies they use a cardboard box with the chocolate inside a plastic wrapper within the box. The open design also allows you to see exactly what your bar looks like.

So, let’s talk about this bar. The title would have been far too long to mention everything I have here, but this is a white chocolate base with strawberries, banana chips, blueberries, sour cherries and cranberries. My idea was that the white chocolate base would be great for a fruity, summer-esque bar. As you can see the banana chips are huge, dominating large portions of the bar, with everything else thrown in. You certainly get what you pay for here, as they make full use of the space available to give you as many ingredients as possible.

The bar is quite thin, but long. On the underside there are breakable squares, though with so many ingredients it’s hard to actually snap a piece off, so I just snapped it where it felt appropriate.

It tastes great. The banana chips are very crisp, and the sour cherries and blueberries are quiet soft and a little chewy. It perhaps didn’t need all the ingredients I added, as I’m not sure what the cranberries offered, though the strawberries definitely gave it a great taste.

Overall this was everything I hoped for it to be. The white chocolate is nice, fairly ordinary which is all I needed it to be, and the fruit all mixed together tasted great. If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a budding chocolate maker or want to give someone a very personal chocolate gift, then I recommend playing around a little bit.

P.S. Chocri have not yet opened up their online shop so orders cannot be made until January, though I will be sure to update you all when this happens.

300g of chocolate for 99p? Something can’t be right, or at least that’s what I thought when I saw this titan in my local 99p store.

The bar appears to be Spanish, and it seems Suchard are owned by Kraft Foods. Everything on the wrapper is in Spanish except for a little sticker about the UK distribution, which is where I got the bar’s title from. The wrapper is quite sparkly, but it doesn’t quite work too well with the mud brown colour. There’s also a little picture of Father Christmas on the front, so I suppose this is a limited edition. On the back of the wrapper are pictures of 5 more bars in this series – Clasico, Almendras Enteras, Avellanas Enteras, Galleta and Blanco. Shame I could only find this.

Anywho, you’re probably wondering what this bar actually is. Well basically it’s plain chocolate with puffed rice. Inside the wrapper is a little plastic tray which the bar sits in. The back of the bar, like most with nuts or pieces of whatever inside, is absolutely riddled with the puffed rice. The topside is plain with ‘Suchard’ etched into it throughout. The bar is about 2 or 3 centimetres thick at least, so there’s a lot of chocolate here.

Personally, I’ve never really ‘got’ puffed rice. It goes well with chocolate, sure, but it has no taste, and that’s the case with this bar. It’s not bad in anyway, but the chocolate is of an ok quality, and the puffed rice just has nothing to it at all. The chocolate isn’t very dark, it’s definitely more plain, and so I could eat the stuff like milk chocolate only without any sort of creamy taste to it.

Overall, it wasn’t bad, but it’s definitely a very average chocolate bar. It’s perhaps more to do with the puffed rice than the quality of the chocolate, but this really did nothing for me. 300g IS a lot though, and you certainly get your moneys worth at 99p. I can’t complain about the price, but I wouldn’t buy it again.

500g of chocolate. Five. Hundred. Grams of chocolate. That’s what this is, and it is bloody huge. Never before have I seen a bar this big, and boy am I impressed and somewhat daunted by this beast. I’ve had a few of the Hotel Chocolat slabs before but in more manageable portions, let’s see if it can be just as good when it’s five times as big.

The Summer Deckchair slab as it’s known on their website, is called the Fruity Five Stripes slab on the package itself. The name speaks for itself, as the bar has five stripes with different flavours, the two fruity stripes are red berries with a white chocolate base, then we have two milk chocolate stripes and the middle stripe is vanilla custard white chocolate.

The bar looks great, once you get over the size then it is very aesthetically pleasing. The back of the bar reveals that the middle stripe, the vanilla custard, is actually backed by milk chocolate, so essentially there’s only half the flavour there, as the rest are their own distinct flavours right the way through (i.e. no matter which way you face the bar it will look the same).

The fruity sections are the best, berries aren’t used too much in chocolate, and it’s also rare I get to have chocolate this good, so it’s a lovely combination. Anyone familiar with Hotel Chocolat will know that I don’t need to go in to too much detail about their chocolate, it’s as amazing as always, a very flavoursome milk chocolate, creamy and full of cocoa and without the sugar hit that cheap chocolate bars go for. The white chocolate was nice but I failed to detect any custard flavours there. It’s a bit of a shame because it seemed like a really interesting idea, perhaps it’s because it’s backed by milk chocolate? The difference in taste between white and milk was evident, it just lacked the special flavour I was hoping for.

Overall though, delicious. 500g of deliciousness. It sure was a lot of chocolate, but think about how long this could last you, or you could…share it? No, ridiculous thought, I know. Enjoy a month’s worth of chocolate right here.

Last week I received a package from Hotel Chocolat with two samples within from their Summer range. I’m not sure how these are part of a Summer range but I won’t argue, as they look great.

Now the backstory behind this (there’s a story behind every Hotel Chocolat creation) is that these were first made when their downpour of molten chocolate naturally set into “its own unique puddlesque shape.” I didn’t know puddlesque was a word but you learn something new everyday. Now despite this, it seems more believable that they looked at Cadbury’s Giant Buttons and thought “let’s use this basic idea, and make them a million times better”, and it worked.

The bag that these come in looks small, but 140g as I’m sure you’re aware is a lot of chocolate. These are milk chocolate and caramel buttons with a hint of salt. The caramel is infused in the chocolate, so there’s no runnyness or anything like that, just a strong caramel flavour.

What I found was that these were very creamy and caramelly (I can make up my own words too), but I wasn’t able to detect any salt. I suppose it removes a lot of the sweetness that caramel would usually bring, but don’t buy these expecting a sweet and salty experience, because you won’t get that. What you will get though is a little back chock full of delicious caramel buttons. Far better than any type of caramel you’d find in a regular bar, this is the special kind of stuff only a company like Hotel Chocolat could make. Lovely, and well worth it.

Alright, I saved this one until last for a reason, because it’s bloody bacon with chocolate! It’s like they combined the two most delicious things in the world and tried to create a super delicious hybrid, but geez…bacon and chocolate? Can they really go together?

Now I know Vosges in America have done a bar like this for awhile but I’ve not had a chance to try it, so I’ve been really eager to try this as soon as I saw it in the package I was sent from Oxford Ethical. This is 70% dark chocolate filled with nougat and pork crackling (7.27%), let’s analyse this.

The wrapper is a bit more low key than the Mango bar, but still retains some class. Again the ingredients are fairtrade, and the pork crackling is organic, awesome. At this point I should also probably point out that this bar is not suitable for vegetarians.

The bar also contains chocolate liquor, whatever that is, and 23.33% hazelnuts, which is a lot, and that basically forms the nougat within the chocolate shell. The bar is the same plain tablet style from yesterday, and again it’s very soft, with a lovely truffle like interior as well as some very…crackly bits within.

The crackling pieces are large, about the size of raisins. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the bar, and I wasn’t sure what I got either. It’s not very bacony (that’s not a word), as in this won’t taste like a bacon sandwich with a chocolate bar on top, though there’s an idea there…

It’s unlike anything I’ve had before, I savoured the aftertaste which was definitely faintly bacon and a little nutty. The bar tastes very nice, and it has a mix of flavours which I can’t put my finger on, and I assume that’s the bacon and the praline and the chocolate all mixing together and creating something previously unknown to my tastebuds. This is certainly something different, it’s something you should have just to say you did, and now I can officially say I have eaten bacon and chocolate at the same time. I have lived the dream.

Another of the bars I was sent from Oxford Ethical is this Austrian made ‘dark mountain milk chocolate filled with mango and Brazil nuts’. The ingredients are fairtrade certified and from controlled organic cultivation.

The wrapper is very retro looking and quite arty, not like something you’d see in the supermarket but in a specialist shop. The ingredients make for interesting reading, you’d expect to see sugar or chocolate at the top of the list, but no, instead ‘mango & mango mash (32%) tops it. Mango mash? I’m not sure if that sounds great or terrible, but it did make me laugh, I wonder if it’s like the monster mash.

Within the paper wrapper is a nice foil-paper wrapper, and within that is our bar. It looks very plain at first sight, it’s just a tablet style bar. It’s very greasy to the touch, and quite melty, and the taste is unlike anything I’ve ever had before.

The amount of mango in this bar is unreal. 32% is a lot, a heck of a lot of mango. It’s definitely mashed mangos, and they seem to be on a bed of Brazil nut paste. So basically we have bittersweet chocolate, and within is one layer of mango on top of one layer of Brazil Nuts. It’s quite thick, very fruity, and very tasty. I’ve never really had mango before and I’ve certainly never seen a bar use it anything like this before.

Zotter have created something special here, this is how a real fruit and nut bar should work. Screw throwing a few raisins and hazelnuts into a bar, let’s grind up some mangos and Brazil Nuts and stick a massive amount of it in. Good job Zotter, probably the best fruit and nut bar I’ve ever had.