Hotel Chocolat quite lovingly sent me this at the back end of this week in return for helping them out with their latest competition, found here. The Love Selection Peepster Box, found here on their website, is a selection of four of Hotel Chocolat’s chocolate slabs, whilst the contents can and will change depending on what you want, as well as their own seasonal specials, the slabs themselves will always be around, and so this is more of a review of the slabs themselves individually, rather than the box as one collective item.

There are four slabs here - Praline Fusion (not sold individually on the site), Crostini Fruit & Nut, Mellow Love, and Deep Love. The four are individually wrapped in plastic wrappers, showing quite plainly what each one is, and as you can see from the picture, each one is a work of art in itself.

The Praline Fusion slab is milk chocolate swirled with white chocolate and a hazelnut praline, the result of which is probably as you can imagine, an extremely tasty product. If I’m honest, I’m not sure what the white chocolate adds to this, as I couldn’t really detect anything from it, I can understand that it may be there to create more flavour, or to help sweeten it slightly or make it slightly creamier, but it may not be a necessary addition. Not to take anything away from this though, the hazelnut praline is absolutely delicious, it’s a tried and tested formula, and Hotel Chocolat have done it perfectly here.

Crostini Fruit & Nut is a busy bar to say the least. Cranberries and sultanas inside milk chocolate which has been studded with almonds and crostini (a type of biscotti). The fruit here is huge, big thick cranberries and sultanas are used which had me a little bit worried, as I’ve never been a big fan of fruit inside chocolate, unless it’s cherries or coconut. Again though, it’s pulled off very well. The fruit here can actually be tasted which is a rarity for fruit and nut bars, and it’s good tasting fruit. The almonds add their own nutty taste to the bar, and the crostini adds more of a crunchy texture than any big hitting taste. I don’t think this was as good as the Praline Fusion, but better than I expected it to be and definitely the best fruit and nut bar I’ve ever had.

The Mellow Love, i.e. milk chocolate love slab, is disturbingly similar to the Dark Love slab, to the extent that they essentially are the same thing, with the Dark Love being, unsurprisingly, nothing more than a dark chocolate version of the Mellow Love. These slabs contain crispy baked pancake pieces and cherries “in a deep relationship” with either milk or dark chocolate, depending on the variety. So note, this is not a cherry flavoured bar, this is a bar with cherries, and there is a big difference here. It sounds strange but I think I would have preffered the bar to be cherry flavoured, as the cherries themselves didn’t offer much in the way of taste. This is especially true in the Dark Love slab, where the dark chocolate has such a rich flavour (72% cocoa solids), that the cherries just can’t compete, it seems odd to turn my nose up at real cherries as opposed to cherry flavour, but I think that would have perhaps been a better approach. The pancake pieces again offer little in the way of taste, but add a pleasant texture. Overall these two slabs were a little on the disappointing side, though they both tasted excellent, I think they have the potential to taste even better with a little change to the recipe.

Overall, a great box. I’m not sure what cherries, pancakes and hazelnuts have to do with love or Valentine’s Day, but as a gift I really can’t see this going amiss with anyone who likes chocolate. And if you’re spending Valentine’s Day alone, then this may also be a nice treat for yourself too.