We often, as you can imagine, have many hot chocs in our house: dark, darker, darkest, filthy dark, milk, plant milk, nutty, orange, mint, etc. It’s like when people were faced with all the flavour choices in my dad’s ice-cream shop: they’d just end up going for vanilla, because the vast array, conversely, can end up narrowing your choice.
And so it was this week that I decided to go for a medium cocoa range – 58% single origin from São Tomé – straight-up hot chocolate from Kokoa, £23.95/ 1 kg. I first laughed at the kilo bags (200g also available, £7.50), but it’s surprising how quickly you can get through it and you can also use it for melting in baking – takes seconds in a bowl above steam. Anyway, this was so good. I lured lots of friends round with the promise of hot chocolate and homemade biscuits, as the weather was turning and every single person said, ‘This is really good!’ And it is. It’s perfect for when you want a standout hot chocolate that offers complex flavours from the cocoa, but with no fancy stuff.
I also loved Continuum Conceits ‘pot luck’ chocolates, £2.10. You can select if you prefer dark, milk or white, otherwise the choices are random and each large piece contains a beautiful hand-drawn print and a letter so you can identify what you ate via the website. The chocolate, and inclusions, were wonderful and I was glad to find milk with caramel in there (code I), but my favourite was A, fruit and nut. If you don’t like someone else making choices for you, avoid this – but CC does make beautiful presents.
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