Tag: British Chocolate

Wickedly Welsh Chocolate Standard Gift Hamper

Birthday Gifts, Children, chocolate, Christmas, Family Life, Gifts for Her, Gifts for Him, Gifts for teachers, Stocking Fillers, Winter

Disclaimer – We received this item free for the purpose of this review/feature but all words and opinions are our own.

Chocolate lovers are easy to buy for at Christmas but if you’re a real chocoholic, you’ll know that just any old chocolate won’t do.  It has to be good quality and taste like chocolate.  The Wickedly Welsh Gift Hamper (standard) makes a perfect gift for anyone but if you love chocolate, this is a real treat!

The quality of the chocolate is first to note. It’s handmade so there’s a lot of love and care that goes into it but with anything that’s handmade, it means that someone has had to physically deliberate over the goods and make sure that they’re of the highest quality.

The ingredients are often more authentic as well, and Wickedly Welsh products are no exception with locally sauced elements to mix the chocolate and flavours to be the best they can.

The Wickedly Welsh Chocolate Gift Hamper is bursting with different chocolates, all of which are sold separately too. There’s three bars of chocolate (Milk Chocolate, Orange & Honeycomb and Welsh Sea Salt & Caramel), two hot chocolate mixes (each sachet makes 2 mugs of hot chocolate), a box of 6 handmade chocolates of different flavours and a bar of milk and dark chocolate from the Wickedly Welsh Love Spoons range.  The whole gift is presented in a letterbox-sized box with window so you can post this or package it up easily as a gift.

My first call was the chocolates which are so moreish and easy to eat! I like to have a chocolate pick-me-up in the afternoon and one or two of these chocolates is ideal.  I don’t know if different boxes contain different flavours but these 6 were Citrus Burst, Raspberry & Vodka, Spiced Praline, Gingerbread, Dark Praline and Mocca Coffee. A lovely assortment and the chocolate alone is delicious!  Secondly, I tried the hot chocolate.  Heating a mugful of milk and adding the chocolate flakes to melt into the milk, this gave a delicious, smooth hot chocolate and the chocolate hit without too much sugar. 

The bars of chocolate were a treat for watching TV or sometimes I just have a small piece in the afternoon. The Milk Chocolate is a favourite with the whole family but the Orange & Honeycomb and Welsh Sea Salt & Caramel are best sellers at Wickedly Welsh and you can tell why. The Orange & Honeycomb is a flavour that’s not widely available with other retailers so you can tell that adults in particular love this. I know I did! The Welsh Sea Salt & Caramel is also a flavour which I would buy, given the chance to look around a chocolate shop on a rainy afternoon so this is especially good. The final Love Spoon Milk and Dark Chocolate bar is an intertwining bar based on the famous Welsh Love Spoons, so it would make sense to give this to your loved one. However, the chocolate is very indulgent and a perfect snack, so I wouldn’t blame you if you kept it for yourself!

This is a brilliant gift not just for Christmas but for anyone at any time and especially chocolate lovers.  There’s something for everyone and the whole family can enjoy the handmade excellence of Welsh chocolate.

Available online from £26.99:

Original Standard Gift Hamper

Wickedly Welsh Luxurious Chocolates

Birthday Gifts, chocolate, Christmas, Family Life, Gifts for Her, Gifts for Him, Gifts for teachers, Stocking Fillers

Disclaimer – We received this item free for the purpose of this review/feature but all words and opinions are our own.

It’s a little known fact that not only does Wales produce chocolate, but it’s probably the finest chocolate to come out of Britain.  Handmade chocolates are always special, but the Wickedly Welsh Luxurious Chocolates are a feast of deliciousness that will wow this Christmas or keep the decadence of your Christmas lunch going.

The box contains 24 of the crafted chocolates which are flavoured and designed on themes from Wales.  You’ll see the Welsh Dragon, honey bee, daffodils and a Celtic Cross as part of the aesthetics. The box is a mixture of milk, white and dark chocolate with an emphasis on their famous milk chocolate. The flavours though are not what you would usually find and are again based on the Welsh surroundings they come from. Included in the flavours are Spring Blossom Honey (hexagonal with a light dusting on top of a bee picture), Ginger Bread (square with a pretty geometric design on top) and Salted Praline, which uses the locally sourced salt that Wickedly Welsh is famous for.

There are 12 flavours in all and most of them are not what you would find in High Street boxes of chocolates.  The chocolate is incredibly rich whether it’s the milk, white or dark chocolate you choose. My favourites were the Ginger Bread and Spiced Praline because they’re completely different flavours from what you would find elsewhere and the milk chocolate is especially smooth. They’re the right sized box to be able to share with the family or for someone to enjoy on their own, no matter what celebration.

I can’t get enough of the Wickedly Welsh chocolates anyway and the fact that these are so delicious as well as being handmade makes them a great gift and a special treat!

Just a note that the factory handles nuts, milk, eggs and gluten so check with recipients before hand.

Available from £24.99:

A Box of 24 Specially Selected Chocolates

Wickedly Welsh Chocolate Great Taste Trio

Birthday Gifts, Children, chocolate, Family Life, Gifts for children, Gifts for Her, Gifts for Him, Gifts for teachers, Stocking Fillers, Summer

Disclaimer – We received this item free for the purpose of this review/feature but all words and opinions are our own.

As if you need a reason to celebrate chocolate, there is an important day in the calendar – 7 July, which is World Chocolate Day! To mark the occasion, Wickedly Welsh, the British chocolate makers, have sent us the Great Taste Trio of three different flavoured chocolates to try.  We’ve never said no to chocolate in this office and today wasn’t the day we were going to start!

The trio are three flavours; Orange Marmalade, Dark Chocolate & Welsh Sea Salt and Mint Crunch.  Two of the flavours has won the Great Taste awards (Mint Crunch in 2017 and Welsh Sea Salt in 2021) with Orange Marmalade being inspired by an award winning recipe.  Each bar is handmade in Wales, and handmade is not something we associate with chocolate in this country so this is a rare treat. 

The Orange Marmalade flavour is set in dark chocolate with a half and half mixture of tangy and sweet, much like the jar of marmalade you remember growing up. It also has a little Cointreau but you can hardly taste it, it’s just the aftertaste on your tongue that you might notice the slightly orange flavour.  The dark chocolate is smooth and rich and brings out the orange flavour.  With the Dark Chocolate &Welsh Chocolate Sea Salt, the minerals of the sea salt are apparent as soon as the dark chocolate starts melting and you can feel the crystals dissolve. The juxtaposition of the salt and dark chocolate work really well together, reminding me of the sea at night when you can hear and smell it but you can’t see it. If you like dark chocolate, then this flavour is a great addition to your taste buds!

Finally, my favourite is the Wickedly Welsh Mint Crunch. Again, this is dark chocolate, swirled with peppermint and meant as an after-dinner chocolate or to cleanse the palate. It reminds me of an Aero bar but with more peppermint and a richer flavour because the chocolate has a higher cocoa content and less sugar. It’s particularly good when added to cooking. Have you tried making your own croissants at home from the ready-made packets and adding some chocolate before you roll them?  Instant chocolate croissant, and the Mint Crunch chocolate bar adds not just the novel flavour to the chocolate filled pastry, but extra texture too.  I think Mint Crunch is my favourite!

Wickedly Welsh have a whole host of different flavours of chocolate on their website and are adding new products all the time, but the Great Taste Trio is a fabulous place to start.

Available online for £14.97 at: https://www.wickedlywelsh.co.uk/collections/best-selling-products/products/your-great-taste-trio

Montezuma’s Chocolate

Birthday Gifts, Children, Christmas, Family Life, Food & Drink, Gifts for teachers, Stocking Fillers

Disclaimer – We received this item free for the purpose of this review/feature but all words and opinions are our own.

There can never be too much chocolate in this house, and not only have I never tried Montezuma’s chocolate before, I don’t think I’ve ever tried this array of flavours either. Let me explain…

Montezuma’s sent us a box of chocolates containing a bag of Giant Dark Chocolate Buttons (74%) and a box of small bars of Montezuma’s chocolates, known as a Mini Chocolate Library, containing 12 bars of 25 grams each in five flavours; Milk Chocolate Butterscotch, Dark Chocolate Lime & Sea Salt, Milk Chocolate Peppermint, Organic Milk Chocolate and Dark Chocolate.

The bars are individually wrapped and presented in a handy (and very cute) little handbag-shaped box which boasts, “A perfect selection of our favourite chocolate bars, in the perfect size’ which it very much is.  This box appeals to both children and adults, especially as adults are more likely to enjoy the different flavours of chocolates. However, with the peppermint, milk chocolate and dark chocolate bars too, it’s great for the whole family or for after dinner watching TV.  I particularly like dark chocolate, so this was a great one for me, but the Lime & Sea Salt was a really interesting flavour.  It reminded me of when Salted Caramel became popular and you had to get used to the taste of the salt and sweet caramel together, but once you do, the flavour stays with you and you start to enjoy it more.  This is a Montezuma’s flavour which I’ll definitely be looking out for in the shops! 

If you’re looking at Christmas gifts already, then this is a good one to keep for families, or to break up the whole library and use as part of an advent calendar.  I think it would also make a fabulous present for a teacher at the end of the school year too, and it’s easy to wrap up or for you to give to a child to take into class on the last day of term.  

The Montezuma’s Dark Chocolate Giant Button grab bag is 180 grams of organic chocolate, nicely pressed into easy-to-eat buttons for your convenience.  This is great for picnics, sharing or taking somewhere like the theatre or cinema because of their size and ease of eating.  The chocolate, like all Montezuma’s chocolate, is of high quality, using all the best cocoa which is ethically sourced from South America and beyond.  Helen and Simon (founders and makers of Montezuma’s Chocolate from 2000 onwards) pride themselves on building ‘Britain’s Greatest Little Chocolate Company.’  We all know about the very biggest chocolate confectionary companies in the world, but if you’re looking for local, more ethically focused chocolate, Montezuma’s is for you. A lot of their products are organic too, plus there’s a massive range on their website of chocolates suitable for both adults and children, and all sorts of occasions.

I can’t speak highly enough for the quality of the chocolate too. It’s not over sweetened, there’s no gritty texture to it and no horrible bitterness to the dark chocolate that leaves you thirsty.  Just good quality, old fashioned chocolate that leaves you with that cocoa ‘hit’ any chocoholic craves.

In the words of the Montezuma’s team, ‘A balanced diet is chocolate in both hands!’ and I agree!!