Tag: Handmade chocolate

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

Wickedly Welsh Chocolate – Three French Hens and Bryn’s Christmas Bauble

Christmas, Family Life, Food & Drink, Gifts for teachers, Home & Garden

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

Handmade chocolate belongs on the table at Christmas, and Welsh chocolate made by the Wickedly Welsh Chocolate company adds some drama to the table on Christmas Day, or even in a stocking.

We were sent two more items from the Wickedly Welsh Christmas Chocolate range; Bryn’s Christmas Bauble and Three French Hens.  

How can a Christmas bauble be chocolate you may ask? Well I asked the same question when I received the chocolates, but upon opening the box, it was clear what it meant.  The bauble is a clear plastic casing with a baby dragon inside, made entirely of chocolate. The explanation on the back give a mythical backstory of the last ever Dragons Egg being entrusted to Wickedly Welsh Chocolate, hence they have made the bauble!

If you can’t see from the photo then the dragon is made of white chocolate, resting on a thick milk chocolate cushion inside the bauble then decorated with sugar snowflakes.  The bauble can be hung on a Christmas Tree for the festive period, or could be used in a Christmas stocking too. At £8.99 it would also work well as a lovely Secret Santa: 

The Three French Hens are made of milk, white and dark chocolate and arrived as a set of all three in a box.  I have seen chocolate sculptures like this before which are used to adorn the Christmas table, or as a substitute for dessert. Personally, I like to have some chocolate after dinner so these are a great addition to the Christmas Lunch which you might not have thought about.

Each hen is the same shape, made of hollow chocolate and like the bauble, handmade too.  The chocolate is quite thick in places but as they’re individually wrapped, you could also break this up and use it as a gift for family members or even in a stocking.  The chocolate is gorgeous though, and each hen isn’t so massive that you could eat a whole one in one sitting if you really wanted to!

Both the hens and the bauble would make excellent gifts for place settings on Christmas Day too!  Any lover of chocolate can’t deny that these look and taste gorgeous and have the added bonus of being handmade in the UK.

Three French Hens available for £14.99

Wickedly Welsh Chocolate Advent Calendar

Christmas, Food & Drink, Gifts for Her, Gifts for Him

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

Did you know they made not just chocolate, but EXTRODINARY chocolate in Wales? The Pembrokeshire based chocolatiers have sent us this advent calendar and other Christmas goodies to try out this year as part of their delicious seasonal range. And no, they did not last long in my house!

The Wickedly Welsh Advent Calendar is aimed at both children and adults so would work brilliantly for teens who have grown out of their cartoon calendars. The box is about A4 in size so it posts easily too, with just the right thickness for a letterbox.  I also like that this is a proper Advent Calendar going from December 1 to 24 instead of the new concept of ’12 days’ of Christmas. Another good reason children will like it!

As for the chocolates… even as a grown-up I felt guilty opening the windows so far before Christmas, but in the interest of research I had to. I did open them in numerical order though, starting at 1 and getting to the 5th window for my first tasting.  The first striking difference with this calendar is that the chocolates are definitely not High Street supermarket chocolates or the type you find in the children’s stocking. Each chocolate is handmade with fresh ingredients which you can tell with each bite.  They’re rich chocolate, but with subtle flavours that aren’t overpowering so children would be able to eat many of the flavours too. There’s a list of the flavours on the back, but as you open each window, it tells you what the flavour is behind the door, and as far as I can tell it’s very accurate too!

For the first few windows I found Spiced Milk Praline, Raspberry Cream in Dark Chocolate, Welsh Sea Salt and Dark Chocolate and Chai Tea in Milk Chocolate. You can see what I mean about different flavours! They are by no means synthetically sweet though, with a lovely balance of flavours in each chocolate. I’m glad there’s only one to eat per day though, I could get too used to these!