Wild Gorse Flower by Chocolarder

If you are a visitor to Southwold, Suffolk, especially during the magical month of May, you will be familiar with a striking and prickly yellow shrub that is known as Gorse which bursts like a ray of sunshine from the scrub. 

A bright colour is not its only attractive quality but it also has a heady, thick coconut scent that envelops everything within a few metres. 

Certainly not something I would consider combining with chocolate, but the guys at Chocolarder have been working their magic to produce an aptly named Wild Gorse Flower bar of chocolate. According to the words on the packaging, "Gorse flowers are handpicked from around Cornwall's coast and steeped in cocoa butter for several weeks to impart their heady scent. Added to 40% milk Javan milk chocolate".

Chocolarder is an artisan bean to bar chocolate maker based in Cornwall and I've taken a paragraph directly from their website, "The Chocolarder is one of the only small batch bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the country. We produce fine quality, stone ground chocolate using organic beans imported from single estate, family run plantations in Venezuela, Java, Madagascar, Peru and the Dominican Republic. The select beans used at The Chocolarder are roasted, winnowed and ground over 4 days before being left to mature for 30 days. The chocolate is then hand tempered and made into bars. This obsessive attention to detail yields some of the finest chocolate in production today".

Chocolarder packaging is all recyclable

The chocolate is a single origin milk chocolate made from Trinitario beans from Java with a 40% cocoa content, infused with Wild Gorse flowers. The beans themselves have been through a grind length of 68 hrs. 

As I said on my previous tasting, their packaging is very good and also completely recyclable or sourced from recycled materials. On opening the greaseproof outer there is a very, very strong aroma of coconut, which brings back memories of sunbathing using coconut oil and gently frying in the Mediterranean sun. The coconut flavour is so strong that I almost expected there to be a white centre not unlike a Bounty. The 40% milk chocolate is lost in the strong coconutty flavour but melts easily with a fudge like texture. To be honest the chocolate does not come through until long afterwards.

Ingredients:

Cocoa Beans
Raw Sugar Cane
Whole Milk Powder
Cocoa Butter
Gorse Flowers

My only question is why did you have to use such a good quality chocolate that ends up being masked by such a strong flavour. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed it and so did everybody else who was lucky enough to try a piece.

Reasonably priced at £3.95 per 70g. To buy click here.