13 February 2012

Rococo Arabic Spices Organic Dark Chocolate Artisan Bar (Libertys) [By @cinabar]



On a recent trip to London I decided to investigate if there were any interesting bars of chocolate available in the capital, which I couldn’t find in the Midlands. I scoured the shelves in Libertys looking for some bars of dark chocolate and coffee too but had no success, it seems that’s hard to find anywhere! I did however find this interesting sounding bar with an intriguing mix of spices.
Cinnamon is a favourite spice of mine, and discovering that this was one of the base flavours meant that I couldn’t resist picking this bar up to try. The base chocolate is quite dark, but at 65% it has enough sweetness to please the senses while balancing the strong cocoa. The flavour from the Arabic spices is quite potent, but it is also lovely and warming. It started with my favourite cinnamon spicing things up, and the aftertaste turning to nutmeg and having a pleasant hot cross bun feel. The chocolate is silky in the mouth, quite thick for a dark chocolate and leaves a lovely rich warm paste coating the tongue. This chocolate would be perfect, except for one small but unfortunate issue. Occasionally I found there were annoying black specs hidden within the chocolate. I spent some time trying to identify exactly which spice or ingredient they were from but I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure, perhaps the nutmeg? One thing is for certain though these black specs are quite hard, and do ruin the smooth chocolate as they add a grit like texture.
This bar was so close to being perfect, and flavour wise it is was there. Texture wise it needed these black specs filtering out to finish the bar. Despite my love of the taste I wouldn’t buy it again as I found the unnecessary grains far too distracting and unpleasant when you stumble across one. It is such a shame, I love cinnamon so much, but the texture just didn’t work for me, and I couldn’t get past it as an issue.
By Cinabar

1 comment:

clairestelle said...

Have you tried Montezuma's dark chocolate with coffee? It's sold in Waitrose I think - my fave shop for unusual chocolate!