Chocolarder 100% Pure Dark Amazon Rainforest Chocolate (@NLi10) @chocolarder @IllustratedLiv

 Chocolate is still weird and versatile.  While last time we saw it made into a family friendly treat, today we see it weaponised and perfected.

I love little arty shops, and I have a habit of picking up prints.  It's getting impossible to display them all now (and tiring to carry everything back) so I tend to just get cards and gifts from these shops instead.  Some shops don't truly understand this tipping-by-gifts, but others get it spot on.

Here is a good example - Illustrated Living in St. Ives - a shop full of lovely curated things to carefully take home for my cats to destroy. This is not a great idea.  Instead - how about we pick up some of the chocolate off the counter, for me to destroy.

The presence of these Chocolarder bars in the shop itself has a lovely story - the owner ended up eating most of the short date chocolate due to lockdown, and realising that the quality of it didn't quite match the ideals of the shop.  He set out to find a superior version (in fact a local maker convinced them to try his) and so I ended up with one to take home.  They had a few varieties, but I knew which one I was trying.

At £6 for a 70g bar (compared to the £3.50 100g box of chocolate pasties) it's possibly a hard sell to a regular person, but for Foodstuff Finds we make sacrifices, and like I said - I'm basically tipping the shop for letting me covet all the nice things.  Here's the link if you do want to browse from home. 

It's certainly a deluxe affair - the packaging is impeccable - like an origami cocoon that ensures the Instagram pic at the start of the review is a perfect bar. It's all folds and art and story and makes you feel very good about being the person that got to take this home.  Very giftable too.

And it's ethical, being plastic & slavery free - and vegans can eat it!  Well - some of them might be brave enough to try - and some might even like it!

Why do I say that? Well - this is 100% dark chocolate. That means it only has one ingredient - cocoa beans.  We tried the 99% Lindt chocolate some years back (as a taste test on the office!) and it was our first true taste of the Death By Chocolate that is the (near) 100% bar. Even Cinabar found a 100% dark bar she likes!

So - what about this.  As in the picture it's not cubes - they know that this isn't for snacking.  Unlike the Lindt 99% (which I'm sure still lurks somewhere in the cooking draw) this has an inviting smell and begs to be sampled.

And it's quite edible.  My first response was that it's actually quite nice - and it certainly moves through all the different flavour notes you'd expect from a roasted super-dark.  It's more like an espresso in that a small bite will sustain you for a long time - and it's probably similar in terms of the pick-me-up effect.  It really is more of an experience than a snack, and it's my favourite 100% bar that I've tried so far.

There isn't much more I can say about this in regular terms - if you like insanely strong flavours, and salivate at the thought of trying the ultimate in luxury dark roasts then this is totally for you. If not - but you want a contrast flavour for baking or to grate into ordinary hot chocolate to make it suddenly special then you could probably justify it. I'm going to keep it at hand in my work from home kit (along with my Poldhu beach bobble hat) as a lovely reminder that not all art is visual and sometimes your taste-buds disserve a little sophistication too.

That said - it is complemented perfectly with the little orange buttons we talked about in the last chocolate review (as a chaser) so maybe I do need to go back and try some more of the flavours...