Freshly Made, Garden Grown Cocoa Hot Chocolate - Costa Rica [@NLi10]

 This doesn't look like much, but this sweet sticky plant hides a big secret - chocolate!  You can chew on this outer and get the sweetness, but the goodness inside only comes from drying and roasting the beans.

So much like the mighty sloth - patience is required.

You start with the beautiful flowers on the trunk which are pollinated by the tiny mosquitos and grow into the fruit.

This can be done pretty much anywhere in Costa Rica that the insects live - so the middle altitudes are best

And then you take the big grindstones and work the roasted beans until it almost becomes paste-like.  Both of these were dug up on the farm region while building - and are put back into use today (for the tourists mostly)

Mix all that with very hot milk and stir for a bit and you get 100% pure dark fresh hot chocolate - to which even I added a little sugar!

Perfect for a rainy season twilight drink, but quite a lot to go through for that!

Outland Ginger Pale Ale (Morrisons) By @SpectreUK

I do love a fiery ginger beer on the evening to help settle my stomach after dinner. I also drink ginger tea for the same reason. Both are sweet and spicy, flavoursome and good for my digestion. It's rare I have an alcoholic ginger beer, but I usually like them too. It's even rarer if I find ginger in a beer, but I've recently found two on the market. This is the first.

Outland Ginger Pale Ale was produced by Badger Brewery. At 5% in volume, I'm hoping it isn't too strong before my comic con tomorrow, and that it will help wash down my ravioli and herb bread for dinner. It is brewed with WGV, or Whitbread Goldings Variety, which has a distinctive and robust spicy, herbal and floral flavour, but also likely having a Fuggle pedigree. There were further Goldings hops added in the brewing. Outland is a hazy pale ale based on the rugged Old Harry Rocks of Dorset.

On opening the can their was a ginger spiced herbal hoppy aroma, with sweet pale malts behind it. On taste this Outland Ginger Pale Ale was reminiscent of a sweet shandy; with a touch of ginger spice, not too fiery, and floral and herbal hops. The sweet pale malts rounded this beer off rather well indeed. I'd certainly recommend this Ginger Pale Ale, it would go well washing down any spicy dish in my opinion.

Kit Kat Hazelnut Cream Duo (Morrisons) by @Cinabar

Nuts and chocolate are one of my favourite combinations, and Kit Kat does a great job with these flavours. I absolutely adore the Kit Kat Peanut Butter, and this bar is essentially that, only with hazelnut spread. I couldn’t wait to relive this great bar! I say "relive" because, as with many nut or caramel editions of Kit Kat, it has been available before, though not for several years.

This bar is a Duo, meaning there are two smaller bars in the pack, perfect for sharing or saving one for later. Of course, you could just eat both at once, I’m not here to judge!

I opened up the pack and tried the first bar of the Kit Kat Hazelnut Cream Duo. I loved what I found: the classic layers of wafer and chocolate combined with a rich, creamy hazelnut flavour that hit the spot perfectly. It was chocolatey, nutty, and a delight. While I still favour the peanut butter version, this is a gorgeous bar I’ll definitely buy again, who knows how long it will be around?

Pignuinos Triple Chocolate - Biri Biri [@NLi10]

 Costa Rica has a few American style snacks that are reasonably priced so I picked some up that ended up back in the UK with us.  We decided to have these Marisela Pinguinos Triple Chocolate as a pudding one day. 

They are very chocolaty and very penguiny.  I' not sure what Biri Biri means, but it's quite similar to the Maleku for hello!

It contains ingredients!

And as expected looks like two neat little chocolate cakes!  If this were truly American the chocolate would be awful. If it were English they'd claim it was chocolate but actually two of the three chocolates would be some kind of replacement like fondant.

Here it looks good

And inside it tastes good too!

All three chocolates are successful and nice, the penguins beat Kipling 3-0.

If these were available in the UK I'd likely try more.  As it stands I'd probably keep an eye out for these in Spain (or Latin America) to try the rest.

Mince Pies (Birds of Derby) By @SpectreUK

I love mince pie season. The variety of mince pies on the market is astounding. There are deep pan mince pies, sugar coated ones, or icing topped, great big ones to little tiny ones. Mince pies to heat up and have with custard, cream, or with a dollop of vanilla ice cream on the side. There is such a plethora of different types of mince pies, I can't list them allI, because I'm still finding different ones out there in the shops.

Personally I like to wash my mince pies down with a couple of shots of spiced rum with lemonade. It has to be 7UP, although other lemonades are available, they just don't have the correct lemony taste to bring out all the flavours of the rum, or Southern Comfort, or Pink Schnapps, depending on what's in reach.

Cinabar works in Derby sometimes. She loves to visit Birds, which was founded in 1919. She bought back their mince pies for me to try. They are cute and pretty small mince pies. Just on biting in I felt like I was eating a really high class quality mince pie. Sugar coated, the pastry had a very soft and crumbly buttery flavour, which was really gorgeous. Some of the nicest pastry I have tried, the pastry really was heaven, buttery and light.

Although shallow, there was a good amount of filling for the size of the mince pie. The mince filling was really tasty, sweet, with some spices, and plenty of citrus. Birds' mince pies tasted handmade, but really well handmade with love, rather than a mass produced mince pie by some machine. I'd certainly recommend a visit to Birds if you're passing by Derby, or know someone who goes there.