Thorntons Coffee Chocolate Bar
With a dark 53% cocoa Columbian chocolate and Columbian coffee roasted and ground added to the chocolate, I had high hopes. Coffee chocolate to me isn’t as nice as tea infused chocolate and I’ll have a top class jasmine tea infused choc or a earl grey tea ganache any day but coffee chocolate intrigues me. You might remember my description of the Green Blacks unrepentant Espresso coffee chocolate bar – a firm favourite if you are like me and favour a pan galactic gargle blaster of a Friday night.
The limited edition bar was like many of the recent artisan bars from Thorntons – a small square of 80g of chocolate wrapped in foil. The foil has the charming “love me – unwrap me – eat me” motif common to this range across its silvered exterior. The chocolate itself is dark with a strong coffee scent. The chunks are around two centimetres in size and are decorated in the swirling motif the other bars in this range have.
The chocolate is what you would expect from Thorntons but the coffee might not be. The coffee has been crushed into granules small enough to feel like sugar granules but given the dark chocolate has sugar as its first listing some of what I was tasting might have been granules of the brown sugar used in the creation of this chocolate.
The chocolate is sweet and this is done I think to balance out the coffee which in this bar is more subtle than the espresso bar from GB though obviously a cup of coffee is less strong than a cup of espresso. Sweet dark chocolate is not a favourite of mine but I can imagine those who aren’t used to eating dark chocolate would love this one.
I think I might have like the coffee to be slightly larger granules – it might not be to everyone’s taste though. I like the crunch the coffee gives the chocolate but the pieces were so small I didn’t get the pleasure of crunching them. They added a clear but not overpowering coffee flavout to the chocolate and the dark chocolate flavour itself has been toned down by the sugar.
A good effort from Thorntons and one I was not hesitant about sharing with my coffee-loving husband (the harshest critic of coffee chocolate *ever*)
