Inspiration for this chocolate

This year we are adding two new chocolates to our filled chocolates collection. If you haven’t noticed already, each filled chocolate in our collection is named after a city in the world. Many of our chocolates are based on flavours inspired by our travels around the world. The first new flavour this year, curry and raisin, is called Cape Town.

The inspiration of this chocolate comes from a South African dish called Bobotie. It is actually a beef or lamb dish with various spices and curry powder mixed with raisins/sultanas and apricot, and then topped with a “custard-like” topping. The dish is not that spicy but for us, it was love at first bite! We just love the complex flavours of the dish – the sweetness of the soft fruit and milk/egg mixture, and the richness of the spices and curry powder. 

When we have summer or Christmas parties at home, we usually ask our guests to bring some food along – this makes the parties more interesting, as the guests would usually come up with dishes that we don’t know about. Bobotie is a perfect party dish, as you can make it in a big casserole dish, and it’s something that adults and children can have. We were first introduced to this dish by our friend Jane who’s from Cape Town – hence we decided to name our chocolate after this South African city. She used to make a huge dish of Bobotie, and it’s always a hit with all our party guests – from our memory we never get to see any leftover Bobotie! Even since Jane moved back to South Africa and missed our parties, the other guests kept asking “where’s the bobotie?”

For our chocolate, we have chosen two of the ingredients that make up this dish: raisins and curry powder. The raisins that we use are from the grapes grown in South Africa. The curry powder comes from award-winning artisan spice producer  Spice Kitchen, who have made a special blend of curry powder exclusively for this chocolate. We have tried a range of curry powders on the market, but none of them come close to what Sanjay and his team have come up with for us. We are really pleased with the collaboration with Spice Kitchen this year – we have known them for a while and we knew that one day we would be able to work on something together, so the opportunity came up naturally this year when we started looking into developing Cape Town! 

The chocolate we are using is the milk chocolate made with Bolivian wild cacao. During the development of this chocolate we have tried a variety of dark and milk chocolate couvertures, and once again this Bolivian chocolate turns out to be the best partner with this ganache filling.

The shape of the chocolate mould somehow reminds us of Table Mountain in Cape Town too!

A few days ago, we were invited to participate at the launch event of  Small Business Saturday UK 2016 at PRS for Music in St Pancras in London, and we introduced this new chocolate to the guests at the event. We asked the guests to try the chocolate and guess the flavour – it wasn’t an easy task to identify the flavour, and we had some very interesting “wrong” answers, as well as some “nearly correct” answers. Here’s the moment when Howard from the Small Business Saturday UK team announced the result to the guests:

Many guests came back to have another tasting of the chocolate, and they told us that when they first tried it, they knew it’s a familiar flavour but they just could not pinpoint exactly what the flavour was. But once they found out the answer, they could certainly detect both the raisins and curry. We had some very positive feedback on this chocolate, so thank you to everyone at the event!  Interestingly, the winner of this little competition, Sam, came from Cape Town!