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Chocolate Heaven and Hell of Duras 14th May

I love a good dark peppermint chocolate, however my “D’or chocolat”, that’s the French word for today (chocolate gold) ran out and I can’t find another. So today’s taste of France is chocolate and because it is raining again this blog is all about my Duras chocolate heaven and hell experience today.

1. Hell: the empty wrapper, no chocolate gold

2. Heaven: Muesli for breakfast laden with large bits of ‘noir chocolat’, dark chocolate of 70% cacao
3. Heaven and Hell: Morning tea is hot chocolate from the local café, however today they decided to serve it in a bucket. Initially it tasted nice, but by time I got to the bottom it had gone cold and had a milky skin. Even worse, it comes with a coffee meringue.

4. Hell: my lunch cake today is an Opera slice of French origin. I have seen this made on bake-off shows and knew of the effort that goes into making it. However I didn’t do my research on the ingredients and happily gave it to Roger when I discovered it is coffee soaked sponge and coffee cream. I persevered with scraping the coffee cream off the dark ganache topping

5. Heaven: As the chocolate workshops are only for children and I can’t find a factory tour on offer, I am doing my own tour of the local chocolate shop. Maison Guinguet is a “Chocolaterie Artisanale” that makes chocolate and has a fantastic factory shop which also specialises in prune products. There were so many chocolate, fruit and cat souvenir products in the shop that I was a little undecided what to buy. The whole experience wasn’t helped by the abundance of free samples to try. My favourites were the raspberry filled dark chocolates and the chocolate raisins; Roger’s the chocolate covered ginger and the prunes with and without chocolate. However given the price we followed all the English customers and went for the ‘buy one, get one free’ Easter chocolates. Bargain, we got two dark chocolate frogs with an assortment of little chocolates for €4.60

6. Food Hell for Roger, chocolate in his dinner as tonight’s gourmet delight is Pork with a chilli, chocolate and orange sauce
7. Heaven: dark chocolate frog for supper

Being really fussy about my chocolate I did do some research and found out that France is one of the top 5 or so chocolate makers in the world, depending on whose website you read. Another bit of useful information I found out is that New Zealand won two awards at the 2017 International chocolate awards. Even handier is that the award winning company, Hogarth Craft Chocolates, is in Stoke just down the road from Frances, has eleven retailer shops in Auckland near Diana and three in Hong Kong near Kate, subtle hint.