I'm getting into doing chocolate work at home to relax and get creative again. I've finally gotten the hang of tempering the chocolate and I have more polycarbonate moulds due for delivery soon 😁

I've loved dark chocolate ever since my Dad bought me a Cadbury Bournville for the first time about 20 years ago. I work in kitchens and I'm a total foodie. I love trying different things and supporting small brands. My friend came back from a trip with some cocoa beans as a gift for me and I actually managed to make them into chocolate at home..... gritty, bitter chocolate but chocolate nonetheless 😅 Soon after I was on a trip with my bf and got to visit Hazel Mountain Chocolate - Ireland's only bean to bar chocolate maker, or so they said. This was so much fun and it felt like my love for great chocolate had been totally renewed.

Photo: I was in the process of packaging up some of my chocolate truffles for family gifts. Some are filled withe white chocolate and vanilla ganache, and some with dark sea salt ganache. Itravelled abroad to attend a big family party and I felt like I had something special to gift my cousins on a happy occasion. I actually wanted to add more photos but couldn't figure out how

Question for the community: where in the world have you had great chocolate experiences?

Okay, I know this isn't a respectable brand and mostly just makes gimmicky chocolate, but I wanted something fun instead of bean-to-bar and I liked their tomato chocolate and one with brownie bits that was "okay." One that tasted like biscoff cookie butter sounded nice!

This one is disgusting. It's worse than Crunch bar level. The chocolate is advertised as mixed with "cookie butter", it's not. They added "butter flavor" (pretty sure that's not what cookie butter means!) and the chocolate has all of these horrible tiny holes and tastes nothing like chocolate or cookie butter in ANY way. The consistency was not there at all for chocolate, flavored chocolate, etc. There are also these "cookie" bits in it that don't have the taste or consistency of any cookie I would ever suffer through. I ate a single bite and then threw the $12.00 (?!?!?) bar directly into the trash. It tasted cheap and, tbh, I want a tearful apology from whoever runs that place because there's no way anyone tried that bar before it went on shelves.

My advice: stay away from Compartés

Hiiii everyone! I'd love recommendations for instant hot chocolate mixes, the kind you put in hot milk or water (ew) and stir and you're done. It's a lot more convenient than melting straight up chocolate bars, especially for when I'm at work.

To this day, I haven't found a hot chocolate mix I liked. They're always just too sweet or don't taste like chocolate at all, usually a combination of both. Got a supposedly fancy, renowned Italian brand of instant hot chocolate from my relatives last year, and it was atrocious, just straight sugar with no hint of chocolate or cocoa powder in sight.

Is there genuinely just nothing out there that actually tastes like chocolate? Just a hint of sweetness (or none at all, I can always just add a bit of sugar if I find it too bitter) instead of a literal sugar bomb?

I live in Europe, so I'd appreciate it if any of you could provide locally available suggestions, but I'll honestly take anything.

Does this chocolate (specifically the salty dark) taste different to anyone else over the last few months? It tastes old and stale now IMO.

I've been fermenting a pod's worth of beans for around 24 hours now. It's just for a home experiment, so no perfect protocol.

I've kept them in the oven, with the beans in a sieve with a dish underneath to collect liquid, and a water bowl on the same shelf to provide moisture. I started on a low heat aiming for ~30°C.

I opened a bean, and inside it's already brown and wavy-looking, which matches pictures of what some fully fermented beans look like. No purple, although I know it can vary by variety.

The outside of the beans look quite dry, with little pulp left which has hardened around some in white patches that I first thought were mould. They smell bready.

Not sure whether it's best to continue for 2+ more days as I had planned, or change anything about the set up. Any advice?

Surprised I didn’t find more posts on similar brands (other than one post for the US) but this brand has been going viral especially for cheat meals

https://www.instagram.com/hvywght_chocolate?xtok=MTVnbzI3MmsyMnRhOA==

I’ve been wanting to grab a bar or two but they sell out each drop in less than a minute and with shipping comes out to a crazy 40 bucks a bar anyway

Are there any similar brands in the US ala overly stuffed giant chocolate bars? Google searches come up with a bunch of brands but without any consistent reviews online