Eric and I got a chocolate tasting experience as a Christmas gift from Ingrid and Adrian. We’ve had to reschedule it several times, for all kinds of reasons, but today we finally managed to make it happen.

I have to start by saying that Duane at Small Island Chocolates did a truly excellent job. Welcoming, knowledgeable, enthusiastic – he made this a really enjoyable experience. The tickets were sold through a generic “events and experiences” company so I was sort of prepared for a somewhat commercial and impersonal event, but this was the complete opposite. Several of the chocolate varieties we tasted came from Duane’s own chocolate plantation on Tobago, and we were offered pieces of nearly day-fresh batches of chocolate.

The far row had pieces of single-estate “bean-to-bar” chocolates made of cocoa from Tobago Cocoa Estate. A milk chocolate, then the same with added sea salt, then a dark milk, and finally a dark chocolate. To my surprise, I found the 58% dark milk chocolate the most complex and interesting one. I don’t generally like milk chocolate much – it’s too sweet and doesn’t taste enough of chocolate – and I was expecting the “dark milk” to be more “milk” than “dark”. But it truly combined the best of both worlds. (I bought two bars of it after the tasting to take home with me.)

The second row had adventurously flavoured chocolate bars, from white chocolate with cocoa and beetroot, through a chilli chocolate and a liquorice one, ending with a bar of 100% cocoa solids. I didn’t much like any of these, but tasting them with my full attention was interesting to say the least. The white chocolate wasn’t bad but really didn’t have much to do with chocolate. With the chilli chocolate, the chilli added heat but no actual flavour – once the chocolate melted in my mouth, the chilli heat was in the roof of my mouth rather than on the tongue, so it didn’t blend with the chocolate flavour at all, which kind of made it feel pointless. The liquorice chocolate turned out to contain not just liquorice but also salmiak, which gave it a chemical taste. Finally, the 100% chocolate had so much cocoa butter in it that my whole mouth felt like it was coated in butter, which was a distinctly unpleasant sensation. This was the only piece I actually spat out. Worse than liquorice, which is saying something.

The third and final row had truffles and pralines. The dark chocolate truffle was utterly delicious, and the pralines were not far behind. I guess the cream in the truffles and the ganache takes both of them into dark milk land, too – which kind of makes sense and explains why I like them so much.

(The lone piece of milk chocolate at the far left wasn’t left over because I didn’t like it, but because I kept it as my “palate cleanser”. Water is no good at rinsing out a coating of cocoa butter.)