Easter Pick Me Up (Hotel Chocolat)

When the postie brings you chocolate, you feel like giving him a big hug. Especially if it is the chocolate from a luxury brand like Hotel Chocolat. Easter Pick Me Up from Hotel Chocolat is a chocolate gift perfect for sharing. You get a selection of treats in one packet: White praline bunnies, Salted caramel foiled egglets and Raspberry Zinger egglets. This cheerful selection offers treats for the whole family, from kids-friendly bunnies to salted caramel mini-eggs with a more grown-up flavour.

Salted caramel is one of my favourite flavours to go with chocolate, it is simply a marvellous combination. Foiled egglets were prettily presented in a transparent bag tied with a ribbon. Festive and tempting. And a very manageable size too.
I would love to know the exact calorie count per egg, but could only find a total amount - 250kcal per serving (which is a very generous serving of 3 praline bunnies & 1 foiled egglet, or 2 bunnies and 2 raspberry egglets). I think each egglet is roughly 62.5kcal (not bad at all for a non-fasting day).

Bite into a chocolatey treat, and be surprised by a sweet'n'salty lava of liquid salted caramel. Or let it melt slowly in your mouth, chocolate and caramel going all gooey (OK, I swallow as I write, they were so good). A lovely treat!

I'm not the biggest fan of the white chocolate, but all my men love it. In fact that's the only photo of the White praline bunnies that I had a chance to take, as they all disappeared very fast. When I asked my guys what they thought, they said "Really good" and "Delicious, Mummy!", so I have to trust their words and my eyes. Not a crumb was left for me to try. They looked very cute, with a thick layer of white chocolate over the praline.

Then there is a small set of four Raspberry Zinger Egglets. I was happy to discover that they have a raspberry and lime flavoured ganache inside the chocolate shell, which is again made of white chocolate with vanilla seeds and natural colouring (beetroot). These pink egglets (as well as the salted caramel ones) would look gorgeous on an Easter cake. Or make the grown-up version of egg nest cakes and add an egglet as a sophisticated decoration.

It goes without saying that Hotel Chocolat has a wide selection of Easter eggs and treats for all ages and tastes. The choice is incredibly varied, but there are a couple of Easter gifts that made me smile: Egg and chips (a humorous take on the British classic) the & You Crack Me Up Extra Thick Egg (with adorable smiley pralines and chicks).

I plan to send my husband to Oxford (our nearest Hotel Chocolat shop) and buy these gifts for our boys for Easter.



Disclosure: I received an Easter Pick Me Up from Hotel Chocolat for the purposes of reviewing. All opinions are mine.

Your Eggsellency from Hotel Chocolat is not so eggciting (review)

Prior to Easter there were zillions of blog reviews of chocolate eggs. It was bordering on chocolate frenzy: from sublime to ridiculous. Hotel Chocolat was one of the brands that sent lots of chocolate eggs for bloggers to review.
Some of the blog reviews were genuinely amusing, well-written and honest, some were as cringeworthy as Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar speech. I felt like screaming: It is only chocolate you're talking about, not Mona Lisa.
One dayI hope there will be a blog post, analysing the mysterious ways in which context contributes to the meaning of blog posts.

This is my post-Easter speculation on this year's Extra Thick Egg aka Your Eggsellency from Hotel Chocolat, which comes with the slogan: An extremely distinguished egg (with one 40% milk and one 70% dark shell filled with 12 finest real cream truffles with Champagne, white port, Amaretto and more). The description sounds very tempting and bordering on decadent.

I haven't bought this box, our guests who celebrated Easter with us, brought it as a gift. We opened the pretty box after dinner and shared the truffles. My first impressions were that the chocolates looked very attractive. The shells were smooth, thick and glossy.
The truffles themselves were very alcoholic. Probably wonderful if you love your chocolate very boozy, but I prefer a more subtle use of alcohol in the chocolate truffles. One of the truffles, I think it was mojito-based, almost took my breath away, it was so strong.
As there were several adults, it wasn't difficult to finish 13 truffles.
The chocolate shells were a different story.
Three weeks later, and we still haven't managed to finish them. The chocolate shells, admittedly thick, taste of nothing in particular, are very plain and boring, too sweet and far from being the best chocolate I have ever tasted.

And the best bit about the kit was the round box, which so delighted my younger child. He kept putting it on as a hat, Lady Gaga-style.

And if that was the best bit, I'll let you speculate about the eggsellency of the chocolate.

I have tried a good amount of Hotel Chocolat products, and I am yet to find one that would impress me.

I am also quite unimpressed with their delivery policy. Once I ordered a big box of chocolate as a Thank you gift to the pre-school teacher counsellor who helped us a lot when our older son was young. I never heard from her, and wasn't sure whether she ever got the box or not. When I asked the Hotel Chocolat customer service if they could confirm that the box was delivered, they told me they could not disclose this information. I haven't ordered anything as gifts since. For all I know it was never delivered to the right recipient.

Returning back to our Eggsellency: not so eggciting.