Nicky Grant – Fine Chocolates from Cornwall

There is a wealth of amazing chocolatiers and chocolates in and around London, but in my far flung part of the country they are few and far between. I was, therefore, particularly excited to discover handmade Cornish chocolates by Nicky Grant at the Cornwall Food & Drink Festival a couple of years ago. Like all of the best filled chocolates, these use fresh ingredients with no added preservatives, colours etc etc. The downside of this is of course, they don’t last very long – but to be honest I defy anyone to make them last as long as the specified two weeks anyway!

The quality of ingredients are key to really good chocolates and Nicky uses single origin and plantation chocolate. She also uses local produce, such as cream butter and honey, wherever possible; this makes them doubly appealing to me. Last year Nicky won Gold at the Academy of Chocolate Awards for her fennel and ginger truffle.

Ginger hit me straight away with this one. Lovely smooth and creamy ginger ganache with toffee notes. Covered in rich dark chocolate, this was rich, spicy warming and delicious. I wondered if it contained a touch of chilli, as it left a lovely warm feeling in my mouth and back of my throat long after I’d finished. I could have quite happily consumed a box full of these. I am now wondering if this may in fact be the award winning fennel & ginger and I just missed the fennel?

As I was hoping this was a fruit puree with a rich deep pink colour. I thought at first it was raspberry, probably because of the colour. I then started doubting myself and thought it tasted more like blackberry. Either way it was delicious and I would have been happy to have had several more.

This domed milk chocolate shell with white and dark marbled across contained what tasted like cardamom & hazelnut praline. The flavour of cardamom was delicate but very much present and combined well with the sweet milk chocolate. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record here, but this too was really delicious.

Covered in dark chocolate and coated with cocoa, this was a dark chocolate ganache through and through. It was good; it had bitter notes and wasn’t too sweet, but somehow it just wasn’t quite as rich as I would have expected. I wouldn’t, however, say no to a box of these either.

This shiny chocolate dome looked to have a piece of crystallised ginger on top. Could this be another ginger I wondered? It was. Less rich and sweeter than the first it was still very gingery. It did not have the distinctive warmth of the first, which sort of confirms my suspicion of chilli. I liked the fact there were two different type of ginger chocolates in the box, for I am a fan – one for the more sweet toothed and one for the, err, more discerning palate!

A dark chocolate shell dusted in cocoa and containing this Cornish seasalt caramel. It was utter bliss. Beautiful smooth caramel which flooded my mouth with salty sweetness. This is another gold award winner and no wonder; the balance of salt to sweet was just right and the dark chocolate offset the sweet caramel wonderfully. Much as I loved the first three chocolates I tried, for me this was the best of the box.