We realise that we could well be starting a stampede here… but we just had to tell you about these four, utterly gorgeous chocolate cocktails. They’re the result of a collaboration with two stylish London bars – The Botanist on Sloane Square and Chiswell Street Dining Rooms near Barbican – and created to celebrate National Chocolate Week.

They’re all made with our Liquid Chocolat and served warm – so they’re perfect for a chilly October treat!

The Ultimate Hotel Chocolat – Caramel Liquid Chocolat with hazelnut syrup and refreshing fresh mint tea. Not just for after eight pm!

Chocolate Orange Melt – Dark Liquid Chocolat with Cointreau liqueur and white crème de cacao for a delicious. Deeply comforting with a citrus tang.

Nutty Devine – Classic Liquid Chocolat with hazelnut syrup, crème de cacao and a good measure of Jamaican rum. Makes an ideal toasty afternoon tipple.

Naughty but Spice – Aztec Chilli Liquid Chocolat with Chairman’s Spiced Reserve rum. A warming experience with a good kick!

So if you fancy one as a ‘me-time’ treat, a delicious dessert or an after dinner relaxant – then here’s where to find them:

The Botanist, 7 Sloane Square, London SW1 8EE
T: 020 7730 0077
thebotanistonsloanesquare.com

Chiswell Street Dining Rooms, 56 Chiswell Street, London EC1Y 4SA
T: 020 7614 0177
chiswellstreetdining.com

National Chocolate Week just wouldn’t be complete without the Chocolate Unwrapped show – which this year is on 13th & 14th October in The London Film Museum, Covent Garden. It’s a chance for visitors to completely immerse themselves in the world of chocolate, from cooking demonstrations and talks, to tasting chocolate from around the world.

So come along and visit us, where we’ll be showcasing our Less Sugar, More Cocoa chocolate philosophy and staging a Roast+Conch Pop Up Café. You’ll be able to taste our unique cacao cuisine dishes, as well as trying our revolutionary new brewed cocoa drinks.

We hope to see you there!

For more details and to book tickets please see chocolateunwrapped.co.uk

In celebration of National Chocolate Week, the Academy of Chocolate is hosting a conference that will bring together an enormous array of chocolate and cocoa experts. It’s set to be a fascinatingly day, covering everything from cocoa genetics and sustainability, to flavour combinations, chocolate tasting and a whole lot more in between.

It’s aimed at anyone with an interest in cocoa and chocolate, whether you’re a budding chocolatier, starting a chocolate business, or simply love chocolate. The line up of participants covers cocoa growers, buyers and experts, chocolatiers, expert tasters and chocolate entrepreneurs.

Academy of Chocolate Conference – 12th October – RAC, Pall Mall, London

As a Hotel Chocolat customer you’re no doubt familiar with our Selector Range. It features recipes from every single genre of chocolate and where customers go to try something new or find an old favourite to take home. But have you ever wondered who selects the Selectors?

It all starts with our Chocolate Tasting Club, where all of our new chocolate recipes are first created and tasted. Tasting Club members taste and rate all of these new chocolates before anyone else and only those that achieve the highest ratings go on to feature in the Hotel Chocolat Selector Range. Very month there are new chocolates for member s to taste, from which the future stars of our Selectors emerge – a delicious arrangement we’re sure you’ll agree

All year long, the chocolatiers that make chocolates for our Tasting Club strive for just one thing – excellence. That’s because the only way their chocolates will feature high in the score charts is by impressing our members. It is their scores and comments that drive all we do in the Club, which guarantees that the pursuit of excellence is at the heart of everything.

So it won’t surprise you to hear that our annual ‘best of the best’ selection is called just that – The Excellence Collection. It’s full of nothing but the highest rated, best scoring chocolate superstars of the past year, brought together in one box for a delicious encore in an array of winning categories – from our overall champion, the ‘Best Leading Chocolate’ and ‘Highest 10/10’, to the ‘Most Uplifting’ chocolate and the infamous ‘Knock Your Socks Off’ award.

Yes? Then you’re not alone. Every year we get hundreds of entries for our Create a Chocolate Competition, which is open to all members of our Tasting Club. And it does just what it says – it’s a chance to let your chocolate imagination run amok and come up with your very own recipe. The winners, selected by myself, are then matched with chocolatier partners who make them come to life.

As if that wasn’t enough, each winning recipe then goes on to appear in a Tasting Club box so that fellow members can taste, rate and comment on it – which is nail-biting stuff, but having a whopping 5kg of your own creation to show off to family and friends helps get over that. You could even see your creation star in the Hotel Chocolat range too. Eton Mess is one of our iconic chocolates, but the first recipe was a winner in our Create a Chocolate Competition.

National Chocolate Week this year runs from 8th to 14th October and as one of the world’s few chocolatiers to grow cocoa, we’re uniquely placed to share our adventures, experiences and expertise with you – which is exactly what we’d like to do throughout Chocolate Week. Here’s what to look out for:

• We’ll be taking you on a different creative adventure every day of Chocolate Week – letting you into a few secrets about our Tasting Club and award-winning chocolates on the way.

• Tasting Adventures – we’re hosting our exclusive Chocolate Tasting Adventures in different locations every evening of Chocolate Week. Taking you on an expertly guided tour of different chocolates over two delicious hours.

• Boucan Supper Club 12th October – we’re hosting a one-off dining event with only 20 places available, a delicious taste of the ‘cacao cuisine’ pioneered at our Boucan Hotel & Restaurant in Saint Lucia.

• Chocolate Unwrapped 13th & 14th October – we’re also participating in the biggest ever Chocolate Unwrapped event in London’s Covent Garden, where you can experience our cocoa, chocolate and a pop-up Roast+Conch café too.

• Academy of Chocolate 12th October – I’ll be speak at the academy of chocolate conference on the Friday 12th October in London.

• Choctails 8th & 14th October – To celebrate National Chocolate Week we have teamed up with The Botanist on Sloane Square and Chiswell Street Dining Rooms near Barbican to produce an exclusive range of decadent hot drinking chocolates and cocktails

Hotel Chocolat employees can enrol themselves on to Hotel Chocolat’s School of Chocolate ‘Chocolate Diploma’ which is a year-long online course designed to help improve chocolate knowledge.  The modules start at ‘The History of Chocolate’ and go right through to ‘Chocolate Production’.

For the final task in the diploma the students had the really hard assignment of spending a day at Hotel Chocolat’s factory in Cambridgeshire where they were given the brief to design, and then make their own chocolate!  The day started with the chocolatier’s talking through how they design chocolates from the brief, what ingredients they use (all natural!) and why they use certain products (who knew that green chocolate contained spinach or nettles?!).  Then the fun began with making the chocolates – tempering chocolate is far harder that the experts make it look!!

The chocolate that was chosen in the ‘Nibblatron’ group was “Dark Chocolate with Wasabi” and lots of fun was had making the chocolate with plenty of discussion on how much wasabi should be included, and what the decoration should look like!  The director’s had the (hard) job of tasting all the diploma chocolates, and ones that are good enough may even appear in a future Tasting Club box – watch this space!

Last week Roast+Conch played host to Hotel Chocolat’s first event with London’s elite Yelpers. Yelp.com worked with our team at Roast+Conch to host an evening of chocolate tasting along with sampling of our revolutionary new cocoa drinks – the cocoa macchiatos and Liquid Chocolat flowed!  The evening proved to be a great success, with over 50 guests sampling the best of what our Covent Garden store has to offer. But don’t just take our word for it, you can see for yourself what they had to say and follow the reviews of Roast+Conch on the yelp website here.

[wpcol_1half id="" class="" style=""]
Ease of preparation: Easy
Preparation time: 10 mins
Standing time: 2 hours
Cooking time: 3 mins

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 45g plain white flour
•  15g cocoa powder
• 150ml milk
• 25g sugar
• 25g Classic Liquid Chocolat™
• Vanilla ice cream
• Blueberries

Method

1. Beat eggs and milk together
2. Add sugar and cocoa powder, then flour.
3. Pass through a sieve and chill for 2 hours.
4. In a small frying pan, heat a knob of butter until it’s sizzling.
5. Ladle in enough mix to thinly cover the base of the pan and to a depth of about 3mm.
6. When the top starts to firm up flip over and cook other side for about 2 mins. If pancake sticks to ceiling, peel off and start again…
7. Sprinkle a fine layer of classic Liquid Chocolat™ over pancake.
8. Remove from heat and set aside. Repeat until you’ve used all of the mix.
9. When all the pancakes are cooked use an 8cm round cutter to cut out little pancakes.

To Serve

To serve put one pancake in the centre of a small plate, add a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a few blueberries, then place another pancake on top and repeat. Top with a third pancake and serve to gasps of amazement.

[/wpcol_1half]

A gorgeous twist on the traditional pancake, perfect on Shrove Tuesday and any other day for that matter! Pancake tossing not required, but give it a go anyway – what’s the worst that could happen…?