2025 Advent Calendar

2025 Advent Calendar

As this will be our last Advent Calendar, because I am retiring this year, we thought we would look back over the almost 20 years that I have been exploring the chocolate and wild foraged flavour worlds.  So much has happened in the time since I started out on my chocolate journey - the chocolate landscape is totally different now from what it was 20 years ago; then there were no craft bean to bar makers in the UK, and certainly none that you could buy couveture from.  Even buying Fairtrade certified chocolate or any other ethically credentialled chocolate was hard, and there was very little focus on origin and flavour.

The foraging world has opened up as well - information is more easily available, there is the Association of Foragers that enables all these individuals to link together.  My foraging knowledge has grown over the years through contacts with other foragers and what they do, with confidence through practice, with more easily accessible information about processing techniques to capture and bring out flavour.

Each day I will post about the flavour on this blog - with notes about the species, the chocolate, the flavours, and anything else that feels relevant to me for that chocolate! we have chosen chocolates that we have won awards for, that are our favourites (of course, we have no favourites), we have tried to cover all foraging bases - flowers, herbs, fruits, nuts, seeds, fungi, seaweeds.  And woven through all these are chocolates from some of our favourite makers.

Happy munching



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