Advent notes

Day 24 - the last chocolate Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis We finish with the Christmas Tree!  In our household, Christmas Eve is when we decorate our tree – not just because I am so busy with chocolate-making in December that this is the first opportunity for me to do it – but just because it feels most special on that day – the day we can relax, sit back and lay outside-life aside for a short while and dressing the tree is the joyous and creative task that helps that transition. Although a Sitka spruce would be an uncomfortable tree to dress, with its very spiky needles; its more friendly cousin Norway spruce is more commonly used!  However, it is Sitka that has this amazing flavour – we have already had the milk chocolate flavoured with it – if you can remember chocolate 8!  And today we have a plain chocolate as the base; it is made by the Chocolate Tree , from the same Guatemala beans as the milk chocolate, but in this plain version the Sitka is even brighter and as ...

Day 24 Crab apple, Malus sylvestris This is the wild ancestor to the domesticated apple, although it is very unlikely that many trees you come across when foraging crab apples will actually be pure M sylvestris .  There are thousands of versions of the domesticated apple and they interbreed with the wild, or often what we think of as crab apples are feral trees growing from seeds of discarded fruit.  So there is a great deal of variation in the crab apples you find – some are green, others yellow on ripening, others still go red.  Their size can vary as well, but on the whole they are a sour and small version of the domesticated apple.  Once you have managed the tartness though, they reveal a wonderful apple flavour and are commonly used to make jellies with other wild berries and flavours as they are plentiful and full of pectin. We have used crab apples in two ways – boiled, pulped and dried – to grind into chocolate, or boiled, pulped and sweetened, then dried to ...

Day 22 Scots pine catkins and seeds Pinus sylvestris The last of our flower and fruit combos - this time the male flowers of the pine tree, and the seeds.  We use many parts of the Scots pine tree over the year, from young spring shoots, the unripe catkins, the very young green cones, and in this chocolate, the seeds!  It takes two years for the seeds to develop - the female flowers appear at the very tips of the new shoots each spring, and the seed-bearing cones from two seasons ago are two seasons growth behind them on the branch! The seeds are small given they take so long to grow and the trees go on to be so big!  They are not the pine nuts of Mediterranean fame, and come attached to a wing that is surprisingly irritating to remove!  On fine dry late summer days, the ripe cones crack open (such a pleasure to be out in the woods when this happens) and release little winged seeds that spiral away in the breeze, off to find new ground and life. The catkins are plump...

Day 21. Elderflower and elderberry, Sambucus nigra Elderflower is one of those foraged ingredients that has gone commercial – you can buy elderflower flavoured cordials, gins, ice-creams etc in all supermarkets now.  Nevertheless, gathering the flowers and berries yourself is such a joy and the tree gives so much pleasure just being there in most hedgerows, along woodland edges, paths and roadsides.  Those gorgeous cream coloured plate-like flower heads, those deep purple drooping berries.   We wanted to include in this selection plants both spring and autumn harvests of plants where we enjoy both flowers and fruits – and this of course is a classic.  In this chocolate we have flavoured a Columbian made white chocolate, made be Casa Luker, with cocoa butter in which we have infused elder flowers – a technique we use for a limited number of flavours.  Run through the chocolate, as an inclusion, are small pieces of elder berry leather.  So floral, fruity...

Day 20 Water mint, Mentha aquatica We find at least three mint species within a ten-minute walk of the house, and they appear at their own times and in their own places.  They have distinctly different flavours - this one, the water mint, has a Moroccan mint tea vibe to it - and is my favourite for making tea, as well as for making ganaches.  The other two mints - M rotundifolia and M avellana - that we find are distinct in their own ways - the first is much sweeter, and the second is hard to identify as a mint in flavour, being more delicate and a little bitter. I use the water mint a lot from early to late summer to make ganaches, and only recently tried it as a flavouring for a chocolate bar.  Mint chocolate is so available and usually very powerful spearmint flavours from oils, and I thought a more subtle mint flavour might just underwhelm people.  But of course, how wrong could I be!  The simplicity of a simple bright mint flavour with a really good milk ...

 Day 19. Blaeberry, Vaccinium myrtilis Blaeberry, or bilberry, bushes cover the hills here, and they particularly love to grow under tall, high and open canopied pine forests.  Springy deep cushions of them often make walking around the hills hard work - but exhaustion often sees me just give up and fall into their entangled embrace.  Even better when they are covered in their gorgeous berries - recover your dignity with an imporomptu snack! I like to try and harvest as much as I can in the early autumn - they make wonderful jams, leathers, freeze well, dry well, ferment well.  A blaeberry pie in mid January is such a pick me up in those short gloomy days.  They take patience and time to pick, an exercise in mindfullness that can be really therapeutic - as long as the midges are kept at bay.  Oh and you tick-proof yourself as best you can! There is a delicious earthiness to the taste of the berries - and we paired them with a wonderful fruity and deepflavou...

Day 17. Sloe blossom and sloe berries, Prunus spinoides The second of our flowers and fruits duos, the spring and autumn combo of Sloe magic.  In spring when the sloe blossom is out, great thick snowy drifts of it catching the spring sunshine - and when you are in that thicket surrounded by the sun-activated almond scent, it is - almost - heaven.  The almost being the 2" thorns that tear at your clothes and hands!  the thorns are still there in the autumn when the berries are ripe, and just as sharp but just a little bit easier to avoid! For this chocolate we used Chocolat Madagascar s 37% white chocolate, and flavoured two batchs.  In one we ground the dried flowers from the spring, and in the second we ground in dried two types of sloe berry pulp; one made from plain boiled sloes, and the second from salted sloes - using Blackthorn sea salt of course!  Salting the sloes transforms them - banishing the astringency and deepening the plum flavours. And then we w...

Day 17 Round leaved plantain, Plantago major I started to follow an amazing account on Instagram few years ago, an American forager Alexis Nikole (her instagram account is @blackforager ); her posts are informative and fun, and although they often feature plants that we do not have here, it is thrilling to get her take on plants that we do find here.  She introduced me to this plant - because the seeds can be used as a vegan egg substitute in baking.  I started to look out for the plant and realised that it is everywhere here, so started to collect the seeds for my daughter and niece - both into vegan baking.  As I dried them to preserve them, they smelt so malty and delicious, I started to have chocolate making thoughts about them and had to collect even more!   Lightly roasted, they do have a lovely maltiness, and I was inspired by a lovely malted chocolate from Seven Hills Chocolates down in Bath, to add toasted seeds to a milk chocolate.  And then went...

Day 16.   Sweet cicely, Myrrhis odorata I love this plant so much – when the young shoots start to appear in late spring, I greet them like long lost friends.  They grow into lush, fullsome plants, swelling hedgerows and verges with their fast, ferny growth and as you brush past them, waves of aniseed scent waft into the air.  I love aniseed flavours and have spent almost all my wild flavoured chocolate-making years trying to find a way of capturing that aniseed flavour.  My favourite chocolates have deep undernotes of aniseed and so I know that Sweet cicely and chocolate is a match made in heaven - just need to work out how to get them together. The problem seems to be that the flavour is not very stable and seems sensitive to heat.  Traditionally this plant was used to sweeten fruits - like gooseberries and rhubarb; not so much sweeten but really reduce the amount of sugar needed.  It seems to work as a flavour enhancer;  I tried infusing leaves...

Day 15.  Barberry, Berberis vulgare A few years ago, I came across a small section of a hedgerow with these large shrubs, bearing hanging bunches of delicious looking and brightly coloured red berries.  A quick search on the internet and this looked to be Berberis vulgare , and to double check I took some berries, some photos and set-to crosschecking identification with other people and other sources of information.  Once sure, I tried the berries - arrestingly sour - even more so than sea buckthorn berries!  They are prized in Middle Eastern cuisine - so I persevered and went back to collect many more and try and find a way of using them with chocolate.  One of the suggestions I read was that the dried berries can be ground into powder and used instead of Sumac powder. They are a handsome shrub - and it seems were once common throughout the UK, in hedgerows.  However, they are a host to a wheat rust, and when wheat grew in importance as a crop, the barberr...

Day 14: Juniper, Juniperis communis Sometime called mountain yew, juniper is a hardy low-growing tree found in mountainous and hilly areas. It is thought to have been used as a flavouring since the Stone Age, and has also been considered to have various medicinal properties since medieval times. It was one of the aromatic herbs used to flavour whisky, and more famously as a flavouring for gin. Indeed in the 19th century, sacks full of berries were sent to markets in Aberdeen and Inverness, for exporting to Holland to make gin.   Juniper is not that common in our area any more, although there are pockets of good stands; for example, there is a beautiful Juniper woodland at Scottish Wildlife Trust Reserve at Balnagard Glen .  I have not been able to find a great deal on Kenmore Hill and it has really suffered from disease over the last few years.  Thankfully it looks like it is recovering and we await berries! The 'berries' (infact they are cones) take two years to rip...

Day 13. Raspberry, Rubus ideaeus One of the joys of July annd August in Scotland is nibbling wild raspberries as you walk - and this year the season seemed to be longer than I’ve ever known it.  I expected it to be poor as the summer was so dry, but those plucky little raspberry canes managed somehow to produce beautiful plump, tasty berries.  They are slow picking though - often few to a bush, few that are ripe enough to pick but not so ripe that they get squished in the picking.  But their flavour is intense, and more than makes up for their smallness and scarseness. So, we were able to pick loads and made leathers, coated in Duffy Sheardown 's Venezuela Ocumare 72% plain.  On making these, I felt I had actually reached a zenith of some sort - this was the most delicious thing I had ever made.  We had enough fruit to dry and grind into chocolate - again using Duffy's Ocumare - and the rich tart flavours of the raspberries highlight those in the chocolate....

Day 12 Sweet woodruff, Gallium odorata Drifts of Sweet woodruff are a beautiful sight - their whorls of green slim leaves look amazing en masse - and then with a haze of tiny white flowers floating on the top it is quite magical.  It can form a lovely understory in the garden as well and I have been protectively weeding patches of it for years (usually to remove ground elder and so attempt to stop it being overshadowed). The plant itself has only a very slight scent, but when you dry it, it really intensifies.  Some call is Scottish vanilla, and others compare it to Tonka;  I think I am with the Tonka group - it has an almond flavour as well as vanilla.  The flavour derives from the chemical coumarin, and the content increases with drying.  (It is essential to only dry leaves when they themselves are not damp: under damp conditions the coumarin converts to dicoumarin on drying, and this is toxic). Once properly dried, this is a useful flavouring for syrups, sauc...

Day 11: Hazelnut, Corylus avellana and Wild cherry, Prunus avium A wild take on the classic Fruit ‘n Nut milk chocolate!  Foraging for both hazels and wild cherries requires careful timing – both are delicious to squirrels and to birds, which are much better equipped to gather them than I am!  They have to be ripe for best results, so you can't pick too early and hope to ripen them 'at home' like supermarket fruit suppliers insist on doing; leave them too long though, and they are snaffled by wildlife!.  Each also require trees with low enough branches for ground based picking – and both make me wish I could tame and train a legion of squirrels to pick for me.  Hazel has held a really important role in Scotland for a very long time; both in terms of food, but also craft and folklore.  Hazel was considered a defence against evil, and the eating of hazel nuts was said to bring wisdom.  One of the finds at the iron age crannog archaeological excavations on Lo...

Day 10: Magnolia flowers. Magnolia spp A couple of years ago I began to see lots of chat about Magnolia flowers and their edibility, and most specifically their ginger flavour.  I love ginger in chocolate, and in the early years of the business, I would make a fresh ginger ganache in winter.  However, as my repertoire of winter wild flavours widened, I no longer needed the ginger to fill the gap.  So the thought that we could be wild and have ginger got me very excited.   I had not noticed many magnolia trees in this area though - and I thought we were maybe too far north for the tree to survive; clearly I was just going around with my eyes shut!  I put a call out on Facebook and lovely gardeners with gorgeous trees invited me to come and pick flowers from their trees.  Now, of course, I see them a lot - and many are magnificent, even up here. There is a ginger flavour to the petals, although not very strong, as well as lots of floral notes.  I ha...

 Day 9: Sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides We first picked the berries for this flavour on a magnificantly clear and calm October day, at an idyllic beach in East Lothian. We had gone to find some waves to continue our family quest to learn to surf, and thwarted (as so often seems to happen to us) by the flat sea, we spent a wonderful afternoon on the beach, with very good friends, just walking, chatting, reading the papers.  And as we wandered along, began to walk past thickets of thorny bushes, bright and cheerful with crowded orange berries carried along their branches.  And more than just small thickets of them - whole swathes along the dunes and above the beach.  And recognised them, with some surprise, as Sea buckthorn.  We had first became aware of this amazing plant in Nepal, where its berries were renowned as having more Vitamin C than any other fruit and where it was a valuable plant for feeding goats as it grows at a very high altitude. We were aston...

Day 8 Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis Much maligned as 'dark, monoculture, plantations marching across our hill-sides', Sitka spruce is indeed a common sight in our landscapes across the country.  Whether you love it or hate it, there is no denying that it is delicious!  In the early summer, the dormant buds on the ends of each branch start to sprout and they look so enticing; small vivid green soft brushes, at the ends of the spiky blue green needled branches of the Sitka.    You can pick them and use them to flavour syrups, vodkas, teas, dry them and add to baking - they have a wonderful bright, citreousy flavour. We first used them fresh to make a milk chocolate ganache, which is now a regular in our spring selections.  The flavour keeps well on drying, and we can flavour creams for ganaches and caramels all through the year - as well as grind into chocolate.   Our chocolate choice for this flavour was Chocolate Tree 's wonderful Guatemala 50% milk c...

Day 7 Dumonts tubular weed ( Dumontia contorta )  and chanterelles ( Cantharellus cibarius) This was one of those happy accidents that sometimes happen!  I had not intended to combine a fungi and a seaweed (although not sure why – seems so obvious now!) but it happened when I was making the Dumonts tubular weed in the grinder (with  Original Beans  Virunga 70% plain chocolate) and seeing that I needed more chocolate, poured a bowl of what I thought was Virunga into the grinder but turned out to be Chanterelles and our own Guatemala 80% plain!  Once that awful feeling of exasperation and dread (oh, no whatever have I done!), I tasted the mix in the melanger and rather liked it! Chanterelles are a prize of early Autumn normally - although this year they seemed to appear from July onwards.  We have a few secret (people are VERY territorial about their chanterelles picking spots, aren't they?) places locally where we like to pick these golden fungi.  We st...

Day 6:   Linden/Lime, Tilia spp. Linden trees, or Limes, are large, elegant trees that are marvels - their timber is fine and light coloured, their flowers send bees into a frenzy (and lime flower honey is highly prized), the flowers also form a very restful fragrant tea, the leaves when young can be munched in salads, and even used as alternatives to vine leaves in cooking.  What a tree!  And to add to this extraordinary list, you can even make chocolate from the seeds.  Really?? I first read about this chocolate thing a few years ago, and unfortunately I cannot now remember where.  A quick google takes me to a couple of interesting posts about it, including one on Practical Self Reliance webiste, that refers to historical accounts of Frederick the Great (in 1658) asking scientists to work out how to make linden seed chocolate on a large scale.  Another talks about people experimenting in the 18th century with linden fruit, including a French chemist...

Day 5: Pineapple weed, Matricaria discoides  Pineapple weed is a low growing plant that thrives in fairly hostile places!  You usually find it along tracks, around gates - where the soil is compacted and other plants find it hard to grow.  This makes it an easy plant to find, but a difficult one to pick as these are much tramped places and not immediately attractive places to pick food plants! It is worth persevering though to find somewhere a little less busy, as the scent and flavour of this plant is amazing.  It does really smell of pineapple when crushed, but there are other aromatics going on as well.  Much loved as an addition to wild cocktails, adding a real tropical lift to a drink, I was not sure how it would work with chocolate.  Infused in cream to make a ganache, the pineapple does come through - with some other complex flavours in the background - and I was really pleased with the results.   Some plants don't respond well to drying - ...

Day 4. Larch, Larix spp. Larch is not a native tree to Scotland, but introduced over 400 years ago, it has established itself well, taken to by birds and squirrels, its timber much sought after by house builders, its rather excentric (for a conifer!) life cycle of shedding its needles in winter - giving us two spectacular series of landscape colour in autumn as the needles turn burnt ochre, and in the spring as the canopy takes on a lime green hue with the opening of the new buds.  Because it needs to grow its needles in spring before it can start to put out new growth, the young shoots that I like to use for flavouring chocolate appear later than the shoots for other conifers and I get a nicely paced array of spring conifer delights. Dunkeld is home to the accidental hybridisation of the Japanese and European larches, on the Duke of Atholl's estate there, and the offspring grew faster and stronger than the two parent species.  This hybrid has been planted widely in commerci...

Day 3: Lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea When picking blaeberries, often just at the base of the blaeberry plant, and snuggled into the moss, there is a smaller Vaccinium, with small clusters of round white-then-red berries - the lingonberry or cowberry.  These ripen slightly later than the blaeberries, and often seem difficult to find; because they are so low growing, nestled in amongst the blaeberries and moss, you can easily miss them.  They are not as sweet as their cousin, and the flavour has a sharp, tending to bitter flavour - but the colour and taste are vibrant none the less.  I use a Scandinavian berry comb to pick blaeberries, and there is always a 'by-catch- of lingonberries; later in the season I go out to focus on lingons and always get a by-catch of blaes!  Once picked, they keep incredibly well - which makes them one of my favourites!  Blaeberries, brambles and raspberries have to be processed as soon as picked which often means long sessions in...

Day 2 Marsh samphire , Salicornia europaea , with a 62% milk chocolate blend of Original Beans Virunga plain and milk chocolates There is so much joy to be had in foraging for Marsh samphire, as well as in eating it and sharing good harvests with friends.  Being out on sea marshes is such a tonic - out on that impossible divide between two worlds - the land and the sea; so rich in plant and bird life, so timeless and otherworldly - you can just lose yourself in gathering, nibbling on other marsh plants, like sea aster, sea blight, staring into those marshy pools, ever mindful of muddy treachery beneath your feet.  Marsh samphire is itself an other worldly looking plant - as if it was made as a lego experiment - creating plant-part building blocks rather than bricks - a prototype that never took off as plants are just so complicated to construct! It is important to tread carefully on these marshes so as not to trample the samphire too much, and always gather using scissors - tr...