2026 Advent Calendar notes

 Blaeberries, Vaccinium myrtilus I have written a little about this plant for the Day 6 chocolate; it is an abundant plant - especially good under Scots pine woodland.  It is always a lovely contemplative berry to pick - under beautiful trees, hoping to hear capercaillies, or maybe look up to see a deer peering cautiously towards you.  The only problem is that the best time to pick is also the peak midge time, and so all that potential for a mindful picking session is blown away by persistent and savage clouds of midges. For this chocolate, we have made a leather with the berries - a fruit chew - and coated each piece in NearyNogs Cuba 65% plain chocolate.  A gorgeous sweet treat for Christmas day. I hope you have enjoyed this chocolate journey and have a peaceful and restful festive season.  Best wishes also for a wild and chocolatey 2026

 Corn mint, Mentha arvensis This is a very delicate member of the Labiaceae family; delicate in both its habit and its flavour.  It has small thin stems, light leaves and tiny pale mauve flowers in rings around its stem - it grows in little clusters, almost apologising for being there.  I think I have walked past a patch of this for years and never paid it any notice before.  I was diverted from the path by some beaver work (see photo below) and stumbled upon this little patch of corn mint.    In terms of flavour, there is a mint freshness, which borders on pineapple sweetness, and then an undertone of the good parts of Wood woundwort (Stachys sylvatica) aroma.  Wood woundwort is a foul smelling plant on the whole, but there is a ghost of an aroma floating around it that eludes you, and is overwhelmed by the main baser undertones of woundwort odour.  Well, corn mint has that ghost and turns it into something really beautiful. Its delicateness...

Cleavers, Galium apanine Another plant that goes by many names including goosegrass and sticky willie.  It is mainly considered a garden pest – able to smother other plants, cover your clothes with small furry beads and generally just get in the way.  However, it does have many uses – the young green plant is quite tasty – quite a lot like cucumber, and you can press the greenery to release a refreshing and health giving juice; you can also just soak a few sections of stem and leaves in a pitcher of water to freshen up the water – like people do with cucumber. It is the pesky sticky seeds though that hold an amazing secret; wait until they ripen and go brown, collect them up, roast them for 10 minutes or so in a reasonably hot oven, grind them up, and make a really ‘passable’ coffee with them.  I reckon, way back in the 16 th century when coffee first arrived in the UK, that grumpy old men in cafes tried the new fangled beverage begrudgingly, and muttered ‘not sure...

 Magnolia 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 alot - 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 have tried crystalising the...

Crab apple, Malus sylvestris We have a local expert on crab apples, Rick Worrall, who has spent many years researching them within Scotland.  He says that it is quite rare to find true crab apples – because there are so many Malus varieties around – in gardens and orchards – both sweet desert apples, and ornamental crab apples, they do a lot of cross breeding over the seasons – and so a true Malus Sylvestris is difficult to find. Indeed, every single crab apple tree that I know of in this area, produces very different versions of crab apples – small smooth granny smith green round apples, to slightly miniature cox like shapes and colours, a very pleasing round pink one, and a lovely red and yellow, Red delicious shaped apple that is really almost quite sweet. The classic use for these little feral fruits is to make use of their abundant pectin and combine them with other fruits and herbs to make jellies.  They are rarely eaten for their own sake.  However, once cooked...

Wild garlic ( Alium ursinum )  Wild gralic is one of the first fresh flavours to forage in the early spring; it greens up still-dormant woodland with its new and lush aromatic leaves. The scent builds up and intensifies over the weeks as the plants grow and then blossom with fabulous white pompom flowers held aloft over the thick carpets of vibrant green.  The Latin name  ursinum  means bear - and I imagine a northern hemisphere bear waking from hibernation, hungry and a little listless, and yearning for something to eat and just glorying in drifts of juicy, fresh, and vibrant wild garlic.  I feel much the same when I first see it's tender shoots.  After what seemed an endless winter one year, I was so energised by the sight and smell of this new growth that I had a go at making a ganache with the leaves, little expecting the results to be as extraordinary as they were; it sounds terrible - but is honestly, fantastic - a real adventure for your taste bu...

  Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria According to Tess Darwin's 'The Scots Herbal', the name meadowsweet is derived from its use to flavour mead rather than it's contribution to sweet smelling meadows; however, it is now more popularly recognised for the sweet heady scent that it contributes to meadows and hedgerows on warm summer afternoons. The fragrance is quite hard to pin down, and can veer on the side of unpleasant to some; however, when mixed with white chocolate it seems to have an aniseedy quality that is really delicious.  It has been used as a flavouring since Bronze Age or before, but also has an important medicinal history; it contains salicylic acid, an ingredient of aspirin, and has been used to treat malaria, fevers and headaches. Its Gaelic name is  Chuchulainn  and is derived from the story that the legendary warrier of that name was treated with meadowsweet baths to cure uncontrollable fits of rage or fever. We use it in ganaches when in season, ...

Sweet cicely, Myrrhis odorata Early summer is the season for Sweet cicely - these lush, fullsome plants swell hedgerows and verges with their fast, ferny growth and as you brush past them, waves of aniseed scent waft into the air.  So love these plants 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. This chocolate is in the Advent Calendar in the ‘the flavour that took the longest to get right’ category.  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.  I have tried infusing leaves, seed heads, flowers, the stems, the ro...

 Nettle, Urtica dioica So much can be said about the stinging nettle - it is one of the most useful plants out there - both ecologically (soil fertility, home for insects, food for so many) and as a food and medicine for humans, as fibre for cloth and string, as a dye.  No wonder it has to defend itself a little!  Even its sting though can be put to good use - some say it treats arthritic pain - but sounds like a harsh treatment It is a handsome plant as well - lovely lush early growth, then tall and statuesque with elegant arrangements of its small intricate flowers and seeds.  It is a dioecious plant - meaning that separate plants are male and female;  there is a lovely post  here  about the male and female flowers, as well as pictures of the seeds which tells you more about it, and links to recipes. Use nettle as you would spinach in savoury pies, make nettle teas, nettle crisps - so many ways to enjoy this flavourful and nutritious plant. ...

Lachua, Guatemala 80% plain chocolate    This is the only unflavoured chocolate in the whole calendar and as this is a reflection on our chocolate journey oer the years, I felt it was important to mark our attempts at bean to bar chocolate This was made with cocoa beans grown by two farmer organisations in the northern area of Alta Verapaz, Lachua region, Guatemala.  Here there is a pristone cenote lake within a national park, and te farmers focus on organic and ecofriendly farming. I bought the beans from Uncommon Cacao, an organisation that sources speciality cocoa from farmers and sells to craft makers.  These beans are sourced from, as explained on their website . Uncommon Cacao was started by CEO Emily Stone in 2010, and is one of a small handfull of ethically driven companies from which you can buy small amounts of cocoa - by which I mean one 50 or 60kg bag to a tonne.  So, not just a small pack for tasters!  Their website is full of information about...

Japanese knotweed, Reynoutria japonica There is much written about this plant – a very invasive non-native; it was brought to Europe from Japan in the mid 19th century, and admired because it looked a little like bamboo.  It is now despised by many, but the foraging world loves it as it is delicious, and the herbalists are exploring the use the roots for a remedy for Lyme’s disease.    Care needs to be taken when harvesting – it is an offence to cause this plant to spread; any part of the plant is thought to be able to propagate – so it is important when gathering to take everything you cut or break from the plant away with you and burn whatever you do not use (and on no account compost it!). The young softer shoots are the sought after part – pink tender stems that can be cooked like rhubarb and have a rich fruit flavour.    Syrups, flavoured alcohols – all work well.    Mark Williams at Galloway Wild Foods summarises the knotty situation with this pl...

As all good things do, this started out as a mistake!  I had ordered some Cornish sea salt, for the sea salt caramels – this was a time that predated any Scottish salt makers!  I somehow misordered, and what arrived was a lovely tub of Smoked Cornish Sea Salt!  I quite like smokey flavoured things and wondered if I could find a chocolate that might match it.  We went with a milk chocolate, and settled on the Callebaut Java 33% milk chocolate – this also predated any UK bean to bar makers producing milk chocolates as couverture. We loved it, as did our customers and we found a transfer sheet that summed it up beautifully to make the thins we made even more delectable.  And we won an International Chocolate Award Gold for it in 2015 – ICA awards would not now consider an entry made with a commercial couverture, but 10 years has seen a huge amount of change in the craft chocolate world! Over the years we have used different salts – we loved the Hebridean sea sa...

Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris This was the first wild flavoured solid chocolate that we ever made, and I cannot now remember when that was!  We had been making wild flavoured ganache filled chocolates and then later sea salt caramels, but I had not started out making any bars or things at all. I went to a chocolate event in London, I think run by Home Chocolate Factory, and met a very lovely chocolatier who ran a company called Lick the Spoon, in Wiltshire I think.  We had coffee after the meeting and chatted about our businesses – hers much more established and larger than mine.  She told me about infusing cocoa butter with flavours to then use to flavour solid chocolate, and as I travelled home on the train, I was eagerly planning to experiment; I knew that I needed to produce a longer shelf-life product as the ganaches with their two week shelf-life were a difficult sell back in those days. Scots pine was the first flavour we tried – I had used the young ...

I know, deja vu!  Yes, we have had a Sitka spruce chocolate already - but it was in the Advent as an award winner - this one is in the calendar as it is a tree flavour (I was trying to cover all foraging bases when curating the collection).  And it is the same dried Sitka spruce tips ground into a chocolate, but this time a plain version of the Guatemala from Chocolate Tree..  We love the milk version they make with these beans, but also love this 65% plain, and it responds so well to the Sitka spruce. It is great fun when chocolate makers play with milk and plain versions of chocolate with the same batch of beans.  Each brings out a different aspect of the cocoa beans themselves.  Often I wonder if makers create a milk chocolate version when a bean is not really standing up on its own in a plain - to be able to round off rough edges in flavour, or dilute it a little as there is less cocoa in a milk version than a plain.  But in this case, there is nothing ...

  Chanterelles ( Cantharellus cibarius) Chanterelles are a prize of early Autumn normally - although they can be spotted in some places 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 started to dry them for storage a few years ago, and realised how tasty they are as a 'crisp', which if course led me to wonder what they would be like dipped in chocolate! Chocolate dipped chanterelles made their debut at the Scottish Wild Food Festival a few years ago, and I have been making a chanterelles chocolate bar for a few years now. I have also tried pickling, fermenting and cold-smoking them - all to great effect, and of course, just in the classic way, fried in butter with some garlic.  I have read that some people steep them in syrup - which they say takes them on a journey with their sweet apricot flavour side.  One to try in the fut...

Ladies bedstraw, Gallium arvensis This is a lovely midsummer meadow plant, with delicate spires of tiny yellow flowers.  It has a lovely clovery smell of honey when you bring it to your nose, and this intensifies as it is dried - so a favoured stuffing for mattresses in years gone by - hence the name!  It has medicinal uses as well, and was reported to be used as a vegetarian rennet for cheesemaking - giving it it's old Scots name of 'keeslip' (Tess Darwin,  The Scots Herbal ).  The root was used to create a red dye, and there is an account in Tess Darwin's book of concern expressed in the late eighteenth century of the disappearance of the plant from the machair in Barra due to overexploitation, as the roots grew much bigger in the sandy soil and so was much sought after. I first tried this flower as a flavour in July 2017 - struck on gathering the flowers at how honeyed their scent was.  The infusion is good, but in addition to the honey there is a bitterne...

Wild raspberry, Rubus idaeus One of the joys of August in Scotland is nibbling wild raspberries as you walk - some years are better than others, and some years your entire favourite spot is wiped out by the local farmers spraying weed killer over his field on a windy day.  It is not too difficult to find a new spot for raspberries around here, and my new favourite spot is really fantastic! 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. I have used the word 'favourite' a couple of times already, and we had a plan for the curation of this Advent - we listed 25 categories and chose chocolates to fit each one.   The category for this day is 'pushed to say it is my favourite':  at almost every event, I am asked many times by customers 'which is your favourite?'  My stock answer is,...

Rowan berries, Sorbus aucuparia I have never been a great fan of Rowan berries - I love the colour and look of them - but have failed over the years to make much of them, in the form of jellies or preserves.  This, if I am honest, has caused a bit of a resistance to trying them with chocolates!  This changed a number of years ago, when I learned from a fellow forager, that the young spring buds have a fabulous bitter almond flavour - even 'better than sloe blossom'.  And it is true!  a friend made some ice cream flavoured with rowan bud and it was amazing - possibly the most delicious ice cream ever tasted - and this inspired me to try a white chocolate ganache.  It makes a fabulously rich, heady almondy ganache with a very delicate pale green hue. Absolutely delicious. But back to those berries!  This year, prompted by success with salting sloe berries over the last few years, I thought I would have a go with rowan berries.    I just added salt t...

Scots pine,  Pinus sylvestris , is the National Tree of Scotland.  It  is a native tree and the ancient Caledonian pinewoods once covered much of Scotland, so the tree has featured for a long time in Scots myth, history and daily lives.  Scots pine is very strongly associated with Highland Perthshire, with the famous Black Wood of Rannoch just in the next valley north of here.   It is a very resony tree - its Gaelic name is  giubhas  or juicy tree - and so was really important as a source of light during winter - long thin resinous sticks being used as 'candles'. I have been making a chocolates with the young spring shoots for many years, and one of these will appear later in the advent, but this particular chocolate is made with the young, unripe male catkins. In the spring, the trees are busy - focussing on both growth and seed production.  The branch ends sprout a number of young shoots, some are plain, some have male catkins and some have...

We wanted to include a combination of two flavours in one of the squares - we don't often do these, usually focussing on one flavour at a time.  However, a wild version of the famous Fruit and Nut combination seemed very achievable and we were delighted with this little bar. I have read that in lean times people used to make flour out of beech nuts, Fagus sylvatica ; having spent hours each winter gathering enough nuts to put in chocolate, I can see why hunger would be the only thing that would drive you to out so much time and effort into gathering a food - despite it being really delicious.  And it is delicious - they reward the hours spend picking and processing, fiddly little things that they are.  We have lightly roasted these, and it brings out a gorgeous roast chestnutty flavour. Blaeberries,  Vaccinium myrtillus,  have been eaten in Scotland for ever - staining fingers and lips for thousands of years! Traditionally, i am told, August 1st was the sta...

Sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides    Sea buckthorn is an amazing plant that we first became aware of 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 amazed to find that it grows so well in a coastal sandy environment here in the UK - so different ecologically from the Himalayan mountains. However, its berry is as sour and as Vitamin C rich here as it was there. It has a really strong 'tropical' flavour to it that persists when cooked. Looking up Sea Buckthorn on Wikipedia I was amazed to read that it is now classed as a superfood due to its high levels of anti-oxidants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_buckthorn ).   There is now an excellent community company based near Gullane, Sea buckthorn Scotland , where they pick and process the berries each year, selling juices, concentrates and many other sea buckthorn wonder-based produ...

Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis  Sitka spruce is the most commonly planted forestry tree in the UK - it is quick growing, tolerates poor soils and conditions, grows reasonably timber-straight.  Although loved by many foresters, it is equally despised by bird lovers, wilderness lovers, landscape lovers and its impact on all these contested passionately.  Whatever you think about it in any of these ways, what is not celebrated is how delicious it is! The young spring tips are up there with wild garlic and sloe blossom as spring vibrant flavours.  The tips are easy to spot and pick, and do need to be picked when really young – just as the brown ‘papery’ coat comes off.    They get tough really quickly, but as Sitka is almost everywhere – especially as even near mature Sitka spruce stands there will be natural regeneration along forest tracks and rides - and the small vivid green soft brushes, at the ends of the spiky blue green needled branches, are easy to acc...

  Dulse, Palmaria palmata In my early 20s I always had a bag of dried dulse in my pocket, and I would dig out a bit to chew on when I needed a snack; my Grandfather had told me that his relatives in Ireland always had bundles of dulse in their pockets and I happily followed on the tradition.  Mo Wilde in her book 'Free Food', mentions that 'Charles Dickens records that as a boy on holiday in Edinburgh, he'd spend his penny on dried Dulse to chew on, rather than sweets, preferring its smoky, almost bacon-like taste'.  Dulse has been eaten, used on gardens, used as a medicine as well as a fabric dye for a long time in Scotland and Ireland - and was highly valued for all those reasons. It is a red seaweed, found in the subtidal zone, so you need a really good low tide to find it, and it is best picked in spring to early summer.  The dulse I used in this chocolate came from Colonsay, one of the inner Hebridean islands - so from lovely clean Atlantic water. So a delicio...

Galium odorata This is one of my favourite plants - when I come across little swathes of this in the garden or woodland in May, it lifts my spirit and makes me smile.  It has the most lovely structure to it – these delicate upright swirls of leaves, and the lovely petite ivory white flowers.  It is a relative of cleaver, but does not have its climbing habit, preferring to stay low and spread in gorgeous sweeps across the woodland floor.  It has a mild scent when fresh, but when dried this deepens into a rich vanilla aroma – and is in fact very similar to tonka.  Tonka beans come from the Amazonian rainforest, and one of the principal chemicals that gives it its character is coumarin, which is exactly the same compound that is in dried Sweet woodruff!   The Caribbean name for the tonka tree was ‘coumarou’ and this gave the compound found in tonka beans its name. By the 1940s the use of artificial coumarin became widespread and it was used in place of natural va...