2026 Advent Calendar notes

We have been making this chocolate for many many years now - I think the first was in 2008 when we developed the recipe for wedding chocolates for the daughter of a dear friend.  The groom had grown up in France and asked if I could include a sea salted caramel as he remembered them from his youth.  At that point, unsophisticated person that I was, I had never heard of a sea salt caramel - as indeed hadn't 99% of the UK population!  Hard to imagine, I know, from these sea salt caramel saturated times.  So I set about developing recipes and sending them to the groom for feedback - given that I did not know how soft or hard the caramel was to be, how sweet/not sweet, how salty it should be - I really needed his guidance.  On about the fourth iteration, he said 'Yes! this is it, takes me right back to childhood', and from then on, we understood his affection for them - they were indeed delicious.   Initially, I thought making them was just a bespoke thing...

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 i...