La Maison Du Chocolat Duo Des Ganaches - I'm A Chocoholic!

I'm a chocoholic and proud of it, as you all well know by now! So you can imagine my little squeal of delight when La Maison Du Chocolat asked if they could send me a free box of their new Limited Edition Duo des Ganaches to review!  I felt super privileged as they are not even available to buy until October this year.  Honour aside though, they looked far to pretty to scoff on my own so when my bud Strawberry from TNT Strawberry Blonde came over for a brew, or five it was the perfect opportunity for sharing them!.

The box is so pretty.  It's orange with brown text and a quaint little ribbon emblazoned with La Maison Du Chocolat fastening in a bow on the top of the box.  You can tell just by the packaging that something exquisite awaits you inside!  We opened the box like giggly little school girls and there was definitely an air of excitement.  We discovered the wonderful smell of chocolate before we even saw any!  It was divine.  Chocolate scented Sunday afternoon, blissful!  It was even better than the nice smells that come from the cocoa mills when the wind is blowing in our direction.

I lifted up the protective paper and there they were. A pretty awesome looking checkerboard effect made from little squares of chocolatey goodness.  Stripes then dots, we took a while to decide which to try first but eventually decided on tasting the dotted ones.  We took one each and both said they smelled even better up close and personal.  In my other I'm A Chocoholic posts I have been known to have a nibble and then a big mouthful.  These were the exact opposite and they really should come with a nibble me slowly warning.  They are incredibly rich.  After we both had a nibble we tried to think of the words to describe it and we could not describe the sound at all so insert your own chocolate heaven noise here. I could tell as soon as the first morsel fell into my mouth and melted that I had made the right choice sharing them with Strawberry.  K & M would not have appreciated them and Misteright was out so he missed out!

The dotty chocolates were seriously chocolatey with a wonderfully smooth chocolate ganache centre.  The chocolate was dark, but not so dark it was bitter and the centre was rich and creamy with a lighter chocolate inside. The stripey ones were dark and bitter and the middles were heavier inside and even richer than their spotty counterparts.  The different types of dark, plain chocolate ganache recipes work really well together but we could not eat more than one of each as they were incredibly rich and a little sickly, not in a nasty way though, just for the first time ever there were still a lot of chocolates left in the box when I closed the lid!  Obviously they are not really called dots and stripey, their names are far more sophisticated than that!   The dotted squares are the Morani and are the product of a subtle blend of Grand Crus of cacao, that means that all of the cocoa beans were sourced in the same region of the same country. The Isle of Grenade, or the stripey chocolates are made from a rare and exclusive Cru from the Southern Caribbean.  That just means that the cocoa was all sourced from the same plantation .

They really were exquisite and so they should be, when they are available to buy from October they will be priced at £22.50 for 18 squares, that's 9 spotted and 9 striped.  I guarantee that if you keep them for yourself then there will still be some left at New Years.  I am a huge chocoholic and even I couldn't eat more than one in an hour.  Too sickly, but deliciously brilliant chocolatey treats in a pretty box, just the kind of thing that I would love for Chrimbletide please Misteright!  Strawberry and me are now going to drink a cup of tea and please, no more chocolate...

Well, at least not until tomorrow!