For many people, life's greatest pleasure is a sport like tennis or football. For yet more it is a hobby like music or acting. Then you've got those people, like myself, who find pleasure in something much simpler, something much less active and much, much tastier. Yes, I'm talking about chocolate. This wonderful substance is said to have first been discovered by the Aztecs and was considered an aphrodisiac. It was because of these aphrodisiacal properties that any food containing chocolate was forbidden to Aztec women lest it should whip them up into a frenzy.
Luckily we have no such rules, and chocolate is enjoyed by millions of people from all across the globe in a plethora of different incarnations. For me, the greatest way to enjoy chocolate is via the Hotel Chocolat Tasting Club. Once a month, for a small fee, a parcel arrives in the post which contains between twenty and thirty of the newest, freshest, most sublime chocolates in a huge range of flavours for your delectation and delight.
Within each box is a menu, telling you all about each of the chocolates, from who came up with the recipe to who made the particular batch that your chocolate has come from. As well as your menu, you also get a score card. The whole idea of the tasting club is that all these new chocolates, from the whipped truffles laced with liqueur, languid ganaches or sumptuous pralines, are eaten, assessed and judged by the Club's members. As you go through the box, you rate each chocolate out of ten, adding any comments that you think pertinent, and Hotel Chocolat use this to decide which new recipes to feature and which to drop.
I was a little sceptical when I first heard about the Tasting Club, I mean, sending chocolates to me through the post? Surely the postman will just eat them all and leave me with the box! Thankfully this was not the case and I have been amazed by the service! I am even able to specify which day of the month that I want my box to arrive on and I was also pleased to discover that Hotel Chocolat are starting to offer boxes that concentrate on a certain type of chocolate, so if you prefer dark over milk or white over dark, it is no problem at all! I can't help thinking, though, that if I keep this up I'm probably going to have to take up a sport to compensate!