All Things Chocolate & Biscuits

Toasted whole oats are added to the cocoa beans and sugar to replicate the creaminess without using dairy. The cacao beans for this chocolate were grown under the canopy of Sierra Leone’s Gola Rainforest National Park. Various charities, including the RSPB, have been working with local farmers to grow the cocoa in harmony with the park rather than drive deforestation.

African chocolate has a dark history which is why projects in the Virunga National Park, the oldest in Africa, are so important. In 2016, the Femmes de Virunga project was launched, the first ever female-led cacao cooperative in the world, in one of the most dangerous places to be a woman. The project educates and supports these women, enabling them to provide for and support their families. Since the project started in 2016, more than a quarter of a million cacao trees have been planted and there are over fifteen hundred women farmers in the cooperative.

Picked by hand in late spring from the abundant prickly hedgerows seen throughout the Cornish landscape, the small, vibrant yellow wild gorse flowers are a treasure but physically painful to harvest! They impart their heady warm, nostalgic, coconut scent to milk chocolate for a unique flavour with hints of fudge and roast nut, ending in light red fruit making the effort all the more worthwhile.