Hotel Chocolat Christmas Chocolate Goody Bag

As I've mentioned before, I love Hotel Chocolat and I tend to pop in for a browse (and linger for samples) whenever I see one.  The chocolate is absolutely gorgeous; my personal favourites are the caramel chocolate and the ones that have bits of cookie in like Rocky Road or Cool Penguin.  The salted caramel and pralines are up there too.

The box I received for review contained:

• 6 Billionaire Shortbread chocolates
• Christmas Gift Slab with milk chocolate and dark cookie pieces
• Milk Chocolate Pocket Reindeer
• Mini Festive Wreath

Let me start with the Mini Festive Wreath, as this was my favourite.  It's a mix of milk and dark chocolate and contains caramelised hazelnuts, bits of cookie and pieces of cranberry - basically all the good stuff!  There's a serious amount of chocolate here, it's really thick and though it doesn't look that big initially, it took me a few goes to finish it off.  The cranberry is a really nice contrast with the chocolate and crunchy pieces of nut and cookie.  I'm generally not a dark chocolate fan but this dark chocolate was really smooth and more than edible. I actually want to buy another one of these and might do so in the run up to the festive season.

My boyfriend ate the Milk Chocolate Pocket Reindeer (after a bit of hovering around looking longingly at the chocolate, and me being a bit territorial about it all) and his verdict was that it was really nice - I turned my back for 5 seconds and it was gone, make of that what you will.  I had a nibble and it's the typical lovely Hotel Chocolat milk chocolate that I like with a cute reindeer design.  Not too cute to eat though...oh no!

The Christmas Gift Slab is really pretty, I love the little perfectly formed caramel bow on the front.  And I'm not ashamed to admit that I ate the milk chocolate around it first and saved the bow until last.  Again, this doesn't look like that much really but the chocolate is really really thick but the dark chocolate cookie pieces stop it from being too sickly.

The Billionaire Shortbread pieces are something I've had before, I do like them, they're crunchy and caramely but I do find them quite rich so I can only eat one at a time (which is probably a good thing), it does taste very much like millionaires shortbread, which you'd expect but obviously that's really rich as well.

This would be an absolutely fab gift for someone for Christmas and is available from the Hotel Chocolat christmas gifts sections, there are more luxury gift bags too which you can see here.