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Tea and chocolate are a perfect match. And yet the existence of chocolate-flavoured tea is something that I have only discovered relatively late in life. I think it was last year’s Bird & Blend advent calendar, which properly introduced me to the concept.
They love a chocolatey tea at Bird & Blend. Their magnificent Snowball and Hazelnut Rocher teas, were a highlight of December 2020 for me. Since then, I’ve enjoyed their Valentine’s Day Love Potion, their Shrove Tuesday Strawberry and Nutella Pancake tea. And of course, their Cream Egg tea which I have reviewed here.
And they’re not the only ones at it. Whittard’s Dark Chocolate really brings the whole thing back to basics. There’s no mucking about here with nuts or candied fruit or whatnot. It’s just Indian and Indonesian black teas paired with a generous amount of cocoa nibs, which delights the tea user with a cup of strong, earthy, slightly bitter cup of pure pleasure.
The thing about chocolate tea, you understand, is it’s not that chocolatey. It is in no way equivalent to a steaming mug of hot chocolate or chomping on a bar of fruit and nut. If one were some kind of super healthy type (and trust me, I’m not one of those), one could suggest enjoying a cup of Whittard’s Dark Chocolate as a low-calorie alternative to other kinds of chocolate, but that – quite frankly – would be crazy. Chocolate tea is an adjunct to those things, not a replacement.
Cocoa nibs are chocolate in its purest form. It’s the base product from which we get – by several forms of culinary alchemy – the chocolate hobnob, and the Toblerone. The Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs were partial to a cup of cocoa nibs steeped in hot water almost 4000 years ago. In fact, if through some kind of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure scenario you could acquaint an ancient Mesoamerican with Shen Nung, the Chinese emperor who, legend has it, invented tea in 2737 BC, then this tea could have been invented several millennia before it actually was.
And who knows, maybe the world would have turned out a happier and less bloodthirsty place if it had been. I’m not sure why I am equating chocolate tea with World Peace, to be honest, given that both tea and chocolate have existed for a long time now, and wars still inexplicably keep happening. Still, even if Whittard’s Dark Chocolate tea doesn’t actually align the planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life from extra-terrestrial beings to common household pets, it does make a truly excellent cup of tea.
Today’s guest book is Monogamy by Sue Miller due to the monogamous relationship between tea and cocoa nibs in this particular tea.
