I’d been watching the launch of Aurosó chocolate bars carefully. When the opportunity to place a pre-launch order came, just before Easter, I didn’t hesitate.
Regular readers will know that my search for a more grown up, yet more exciting than a regular slab bar of chocolate is ongoing. And I love me a filling.
Aurosó is artisan chocolate handmade in Oxfordshire on a street called Halfpenny Lane, which sounds like something from a children’s book (I take my comforting references where I can at the moment). The name is an amalgam of Welsh (aur, gold), Malagasy (roso, flavour) and Gaelic (só, luxury). The first and last of these reflect the founder, Catrin Burr’s, heritage, the middle one represents the chocolate: all from Madagascar.
Each bar is beautifully packaged and contains six pieces enrobed in 90% cocoa with a filled ganache centre. The emphasis is on pure, sustainable ingredients, but using low sugar. This is something I get asked about a lot and now here it is. The sugar content goes from 8.4g to 11.5g/100g. So these aren’t for everyone, but you sure taste the cocoa and fillings. There are currently eight, the one I thought I’d like the most, hazelnut truffle, I hated, yet it’s the bestseller. The ones I thought I’d hate I loved: lemon coriander, the strawberry lemon (fizzy!), date and tahini, and rose geranium, all super complex. Some flavours fought like siblings, with one dominating: all I got was coffee with the coffee macadamia, but I ended up having it instead of an espresso after dinner.
