Rolos, remember them? Steve and I grew up with Rolos and their ‘do you love anyone enough advertising. Steve loves a challenge, and we love making fresh versions, inspired by famous chocolates. 

What’s different about our Luxurious Butter Toffee Chocolates, is that they are lovingly hand-made with real double cream and golden syrup and the not-so-secret ingredient…a tiny pinch of Oak-Smoked Dorset Sea Salt. This final touch from our friends at Dorset Sea Salt brings out depth of flavour and the personality of the chocolates as well as adding just a little smokiness. Delicious!

What’s a Micro Batch?

Micro-batches are where we experiment with new flavours – we usually lose money on them, but it’s a great way of testing new ideas with our consumers to see if they would like us to make a bigger batch!

We’ve only made a couple of hundred pouches, so you’ll need to be quick!

The story of the flavour

We've been working with Dorset Sea Salt since launch, putting a pinch of their salt in our chocolates to help bring out the flavour and as a great natural preservative.

We finally visited them in their natural habitat, just off Chesil Beach,  you can read all about our visit and how they extract their wonderfully tasty, mineral-rich salt in our blog “Salt – the mineral that shaped humanity’

We experimented with a variety of different Sea Salts before deciding on the Oak-Smoked, it had a depth of flavour and an edge of smokiness that won us over.

Trial and Error

After multiple prototypes, Steve finally cracked-it – getting the balance right between the natural sweetness of the toffee, the richness of the organic butter and the elevation provided by the salt -  we were delighted to get the seal of approval from Caleb, Sales Director at Dorset and brother of founder Jethro, literally on Chesil Beach!

 

 

 

Scaling up

It sounds easy, but getting from a kitchen sample to making 1000 pieces then gets a lot harder.

Something always goes wrong when we make a Micro-Batch and this time was not exception! The tempering machine that we normally use decided to misbehave (again) costing us valuable production time.

It was only through the help of another local business lending us their spare temperer and some ingenuity from Steve that we managed to get it all up and running.

First Steve fills the moulds

Then he reverses-out the excess chocolate

Then he pipes in the delicious centres

These delicious centres are made with real golden-syrup, double cream and just a pinch of Dorset Oak-Smoked Sea Salt. You can see them freshly piped and standing proud in the chocolate shells.

Finally the chocolates are ‘backed-off’ (liquid chocolate is flooded over the backs to seal) and the chocolates are left to cool on racks

Before finally ready to chill and pack, and sent out to the 200 lucky customers who can get hold of them.

We’ll release the chocolates at midday on Friday 18^th July. Click on the picture below to buy.

If you manage to get hold of one, do let us know how you find them and of course, whether you love anyone enough to give them your last one - that's up to you.

 If you miss-out – sorry!  Please join our mailing list to find out about new flavours first…