Ocelot chocolate is made in Scotland. I’m not sure why I haven’t featured it more than I have. It has it all going on: it’s organic, it works with great cocoa beans and it supports women cocoa farmers. The packaging is also really fabulous, like retro modern (yes, this is a thing) paperback books. I have mentioned a few of its bars in the past (Chocaletta: a creamy milk not currently available, but I remember going mad for it).
Anyway. Ocelot also works with bakeries in Scotland. Wild Hearth, a wood-fired, artisan bakery in an old Nissen hut on the edge of the Highlands, makes the cinnamon swirls for Ocelot’s Cinnamon Swirl bar, £6.99/75g (sadly, not tested).
And now it’s started collaborating with an Edinburgh bakery called Twelve Triangles that makes everything using cold/slow-fermented dough and whose website alone made me drool (must plan trip to Edinburgh; also where the world’s best B&B is). From Twelve Triangles, Ocelot gets something called ‘miche crumbs’, which is TT’s heritage grain loaf caramelised in the oven with brown butter, honey, malt and salt. The Miche Crumb bar is £7.50/75g. The crumbs render the bar quite soft in parts and frangible, because Ocelot is very generous with the amount of crumbs that are pressed in. I really liked this. You still get the snap of the chocolate which, here, is Original Beans’s wonderful Viruga’s 70% cocoa. It’s a delicious bar in an ‘is it chocolate or a pastry?’ kinda way. Which is precisely the sort of craziness we need for January.
