Thorntons salted pistachio and milk chocolate bar, made with 32% cocoa from Madagascar, a one star gold winner at the Great Taste Awards 2009.

The chocolate block is presented in a pistachio coloured box, in the same bold and colourful design as the rest of the Thorntons Chocolate Block range, proudly displaying the bar’s award in the right top right corner.

Inside the box the milk chocolate bar is wrapped in a special “award winning” gold wrapper – both the award logo on the box and the wrapper set this bar up to be something special.

Divided into small breaking squares and two rectangle sections at the top and bottom, the block has a floral motif impressed into it and the Thorntons logo in the lower rectangle.

Thorntons Lightly Salted Pistachio Milk Chocolate Block is milk chocolate made with 32% cocoa from Madagascar, with pistachio halves running throughout the bar. The chocolate is sweet, smooth and creamy with the soft crunch of nuts, the sweetness of the chocolate is neutralised with the savoury of the pistachios and you can’t really taste any salt – but I wasn’t expecting to, as salt is added to chocolate to enhance the flavour not to make it taste salty.

The flavours are not too strong and I think without the nuts, this would be an average milk chocolate bar. I was expecting more flavours or a wow factor based on the awards, but overall it is just “nice”. Enjoyable, but nothing special.

£1.79, 80g.

Labelled: Vegetarian and Gluten Free.

The Amedei Porcelana chocolate bar, a bitter dark chocolate bar, made from the rarest cocoa bean in the world and one of the most expensive chocolates available.

Porcelana comes from small plantations in Venezuela, South America and is a variety of Criollo (T. cacao var. Criollo); the name, Porcelana, comes from the colour of the cocoa bean which is translucent Porcelain white. Criollo is one of the rarest type cocoa because it is difficult to grow, susceptible to disease and has a lower crop yield thank other varieties.

The bitter dark chocolate bar is 70% cocoa, single origin and single variety, allowing all the complex favours of the Porcelana bean to flourish.

Amedei only produce a limited number of the Amedei Porcelana bar, 20,000 per season and each bar is individually numbered.

Due to the amount of awards and accreditations chocolate made from the Criollo cocoa bean receives, is is considered to be the finest chocolate available and is highly prized. Amedei’s Porcelana bar has been awarded numerous awards including “Best Dark Chocolate Bar” and Academy of Chocolate Gold.

£7.50, 50g.