Green & Black's Maya Gold

I know, people have been worrying - perhaps needlessly. All this talk of juicing and detox - what has happened to Cazz? The woman we know for guzzling wine at meets and laughing too loud and Mel and Jo's dirty jokes, has she come over all puritanical on us and renounced all earthly pleasures for a world of wheatgrass and restrictions? Nah. Fear not, read on.

Allow me to introduce one of my favourite indulgences that above all, gentle reader, can be enjoyed entirely GUILT FREE - yes, this divine product is -

• Fairly traded, Green and Black's ensuring the indigenous Maya cocoa farmers in Belize get a fair and direct price for their bean, and sustainable and safe working conditions
• Organic, gaining the Soil Association's stamp of approval - free from both pesticide residues and genetically modified organisms amongst other nastinesses
• suitable for vegetarians and vegans, containing NO animal body parts or excretions (and incidentally no cholesterol)
• contains a minimum of 55% cocoa solids, so this is REAL chocolate not the miscellaneous brown stuff often marketed as such in this country
• is totally calorie free! ...ok that last is a complete LIE, but you can't have everything - so deal with it. Actually a 100g bar contains a shocking 552kcal and 33.5g fat. Like I said, you gotta deal with it, this is worth eating carrots for a week to make up afterwards...

So can anything that right on possibly taste ok? Impossible right? Well you're wrong there. Now everyone's got different tastes and perhaps this won't be for everyone. My daughter loves it too, but I wouldnt say it was a typical taste for a young child... this is definitely grown-up, sophisticated, occasionally positively x-rated choc. Luxurious, subtle, and not-oversweet.

Dark and shiny, it is flavoured with orange, allspice and vanilla, a truly divine combination. Think of a dark Terry's chocolate orange, take away several wedges of the cloying sweetness and add the underlying spicy depth, and you're not even getting close. It smells fantastic as you open the wrapper, the warm vanilla notes hit the back of the throat before you even claw the gold paper off. Traditional rainforest spices apparently... all I know is that it is a unique and wonderful taste combination. Goes to show you don't actually need 70%+ cocoa to make a true and authentic chocolate flavour, and it has none of the sharp 'tang' which can get ever-so-slightly up your nose with some of the very bitterest and darkest dark chocolate (which I do like but it's a question of mood. And I am very rarely NOT in the mood for a bar of Maya Gold).

As chocolate goes it is quite hard and crumbly, not atypical of dark chocolate in general especially the higher cocoa content brands, and perhaps the melt-point is a little high - you have to wait an agonising second or two before it spreads delectably across the front of your tongue. (or you can speed it up by - no, did you think I was going to say? Honestly, the way you lot's minds work! - sipping a little scalding hot herbal tea at the same time). Incidentally there isn't a chocolate-containing recipe I can imagine that wouldnt benefit from a substitution with this brand, in my pre-vegan days I did particularly enjoy Nigella's chocolate orange cake (see 'Domestic Goddess') with the ganache made with this instead of regular dark chocolate).

Ingredients: organic raw cane sugar, organic cocoa mass, organic cocoa butter, lecithin, natural spice and fruit extracts (0.1%), organic vanilla. All organic, all simple and straightforward, the lecithin coming from organic soy beans rather than egg obviously. The packaging warns it may also contain 'traces of nuts', clearly a bit of corporate arse-covering here, perhaps there is a peanut processing plant in the same postal district... Apparently it's made in Italy, but distributed in the UK by Green and Blacks.

It used to be quite hard to get hold of, the preserve of health food shops and mail order stores, but now - heaven help me and my waistline - it is available in most supermarkets (although you will probably find it with the cooking ingredients rather than the in the confectionary aisle). You can't miss Green and Black's distinctive dark packaging, the Maya Gold bars are flashed red at the top - they make a range of other bars, all organic and fairly traded but not all vegan; the recent sour cherry dark chocolate is to die for too. (Incidentally the packshot Ciao have chosen does NOT illustrate the current wrapper, it is dark brown with gold writing). It is available in a rather measly 20g bar or a stuff-your-face 100g one - no half measures, and I warn you don't kid yourself about only eating half of it or whatever. Costs a bit more than Cadburys, less than posh Belgian stuff - about £1.20 for the 100g bar.
So what are you waiting for? Enjoy!!

Cazz 2003 :-)