Dark chocolate gems to swoon over

I have had a bar of chocolate hanging round for a while now. It’s unprepossessing. If we were in the 1950s still and it were a girl we’d call her plain and unlikely to get a husband. Luckily we’re not and women don’t need husbands anymore, anyway.

So this bar: Melt’s 80% Criollo (a rare beast of a bean and from Mexico) is a thing of internal beauty. It does contain emulsifier, so from that point of view it garners some tut-tuts from the purists, but listen: here is a bar which is smooth, creamy despite the cocoa punch it carries and if you want to start your new year with a "more dark chocolate" promise to yourself: start here. You won’t regret it. It’s so – I repeat – smooth, sophisticated and frankly, superior. Yes it’s expensive at £10.99 but actual chocolate, as opposed to chocolate flavouring, is.

I also got a box of Raphia chocolate-covered, cocoa-dusted almonds, £13, that I’ve been happily munching through. Anything almond-related feels like a health food, doesn’t it? These taste like they’ve got a candy coating under the cocoa dusting, but Raphia assure me it’s just a chocolate layer. They remind me of the sugared almonds (some) Italians give out as bomboniere, which we call confetti. Once at my mum’s, and desperate for a sugar snack, I raided her sideboard and found some gold sugar-coated almonds tucked into a bit of veiling. I ate some. Later, emboldened, I went back to the sideboard whilst I thought my mum was distracted by Deal or No Deal. She wasn’t, and she told me that there was some gold confetti in there from my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary.

In the 1970s.

I lived.