Isn’t it time you made your own giant chocolate boulder?

I sometimes wonder, given where I’ve ended up, what would have happened if I’d been born into a chocolate-making family. Our history is deeply ordinary: my grandparents were all agricultural workers in the north and south of Italy. My maternal grandmother must have made pasta, but I don’t remember a single thing about her cooking, other than that she used to make a lot of bread for village folk (I seem to have inherited this trait).

But my paternal grandmother – I do remember her cooking, especially her pasta. I used to make gnocchi with her and she made it look so easy that I didn’t pay attention to the skill it takes as I rolled the little bullets of potato dough over the fork to make the grooves. I still have her apron and her pasta brush. I don’t know why, but I thought of all this as I was eating, as a python would a bird’s egg, a giant Zara’s Chocolates boulder. I wondered if there was a child somewhere with a chocolate-making grandma, making these balls of soft, caramelised hazelnut praline, covering them in chocolate and then rolling them in chopped, toasted hazelnut pieces.

Although you can buy a box of these wonderful creations – £15 for a box of three – you can, if you live near the Bristol shop, go to a Giant Boulder Workshop and actually make them. It costs £55 per person.

This would be a lovely thing to do with a family member, and having done a chocolate workshop (though not at Zara’s) I can’t recommend doing them highly enough. They are so much fun, and make great presents for those hard-to-buy-for people. And you get to take home what you make.