Chocolats Geneviève Grandbois Le Carré Pain D’épices

While Montreal’s Chocolats Geneviève Grandbois make spectacular chocolates, I really wasn’t sure if their fine touch would apply to their bars of chocolates too. But I really needed to know, so I picked out one from a range that also includes bars with maple syrup, sea salt and olive oil and jumped right in.

Their Le Carré Pain d’épices is a square bar with little bits of gingerbread in it. While I’ve had more than my fair share of bars with ginger, I’d never seen one with gingerbread before and was intrigued to see how it measured up. Like most of their products, it came in a tin which makes it look like a quality product no matter how it tastes.

Fortunately it tastes really good. The use of little pieces of gingerbread cookies scattered throughout the bar is quite inspired because it provides both a crunchy texture and a big punch of ginger, cinnamon and cloves that punctuates the darkness of the 70% chocolate. It works incredibly well, even although the pieces are quite small and there isn’t as much of them as I’d put in if I was in charge.

The chocolate itself is a lot less straight-forward than it needs to be thanks to a clever blend of spices that means every bite has a hint of gingerbread whether or not any cookie is present. It is quite subtle, but helps to make for a very well-rounded and restrained bar.

The downside is that at very ungenerous 70g, this is a bar which is going to disappear far too quickly because it is an easy one to consume in a single sitting. Or, to put it another way, I need some more. Time for another trip to Montreal I guess…

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