Pump Street Chocolate 55% Ecuador With Eccles Cake

Pump Street Chocolate are one of Britain’s best known and best loved bean-to-bar chocolate makers. Started by father and daughter Chris and Jo Brennan in 2017 as a sideline to their village bakery in Suffolk, they have quickly grown to be one of the world’s most respected makers.

Being a spin-off from the bakery, they are well known for combining baked goods with their chocolate. In particular, their Sourdough and Rye bars take bread from the bakery and refine it into the chocolate itself. To combine bread and chocolate is no easy task, but Pump Street consistently manage to capture the flavour and texture of their bread in the chocolate, marrying the two expertly.

Combining an Eccles cake and chocolate is another matter entirely. A Pump Street Eccles cake contains raisins, currants, brown sugar and alcohol, all of which can potentially contain water – the enemy of chocolate! If you tried to simply grind one into chocolate, you’d likely end up with a thick, sticky mess.

I’m not entirely sure how they have produced this bar, but the chocolate itself tastes just like a traditional Eccles cake; bready and friuity with a hint of brandy, but you also get whole currants and raisins and just a hint of brandy. The result is very identifiably an Eccles cake, rather than some other kind of fruit cake flavoured chocolate. Each of the flavours – bread, fruit, spice and alcohol – are there and identifiable, but none of them detract from the chocolate.

I love this bar and highly recommend you check it out, along with the rest of the Pump Street range. The bakery series bars are always the most interesting to me, but Pump Street have proved themselves to be some of the best in the world, so you really can’t go wrong whatever you choose.

Thanks to The Foodie Bag for supplying the photography background and other equipment used in this post.

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