Chocolate Tour Of The City!

Today marks the three year anniversary of being with my boyfriend Rich, time flies huh!? So on the weekend we wanted to do something fun to celebrate it. It’s really hard when you’ve been in a long relationship to think up new activities to do, because you’ll probably have done pretty much every date type activity there is.

Well there was one idea we hadn’t yet done that I’ve been wanting to do for ages...

... a Chocolate Tour of the city!

Seeing as I’m the biggest sweet tooth ever, you can probably see why this activity appealed to me. Also I feel I should note here that my boyfriend attended of his own free will*.

Basically it involves going to about four different chocolate shops in Melbourne with a tour guide who teaches you about chocolate, and about the history of the chocolate shops you visit. And the best part: you get lots of chocolate samples! Also after visiting all of the chocolate shops, you go to one for afternoon tea (which was included). You also don’t have to eat all of the chocolate samples at the time, you can take some home to eat later.

So I thought it would be really fun to do a post about the best chocolate shops in Melbourne! Perhaps you can live vicariously through my chocolate eating!

This is where our tour went, in order of visitation:

Haigh’s Chocolates (in the Block Arcade)

This chocolate shop was the most generous with its samples. We received three types of them (and got to eat about two of each type):

-A chocolate champagne truffle: a very sweet chocolate with a dark outside shell and a softer ganache in the middle comprised of a mixture of white chocolate, milk chocolate and champagne. It melts in your mouth and tastes very rich and indulgent.

-A milk bud (30% cocoa) that was one of the best and creamiest milk chocolates I’ve ever tasted.

-A dark chocolate freckle (55% cocoa) that was really quite sweet considering it was dark chocolate. I usually dislike dark chocolate as it is too bitter, but this one was lovely and sweet. The higher the cocoa percentage, the better the chocolate is for you... so perhaps this one is a winner!

Ganache Chocolate (on Collins St)

This chocolate shop had the most attractively designed chocolates, with the most impressive sculptures and prettiest colours and designs painted on them. If you look closely at the picture below then you can hopefully see what I’m talking about.

Here we sampled one chocolate:

-A dark chocolate (60% cocoa) with a honey, almond and orange centre. I don’t tend to like chocolates with a lot of fruit or masses of ingredients in them, but this was divine. The texture of the inside was very soft and nutty, and it left behind a lovely sweet flavour.

The manager of this store came out and talked to us about the brand and their master chocolatier who had trained for 16 years in Europe to be a master chocolate maker! Apparently you have to study longer to be a genius of chocolate making than you do to become a doctor... crazy!

The Lindt Cafe (on Collins St)

Lindt is one of my favourite chocolate shops that I frequent a lot, so unlike the first two, I knew my chocolates here.

They gave us a sample of their Milk Chocolate Delice (Macaron), which was lovely. These are best eaten at room temperature however - ours were a bit too chilled. I wouldn’t recommend the Milk Chocolate though as there are far better flavours of Delice: Strawberry, Vanilla and Cookies and Cream are my favourite. Strawberry is just a dream to eat, and probably the best macaroon I’ve ever tasted in the world! Definitely try one if you have the chance.

Lindt also provided us with a little show bag with some information about their brand plus two dark fondant sticks and one milk chocolate square. Lindt chocolate never disappoints, and is the creamiest, meltiest chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

You can also eat in store at the Lindt Cafe (which I’ve done a lot!). I strongly recommend their croissant dipped in melted chocolate, their hot chocolates that you get to mix up yourself, any of their Lindt balls, and their Iced Chocolate.

Koko Black (Royal Arcade)

Out of all of the chocolate shops, I frequent this the most for their sweet cafe items (but rarely for their chocolates). They gave us a sample of their Hazelnut truffle, which tasted a lot like Nutella and was covered with Hazelnuts around the outside, with a creamy nutty mix of ganache on the inside. One of my favourite chocolates of the day!

The environment and ambience in the Royal Arcade is just lovely. There is an upstairs hidden eating room, where you can sit in a lavish parlour styled room and peek out huge ancient domed windows at the hustle and bustle of the arcade below. It’s just so cosy, comforting and hidden up there, and you can fully escape the craziness of the city.

If you are going here for its cafe, I’d recommend their Belgian Hot Chocolates (also their Light version, which tastes mostly the same and is so healthy for you... right?!), their chocolate mousse, their Iced Chocolate, and their little Chocolate mud cakes. They have some great share plates that give you a lavish assortment of Koko Black’s offerings that are great to order if dinning with a partner/friend.

We finished the day at Olio Cucina, a lovely little Italian Restaurant in the outside alley of the Block Arcade. We all got a slice of incredible tasting orange cake which was very refreshing after all that chocolate, and our choice of tea/coffee/hot chocolate-of which we went the latter (it’s a chocolate tour after all!).

Here are all the samples we were given (somehow we managed to get a pic of all of them at the end from the extras we took/the ones we saved for later):

Our Chocolate Samples!

So all in all it was a very well spent, entertaining afternoon. My couple of criticisms would be there were no white chocolate samples (of which I am a huge fan), and also that we didn’t get to see any chocolate being made or see behind the scenes of the stores in any way. I thought a chocolate tour such as this would include this element. I’ve been to a lot of chocolate factories over the years (Hershey’s, Cadbury, Chocolatier etc), and I’ve always really enjoyed seeing chocolate being made and then being able to eat it after seeing the effort that goes into it. I felt this part of the chocolate process was really missing in this tour.

My favourite of the chocolate shops? That's a tough one! I like all for different reasons! Lindt for it's Macarons, Koko Black for it's cafe, and Ganache for it's decorative chocolates. They were all brilliant though!

The tour cost $37 pp, which was pretty good considering all samples and afternoon tea was included. I think a tour like this would  be more beneficial to a tourist, or someone who doesn’t know chocolate shops inside out the way I do :P

If you don’t want to pay the money, why not go on your own tour? You could probably do it cheaper, and at your own pace, and only sample the things you choose. The good thing about Melbourne is that we have so many chocolate shops, and they all tend to be quite close to each other and plentiful. So it’s easy to barely walk and stumble across about 6 in a 5 minute stroll!

The site of the tour can be found here. We did the Chocolate Sunday Walk tour at 2.15pm.

Have you ever done something like this? Do any of the chocolate shops I mentioned rate among your favourites?

*May have complained about the lack of other guys in the group, but as I pointed out, there were two other couples. It does not matter that the other 22 people in the group were females... :P