Next stop on the “Rache’s Last Day in London” itinerary was a Chocolate Walking Tour with Great British Tours.

The walking tour had a pretty good itinerary visiting the following areas:

• Cox Cookies & Cake (the place known for adult themed cupcakes – the chocolate coming from the Triple Valrhona Chocolate Chip cake) (S)
• Mrs Kibble’s Old Sweet Shop (not strictly linked to chocolate it nevertheless was a cute find with jars are filled with retro sweets)
• Freggo (Arguably the best ice cream in London – the tenuous link to the tour being a chocolate ice cream flavour) (S)

• Prestat (One of the oldest chocolate shops in London Prestat has been awarded two Royal Warrants which basically means it’s a supplier to the royal family! The Dufour family who created the store is widely credited with creating the truffle)
• Fortnum & Mason’s
• Ladurée (Again a tenuous link with chocolate – but I can well understand people’s obsession with gorgeous macaron – the Salted Caramel one I had today was divine)
• Charbonnel & Walker (A posh chocolate store and truffle specialist)
• Selfridges but mainly we had a pitstop to visit Godiva. (S)

The stop at Godiva was the best of the whole tour. The tour which was sadly lacking in chocolate tastings (which is what you normally expect from a chocolate tour.) Godiva not only gave us a little talk on what to look for in good chocolate but gave us plenty of samples (which other members of the public were very happy to muscle in on! Honestly some people have no shame!)

So, what do you look for when tasting chocolate? There are four things:

1. Shine. The chocolate should be shiny.
2. Snap. When you snap the chocolate there should be a loud audible snap.
3. Smell. True chocolate makers will not wear perfume because it can permeate the chocolate.
4. Not melting. It shouldn’t melt when you hold it in your fingers.

Our tour guide was pretty good to be honest. She was training to be an actress so was getting right into her spiel. The funniest thing was how she was telling us about the tour operator and how he didn’t really care how many people went on the tour. She said she had previously given a Harry Potter tour which had over 60 people on it!

But as I said before I can’t rate the tour too highly because it wasn’t really a co-ordinated effort with the stores we visited. It was more the case of standing outside as our tour guide told us about the place and then having free time to go in ourselves. At one store, Prestat, we must have waited outside for about 20 minutes simply because the store couldn’t handle that many of us in there. I would normally expect that on a tour we’d get some sort of privilege, even if it was only as simply as getting samples. We did get some samples (as marked with (S) above) but I think that was more because the store felt sorry for us or the store generally offered samples anyway.

Rache is in London town for the last time in a long while as she is soon heading to start a new life in Canada. We are going to miss her terribly but I was happy that she had the time to spend at least another day with us before she headed off. We were trying to think of something a little bit different to do and with the weather being a bit dodge it kind of limited our options a bit. However, Rache and Emma came up with a brilliant idea to hit Arts4fun. They have various venues around London but the basic premise is that we could paint our own ceramics, get it fired up and then have a cool piece of art or whatever to take away with us.

The only drawback was that there was a hen party that came in about halfway through our time there – and they were very loud and just a little bit disruptive.

At Arts4fun you can paint as many pieces as you want – you pay a set fee to use the facilities and then a price per piece. You do have to leave your pieces behind to be fired, however, so you should ensure you have the opportunity to come back and pick your art again. Alternatively they have postage service.

Oh, and if you’re worried you’re not creative enough to play they have plenty of templates on hand for tracing or painting over and the staff are very helpful with ideas on how you can paint your piece.

What a fantastic way to spend a couple of hours on! It was very cool indeed and, in spite of the hen party, was a great way to relax, chat and just generally chill out.

The carnage of our table: