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.