i thought i was done with london posts, but no. i don’t know if it’s the sudden pocket of werk i find myself in, but these days i find myself thinking about –– yearning for –– chocolate. i eat too many squares of cheap supermarket lindt, or contemplate a second (or third) tim tam. and then i start reminiscing about the little paper cup of amazing i encountered down camden passage one afternoon.

paul a young makes the best salted caramel truffles ever, and in the winter, a fine hot chocolate. he makes brownies as well — thick black slabs of fudgy chocolate cake with pecans or caramel, but i find these rather too intimidating. as the weather warms up, the hot chocolate dispensary in the corner by the entrance becomes a little outpost for sorbet. there is regular chocolate sorbet, and then there is salted caramel chocolate sorbet, which is what we chose, me and my sister, as we waited for our mother to finish her rounds at the antique stores. the amiable shopgirl arranged a scoop in the pristine white paper cup, and then asked, would you like the toppings?

yes, please!

she poured a stream of liquid chocolate over the sorbet, and then sprinkled chocolate shavings, and cocoa nibs, and little chocolate balls over that. she popped two spoons in, and moments later outside the shop, as i tried to take a spoon of sorbet, i found that the molten chocolate had solidified into a sturdy chocolate helmet. ice magic!

yes, the baubles up top were enchanting and all — a real riot of texture — but the real magic lay below. the sorbet was impossibly smooth and light in texture, while the taste was serious and dark. at first i found myself searching hard for any caramel flavour, but a spoonful or two later, i hit an artery of thick sticky caramel. a jolly good idea to keep the two separated, mr young. it was sublime, and i’m glad we were sharing. i might otherwise have fallen over in the street, twitching and gurgling.

some days later, i bought myself a toffee chocolate bar from peyton and byrne — toffee-nosed chocolate, according to the pleasing white paper wrapper sensibly typeset in gill sans, and adorned with nothing more than a tiny toffee-coloured flower. but the spare aesthetics reveal a somewhat more spartan affair. this slim bar shatters under your teeth, and the rigid grid of crests yields a rather severe burnt sugar flavour within the dark chocolate. the sour aftertaste was definitely not delicious. perhaps it is an inbuilt mechanism to keep you (me) from eating it all in one go? i much prefer the caramel with sea salt bar that i found in singapore on the way back home.

(this is where my london post officially becomes a chocolate post.)

back in singapore, i stumbled upon chocolate research facility, just hours before i had to get on the plane back to sydney. i must admit, i was not overly excited about the chocolate — south-east-asian chocolate always seems a bit too floury, or claggy, or sweet — and my stance was not helped by my good mother, who popped a sample into her mouth, grimaced, and then called undiscreetly over her shoulder while rushing out of the shop, “don’t buy me any. that is really horrible — much too sweet!”

indeed, the first ingredient listed on the box is “sugar”. but what a box! in fact, a hundred different boxes — a unique design for each of as many flavours. i found myself with an armful of bars: last minute presents mostly, in flavours like almond, tiramisu, stout, black sesame and durian.

besides the caramel bar, i also picked for myself, “new york” from the spring/summer ’10 city series (the durian bar represents singapore), with a slick map graphic. this was a bar of milk chocolate with crunchy little pretzels — salt crystals and all — embedded whole. yum.

the caramel with seasalt, from the autumn/winter ’09 series, was adorned with lovely peranakan tiles, and was a moulded shell of milk chocolate with a runny caramel filling. double yum. the chocolate was smooth and mild, and no, not too sweet for these tastebuds.

these are small bars — only 70g, and even though you might find it easy to eat the whole thing in one go, the $12 price tag will probably slow you down. there is also the confounding configuration of the grooves along which to divide your chocolate bar: there is pretty much no fault line to engineer a clean break, unless you begin by snapping it lengthways right down the middle. maybe they do want you to eat it all at once, after all.

i arrived back in sydney to find a chocolate bar sent to me as part of an easter twitter giveaway by the kindly folk at third drawer down. offerings of chocolate really help keep the back-home blues at bay. the chocolate edition that i received was a special edition strawberry stripe bar, with fat, free-form stripes of dark chocolate and white chocolate with “natural strawberry ingredients”. indeed, the strawberry portion was not a lurid pink, and tasted mostly natural. its creamy sweetness was broken up by little bits of tart freeze-dried fruit. in contrast, the dark chocolate was noticeably less creamy, and infinitely less sweet, and had a slight blackened flavour like that of an oreo. it’s like two chocolate bars in one, definitely handy for sharing with a sugar-junkie kid due home from school any minute now.