NATURAL INDULGENCE
Charlotte Flower captures the taste of the Highlands in her chocolates with unique foraged flavours
Breaking off a piece of chocolate, Charlotte Flower holds it out. “This one tastes of a bright spring morning in a Scottish woodland,” she says. And she’s right. As it melts onto the tongue, the initial dark chocolate hit makes way for a fresh, sweet and undeniably evergreen taste. But it’s hardly surprising, as this variety is infused with the young shoots of Scots pine, collected during one of Charlotte’s daily foraging walks along the wild Falls of Acharn behind her house.
Charlotte has been producing handmade chocolates using ingredients gathered on the banks of Loch Tay, between the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Parks, for nine years now. But although her business, Charlotte Flower Chocolates, has won a string of awards for its innovative flavours, it’s an unexpected chapter in her working life. In fact, her previous career was as a forester and ecologist, taking her all over the world from Nepal to Namibia.
It was her partner Adam’s job working for WWF, whose headquarters were nearby, that eventually brought her to this part of Scotland in 2000. They settled in a Victorian schoolhouse amid craggy Highland hills and Charlotte worked from home for an anti-poverty charity. But when this role came to an end seven years later, she began looking for something that would enable her to not just work within but utilise her remarkable surroundings, too.
“I’ve always been a forager, nibbling my way along woodland walks, and, like most people, I’ve always liked chocolate, but it was only when Adam brought back a box of them from Brussels that I had the idea to combine the two,” she says. It was no ordinary box, either, but a selection from renowned chocolatier Pierre Marcolini: “Before I tasted them, my idea of ‘proper’ chocolate had been Bendicks Bittermints. But these were filled with fresh cream ganache and inspired by flavours such as basil and olive oil. It was then the idea came to me: I wanted to find out if the wild flavours of Scotland could work with chocolate.”
As spring progresses, Charlotte will be able to gather fragrant elderflower blossom. This will be followed by a summer bounty of meadowsweet and wild mint, then an autumn harvest of sloes, beech and hazelnuts. She also makes use of the fruits in her garden (and her neighbours’), transforming raspberries, cherries, plums and damsons into delicious fillings for her confections. All the ingredients are taken back to her chocolate-making kitchen, a dedicated room on the first floor of the house looking out across the fields. (“We had to convert one of the bedrooms a couple of years ago because the family got annoyed at me taking over the main kitchen all the time.”) Here, she chops today’s crop of shoots before tipping them into a simmering pan of melted cocoa butter. Popping on a lid, she leaves the mixture to infuse overnight. Once sieved and cooled, the infused cocoa butter will store for up to a year, enabling Charlotte to include the tastes of many seasons in one box of chocolates: “I keep flavour notes for each batch, but sometimes I’m not sure how helpful these are, as the natural product can vary so much from year to year. The
weather and even the time of day I pick things can all affect how intense the flavour is.”
Charlotte is accustomed to trial and error, though. Following her initial interest in chocolate making, she enrolled in a two-day course at Inverness College that covered the basics, but she was unable to attend the first day due to family commitments: “I spent the following year twisting and banging moulds on the table; I just couldn’t get them to come out properly. It transpired I wasn’t tempering the chocolate correctly. Of course, that was what I missed on day one!” Ten years later, Charlotte is still learning: “At first I was worried about melting the chocolate, but now I know the end result is more reliant on how it cools and sets, especially in the colder climate of Scotland.”
As well as infused chocolates, she also creates flavoured ganache fillings that are carefully piped into empty chocolate shells. This week she’s using freshly picked gorse petals, adding them to simmering double cream and leaving them to steep for an hour before sieving the mixture and melting in chocolate ‘buttons’. The liquid ganache is then whisked to a silky texture. “I leave the filled chocolates to set overnight because one of my early mistakes was to seal them the same day. The cooling ganache then pulled down the top layer of chocolate and cracked it,” explains Charlotte, whose attention to detail means she
“Wild garlic was subtler in a truffle – perfect to get your tastebuds going”
hand-polishes each of the tiny moulds to ensure there’s no residue that might affect the glossy finish.
Her previous work in forests around the world also means she is passionate about cocoa as a crop: “It has the most amazing potential to lift people out of subsistence farming, if only they are paid a fair price.” With this in mind, she sources ‘single origin’ chocolate from Colombia, Venezuela, Madagascar, Ecuador and Java, among other countries. Like wine, these each come with their own subtle character. Some are fruity, others nutty; some have spicy elements, others a soft vanilla touch – notes that Charlotte mixes with wild flavours for even more complex tastes.
She is always on the lookout for new combinations and spends hours experimenting – with varying degrees of success: “Clover and nasturtiums don’t seem to work. We get carpets of violets but I can’t get the flavour out of them. However, wild garlic was revelatory in a truffle – the perfect amuse-bouche to get your tastebuds going.”
Although she wants to broaden her range, Charlotte doesn’t intend to grow the business: “I use seasonal ingredients, which means they change from week to week. I can only respond so flexibly because I’m a small artisan business and want to produce something that has complete integrity. I’m not looking to make a fortune either. The continent is dotted with small-scale chocolatiers making the most of local ingredients. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have the same here?”
For more information on Charlotte’s products, visit charlotteflowerchocolates.com.