Twelve Stork chocolate eggs

These hand painted chocolate eggs are things of real beauty. The box contains 12 eggs and each delicate sugar shell is filled a milk chocolate salted caramel ganache.

Now, obviously, these are not the size of real stork eggs. But buying them will help some real-life storks, specifically those on the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. There had been no storks in Britain for over 600 years until, in 2016, the White Stork Project started a programme of reintroduction. The first chick hatched at Knepp in 2020 at the top of an oak tree. Knepp is a trailblazing re-wilding project, of which the storks form just a small part of the biodiverse jigsaw.

All of The Chocolate Detective’s range is either produced or sourced by founder Chantal Coady, a woman so committed to good chocolate that she’s been awarded with an OBE. These eggs are made by a French manufacturer: as a small producer Chantal doesn’t have the technology to make the thin sugar shells but she has been working with them for 40 years. The beans are responsibly sourced from Ecuador and are full traceable. Chantal’s business model aims to keep more of the business of chocolate, and therefore more of the money, in the country’s where the beans originate.

Weight: 150 g

Dimensions: 13 × 10 × 4 cm

Ingredients: Sugar, cocoa mass, caramel 12% (sugar, water, dextrose), concentrated butter (MILK), cocoa butter, whole MILK powder, glucose syrup, enrobing agents (gum arabic, carnauba wax, beeswax, shellac), starches, emulsifier: SOYA lecithin, ‘fleur de sel’ salt, natural vanilla flavouring, colouring ingredients (safflower, lemon, radish, blackcurrant and apple concentrates, BARLEY malt extract and E150c).

Nutritional Information (per 100g): Energy 482 kcal, Fat 24g of which saturates 15g, Carbohydrates 61g of which sugars 58g, Protein 3.9g, Salt 0.18g.