Melt Chocolates

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03/11/2026

Did the Italians invent the perfect hot chocolate? 🍫☕

In Turin, they created something extraordinary.

Bicerin. A luxurious combination of rich chocolate, espresso and cream that has been enjoyed for centuries.

But the secret is in the layers.

Rather than mixing everything together, the chocolate, coffee and cream create a contrast of temperatures, textures and flavours.

Think of it as drinking a tiramisu, except Bicerin's history stretches back even further.

And now you can learn to make it yourself.

Join us at Melt Chocolates in Notting Hill for our Hot Chocolate Making Experience, where our expert chocolatiers will guide you through two extraordinary chocolate traditions.

🍫 Make an Aztec-inspired hot chocolate with cacao and warming spices.

☕ Create your own indulgent Italian Bicerin with chocolate, coffee and cream.

🌍 Taste exceptional single-origin chocolates and discover the history of cacao.

Book our Hot Chocolate Making Experience in Notting Hill, London, now. Link in bio.

Have you started thinking about your Christmas tablescape yet? 🎄🍫From beautiful place settings to those little finishing...
03/11/2026

Have you started thinking about your Christmas tablescape yet? 🎄🍫

From beautiful place settings to those little finishing touches, Christmas is all about creating a table that feels special.

And what better finishing touch than luxury handmade chocolates?

Whether it’s a box of artisan bonbons to share after dinner, chocolate-covered orange peels for a festive treat, or beautifully packaged chocolates waiting at each place setting, Melt brings a little extra indulgence to your Christmas table. ✨

Handmade in London using exceptional ingredients and presented in elegant, plastic-free packaging, our Christmas chocolates are designed to look just as beautiful as they taste.

Discover Melt’s luxury Christmas chocolate collection and make your festive table even sweeter. Shop via the link in our bio. 🎁

FestiveTablescape MeltChocolates

02/11/2026

Why would a chocolate company remove one of chocolate's most important ingredients? 🍫

The answer is simple. Cost.

Cocoa butter is the natural fat found inside cacao beans, and it's responsible for some of the things we love most about chocolate.

🍫 That beautiful glossy finish
🍫 The satisfying snap when you break a bar
🍫 The smooth, luxurious melt in your mouth

But cocoa butter is also one of chocolate's most valuable ingredients.

So some manufacturers use cheaper vegetable fats to create what's known as compound chocolate.

These alternative fats can reduce ingredient costs and simplify production, because many compound coatings don't require the same careful tempering process as traditional chocolate.

But there's a trade-off.

Different fats melt at different temperatures, which can completely change the way chocolate feels in your mouth.

And that's actually where our name comes from.

Melt Chocolates.

Because we believe one of chocolate's greatest pleasures is that extraordinary melt-in-your-mouth sensation.

It's why we use real cocoa butter in our chocolate, rather than replacing it with cheaper vegetable fats.

Sometimes the most important ingredient is the one you don't notice until it's gone.

Follow for more surprising facts about chocolate and what goes into making it.

30/10/2026

Did you know our Portobello Advent Calendar contains 4 different chocolate flavours? 🍫🎄

Behind its 24 beautifully illustrated doors, discover delicious handmade chocolates in four irresistible combinations:

🍫 Milk Chocolate with Biscoff

🤎 Blonde Chocolate with Pecan Praline

🤍 White Chocolate with Peanut Praline

🍓 Strawberry Chocolate with Hazelnut Praline

But there’s more hiding behind the doors than chocolate…

Inspired by the colourful houses of London’s iconic Portobello Market, our bestselling Advent Calendar also reveals a magical Christmas story as you count down to the big day.

Follow Ben and his extraordinary Blubber Monster Dad on a festive adventure filled with flying, laughter and plenty of green slime!

Praised by BBC Good Food, it’s 24 days of chocolate, storytelling and Christmas magic for the whole family.

Discover the Portobello Advent Calendar and make every December morning a little more magical. ✨

29/10/2026

Is dark chocolate actually a better superfood than blueberries? 🫐🍫

Blueberries have a reputation for being one of the ultimate antioxidant-rich foods.

But dark chocolate might give them some serious competition.

High-cacao dark chocolate contains:

🍫 Polyphenols: Naturally occurring plant compounds with antioxidant properties.

🌱 Fibre: Cacao solids contain dietary fibre, meaning high-percentage dark chocolate can provide a surprising amount.

🩸 A potentially lower glycaemic impact: Dark chocolate with very little added sugar generally has a lower glycaemic index than many sugary snacks.

And because cacao is so rich in plant compounds, it can score exceptionally highly in laboratory tests of antioxidant capacity.

Of course, antioxidant scores don’t directly tell us how beneficial a food will be in the body, and chocolate is also energy-dense.

But it does raise an interesting question…

If you were ranking superfoods, would dark chocolate make your top five?

Follow for more surprising facts about chocolate, nutrition and the science of cacao.

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21/10/2026

Why can’t you just add milk to chocolate? 🥛🍫

It sounds like the simplest recipe imaginable.

Chocolate + milk = milk chocolate.

Except there’s a problem.

Ordinary milk contains a lot of water, and melted chocolate really doesn’t like water.

Add liquid milk directly and the chocolate can quickly seize, turning from smooth and glossy into a thick, grainy mass.

This is part of what made creating a stable solid milk chocolate such a technical challenge.

The breakthrough was finding ways to dramatically reduce the water content of the milk, with concentrated milk and later milk powder becoming important tools in milk chocolate production.

Sometimes the simplest-looking foods have the most complicated science behind them.

Watch We Make Milk Chocolate Through Time on YouTube now. Link in bio.

ChocolateThroughTime MeltChocolates

20/10/2026

Why can't some chocolate products legally be called chocolate? 🍫👀

Because not everything that tastes like chocolate meets the legal definition.

In the US, milk chocolate must contain at least 10% chocolate liquor, while semisweet and bittersweet chocolate must contain at least 35%.

In the UK, milk chocolate generally requires at least 25% total cocoa solids, although certain categories have different requirements.

So when you see a product labelled "chocolate flavoured" rather than simply "chocolate", it's worth checking the ingredients.

You might find sugar, cocoa butter and emulsifiers with some rather complicated names.

One of them is **polyglycerol polyricinoleate**, better known as PGPR.

Despite its intimidating name, PGPR is an approved food emulsifier used to help chocolate and confectionery coatings flow more easily during manufacturing.

It isn't inherently unsafe, but it does reveal something about how industrial confectionery is made.

And it raises an interesting question:

How much cacao should something contain before we call it chocolate?

Follow for more surprising facts about chocolate, its ingredients and the science behind what we're eating.

19/10/2026

Why can't you just add milk to chocolate? 🥛🍫

It sounds like the simplest recipe in the world.

But when you add ordinary milk to melted chocolate, something unexpected happens.

The chocolate can turn into a thick, grainy mess.

That's because **milk contains a huge amount of water**, and even a small amount of water can cause melted chocolate to seize.

So how did we end up with the smooth, creamy milk chocolate bars we know today?

It took a series of extraordinary inventions.

🍫 Coenraad van Houten helped revolutionise cocoa processing in the Netherlands.

🥛 Henri Nestlé developed milk-processing technology that helped make milk chocolate possible.

🇨🇭 Daniel Peter spent years experimenting before successfully producing solid milk chocolate in Switzerland.

Together, these breakthroughs helped solve one of chocolate making's biggest challenges: combining milk and cacao into a stable, smooth bar.

Something that sounds incredibly simple actually took decades of innovation.

Watch We Make Milk Chocolate Through Time on YouTube now. Link in bio.

15/10/2026

This invention changed chocolate forever. 🍫

Before modern chocolate bars existed, cacao was much harder to process into the products we recognise today.

Then came a Dutch chocolate maker named Coenraad van Houten.

In the 19th century, the Van Houten family helped transform chocolate manufacturing through two important innovations:

🍫 The cocoa press, which separated much of the cocoa butter from cacao, leaving a solid cake that could be ground into cocoa powder.

🍫 Dutch processing, which treated cocoa with an alkaline solution to reduce acidity, darken its colour and create a milder flavour.

These developments helped make cocoa easier to process and more widely accessible, paving the way for the modern chocolate industry.

But there was a trade-off.

Alkalisation can significantly reduce the levels of cocoa flavanols, naturally occurring compounds found in cacao.

So one of chocolate's biggest technological breakthroughs also changed its chemistry.

Without innovations like these, the chocolate industry we know today would look very different.

Follow for more surprising facts about chocolate's history, science and the inventions that changed what we eat.

13/10/2026

Still thinking about the Notting Hill Advent House? Enjoy 25 days of fresh, handmade chocolates inside our limited-edition, plastic-free Christmas calendar. Make your countdown one to remember and order yours today.

05/10/2026

Where does some of the world's most expensive and delicious chocolate begin? 🍫🌿

For us, one answer lies in Peru, where the Amazon meets the Andes and remarkable varieties of cacao have been cultivated for generations.

Among them is Chuncho cacao, renowned for its genetic diversity and complex flavour.

This region sits within the wider story of cacao's ancient South American origins, where archaeological evidence shows humans were using cacao thousands of years ago.

And that diversity matters.

Different cacao genetics, landscapes and generations of cultivation can produce dramatically different aromas and flavours in the finished chocolate.

It's why understanding chocolate means going right back to where the cacao grows.

A huge thank you to for showing us where this incredible Chuncho cacao grows and helping us explore the story behind it. 🌱

And this journey has inspired something new...

Our Inca Chocolate Bar is coming soon. Follow to be the first to know when it's released.

02/10/2026

Milk chocolate has a history that begins long before the chocolate bar. 🍫🥛

In 1655, England invaded Jamaica, then a Spanish colony. During the conflict, enslaved Africans who had been forced to work on the island’s plantations and cattle ranches escaped into the mountains. Many joined the resistance and established free Maroon communities.

These communities used their knowledge of the land and locally available foods to survive and resist colonial forces.

Cacao was one of those foods.

Historical accounts from 17th-century Jamaica describe chocolate being prepared with milk and water, long before Sir Hans Sloane popularised his medicinal chocolate drink in Britain.

The precise origins of milk chocolate are difficult to establish, but the contributions of enslaved Africans and Caribbean communities have too often been overlooked.

For our Chocolate Through Time series, we’ve created a historically inspired recipe called Maroon Mountain Cocoa Milk, using ingredients that would have been available in Jamaica, including cacao, milk, allspice and other local foods.

It’s a reconstruction, not a surviving original recipe, but it helps us explore a history of chocolate shaped by resistance, survival and cultural exchange.

Watch the full video, We Make Milk Chocolate Through Time, on YouTube now. Link in bio.

FoodHistory ChocolateThroughTime MeltChocolates

29/09/2026

For the person dreaming of a chocolate-filled Christmas…

Give them 24 days of fresh artisan chocolates hidden inside Melt’s Alpine-inspired Log Cabin.

Handmade in London, completely plastic-free and named one of BBC Good Food’s Best Advent Calendars of 2025.

A Christmas gift that gives them something to look forward to every single morning.

25/09/2026

Chocolate's greatest enemy isn't heat.

It's water. 💧🍫

You can have a perfectly smooth bowl of melted chocolate, add just a small amount of water and suddenly watch it turn thick and grainy.

Why?

Chocolate contains lots of fat but very little water. When a small amount of water is introduced, it can dissolve some of the sugar on the surface of the particles, causing them to clump together.

The chocolate **seizes**.

And this helps explain one of the problems early chocolate makers faced when trying to create solid milk chocolate.

Fresh milk contains a huge amount of water.

The solution was finding ways to dramatically reduce that moisture, eventually allowing milk and chocolate to be combined into the smooth solid bars we recognise today.

Sometimes understanding chocolate comes down to surprisingly simple chemistry. 🍫

Watch *We Make Milk Chocolate Through Time* on YouTube now. Link in bio.

Address

59 Ledbury Road
London
W112AA

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 6:30pm
Tuesday 10am - 6:30pm
Wednesday 10am - 6:30pm
Thursday 10am - 6:30pm
Friday 10am - 6:30pm
Saturday 10am - 6:30pm
Sunday 11am - 5pm

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