Melt Chocolates

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Melt Chocolates London's Most Luxurious Chocolate Boutique. Holland Park, Notting Hill, Selfridges, Kings Road

Handmade Chocolates from Notting Hill
Ship Globally - Stunning Designer Packaging (plastic-free)
Zero emissions electric van for same-day delivery in London
London's Most Luxurious Chocolates: Notting Hill, Selfridges, Kings Rd & Holland Park Boutiques.

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.

24/09/2026

What the hell is "milk chocolate flavour"? 🍫

In the US, a product has to meet specific standards before it can legally be labelled milk chocolate.

Under FDA rules, milk chocolate must contain at least 10% chocolate liquor, while products labelled semisweet or bittersweet chocolate must contain at least 35% chocolate liquor.

In the UK, the rules are different. Milk chocolate generally requires at least 25% total cocoa solids, although specific categories have different requirements.

So when you see something described as "milk chocolate flavoured" rather than simply "milk chocolate", it's worth turning the packet over and reading what is actually inside.

Sometimes what looks like chocolate isn't legally chocolate at all.

And that raises a bigger question:

How little cacao can you put into something before it stops being chocolate?

Follow for more chocolate facts, history and slightly obsessive investigations into what we're actually eating. 🍫

23/09/2026

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.

21/09/2026

Vanilla and chocolate were paired together long before Europeans ever tasted cacao. 🍫🌿

To recreate an early Mesoamerican chocolate drink, we're grinding cacao by hand into a paste, a physically demanding process that formed the foundation of traditional chocolate preparation.

The paste could then be mixed with water and flavoured with ingredients such as flowers, maize, achiote, chilli or vanilla.

For our version, we're adding fresh vanilla and a small amount of chilli.

Vanilla is native to Mexico, where the Totonac people cultivated it long before European contact. It later became part of the tribute demanded by the Mexica Empire.

So the relationship between cacao and vanilla isn't a modern invention. It's a pairing with centuries of history behind it.

Watch We Make 10 Chocolate Recipes Through Time on YouTube now. Link in bio.

19/09/2026

Is chocolate the most underrated psychoactive food on earth?

Cacao contains 600+ natural compounds, which is part of what makes its effects so unusual. Rather than doing one thing, cacao can influence multiple systems at once, supporting stimulation, relaxation, reward, energy, and circulation simultaneously.

That is why the experience of real cacao can feel so different from ordinary supermarket chocolate. Many mass-market products are dominated by sugar, emulsifiers, and flavourings, with lower cacao content and less of the original complexity intact.

High quality or ceremonial-style cacao retains more of the compounds naturally found in the bean, including theobromine, flavanols, and mood-related molecules that can subtly shift how you feel.

Chocolate is not a drug in the conventional sense, but it is clearly psychoactive. It can alter mood, attention, and bodily state in measurable ways.

The difference is that great cacao tends to do this with balance rather than intensity.

Follow for more stories behind chocolate.

18/09/2026

If it’s called hazelnut spread, shouldn’t it taste primarily of hazelnuts? 🌰🍫

Look at the ingredients in Nutella and the first one isn’t hazelnuts.

It’s sugar.

So we decided to reverse the idea.

Our spread is made with 55% hazelnuts, combined with high-quality chocolate, real vanilla and olive oil.

And when you taste the two side by side, the difference is immediately noticeable.

One is dominated by sweetness.

The other puts the deep, roasted flavour of the hazelnuts at the centre.

Which raises a pretty simple question…

What should a hazelnut spread actually taste like?

🌰 Our 55% Hazelnut Spread is available to buy online now. Shop via the link in our bio.

FineChocolate MeltChocolates

Address

London

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

Telephone

+442083544504

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