Bars you can judge by their cover

A chocolate correspondent’s life is, one might fancy, glamorous. I try to pretend it is but, right now it isn’t. I’m alone in a hotel room having traversed town, eating dinner en route: a pretzel torn straight from its paper bag.

In front of me sit the spoils of a few days of chocolate hunting. These include three of the prettiest bars I’ve seen for a long time by Creighton’s, an all-women, UK-based chocolatier. I’m struggling to keep our relationship professional (just a nibble to taste and note) and not eat the whole lot out of sheer loneliness.

I struggled to decide which bars to buy because the wrappers are distractingly pretty: colourful, playful, with crackly paper linings (shame about the outer plastic wrapping, though, which seems superfluous) and all the names invited purchase: Jammy Hearts, Botanic Refresh, Cherry Amour, Coffee and Crumbs, to name three.

Craft chocolate this definitely ain’t (no bean origin is given, the couverture comes from Belgium). I chose three (£4.75/100g each): Custard Cream – couldn’t resist it as I love the biscuits of the same name – was every bit as sickly sweet as you imagine a white chocolate with smashed up biscuit in it to be. Not my thing, but if white chocolate is yours you’ll probably love it.

However, I liked Sweet and Salty, a 53% dark chocolate with bits of salty pretzel in (I was obviously in a pretzel mood). The fabulously named Jaffa Snaffler was 54% cocoa chocolate with – again – bits of biscuit and orange jelly in. And, yes, it really did taste like a Jaffa Cake.