Choosing a Chocolate Gift

Chocolate is the default gift, which is exactly why it is easy to send a forgettable one. It is also the gift most likely to arrive in poor condition, for reasons of geography.

Here is how to choose well, and how to get it there intact.

Milk, dark or white

The only choice that really matters, and the one people guess at.

Milk is the safe send. If you do not know someone's preference, this is the percentage play, and there is nothing unsophisticated about it.

Dark divides people sharply. Anyone who loves it really loves it, and anyone who does not will not eat the box. Send dark only when you know, and if you do know, go properly dark rather than the 55% middle ground that satisfies nobody.

White is the most polarising of the three. Lovely for someone who wants it, essentially inedible to a dark chocolate drinker. Never the whole gift for someone you do not know well.

The way around all of this is an assortment, which is why most of our chocolate hampers are mixed rather than single-type.

Truffles, blocks or coated nuts

Format changes how a gift is eaten, and therefore how it is remembered.

Truffles read as a treat and get eaten deliberately, often shared. The most gift-like format.

Blocks are for someone specific with a known favourite. As a gift to a stranger they read as something bought at a service station.

Chocolate coated nuts and fruit are the quiet winner. They last longer than truffles, they go out on a table when people visit, and they suit someone who finds a box of truffles too rich to get through.

Sending chocolate in an Australian summer

The part nobody mentions until it has gone wrong.

Chocolate softens at around 30 degrees and there is no courier network on earth that keeps a parcel below that in a Queensland December. A box sitting in a van, or on a doorstep in afternoon sun, is going to have a hard time.

What actually helps:

• Send to a workplace rather than a house between Monday and Friday in summer. Someone takes it inside within the hour.
• Order early in the week. A Thursday or Friday dispatch risks a weekend in a depot.
• Choose a mixed hamper over a pure chocolate one in the hottest months. If the chocolate has a difficult trip, the rest of the box still lands.
• Tell them it is coming if they are at home. Ten minutes on a doorstep in January is the difference.

If chocolate softens and re-sets it develops a pale bloom on the surface. It looks wrong and it is completely safe to eat, though it will not have the same snap. Worth knowing before anyone throws a box out.

What to send

All in stock at the time of writing.

• Sweet Chocolate Hamper. Cacao Boutique hot chocolate, Belgian Marc de Champagne truffles, milk chocolate almonds, cookies and biscuits. The straightforward one, and the safest for someone whose taste you do not know.
• Ultimate Chocolate Gift Box. Cacao Boutique throughout: chocolate coated peanuts, almonds and raspberries, hot chocolate and caramel chocolate popcorn. The one for a serious chocolate person.
• Celebrate Shiraz & Chocolates Gift Box. A Chocolatier assortment with a bottle of Shiraz. Dark chocolate and Shiraz is a better pairing than most people expect.
• Box of Treats Hamper. Chocolate alongside savoury, for a household rather than an individual, and the more robust choice in hot weather.
• Luxury Moet Hamper. Marc de Champagne truffles with champagne and a Barossa Shiraz, for when the occasion warrants it.

The full range is in chocolate hampers.