Six chocolatey vegan treats I can't get enough of

The other day, Mr Flicking the Vs came over and presented me with this little gem:

It is one of my favourite things in the world: a previously unknown vegan treat. It is an Eat Chic peanut butter cup - whose virtues I have waxed lyrical about on more than one occasion - but it's not just any Eat Chic peanut butter cup. It is an Eat Chic raspberry jam and peanut butter cup, and that is an even better thing.

It's better because it's got all the lovely richness of dark chocolate and nuts, but there's now a sharpness that cuts through that richness. You couldn't eat two of them, but you'll be so full of joy by the end of the first one, you won't need a second one.

It wasn't the only raspberry and chocolate combination that went in my face recently. There was also this:

There's raspberry jelly on the bottom, chocolate pudding on the top, and chocolate shavings to try and make it look like I actually did something in the kitchen. This was a cheat's treat - the jelly just involved adding water, the pudding similarly only needed some non-dairy milk. If I could have got someone to grate the chocolate for me, I would have done that too.

In other news of things I've been loving recently, here's the last of my Choices caramels. I love those guys. Sadly, they've stopped stocking them at my local supermarket, so let's just have a minute's silence for the disappearing chocolate caramels. Long may they live in my memory.

Another very pleasing box of chocolates that I've been shovelling in my gob recently is Beech's dark chocolate brazils. 

I came across Beech's at VegFest in London this year, where they were selling some of their lovely vegan wares for - if my choc-addled memory serves right - three boxes for £10. Clearly, if you don't take anyone selling three boxes of chocolate loveliness for less than a round in most pubs, you're in need of some professional help. I availed myself of said offer, picking up these brazils, because 1) I love chocolate brazils better than some members of my own family and 2) I don't think I've seen any other vegan brands. 

Beech's full name is Beech's fine chocolates, and yes, I can confirm they are fiiiiiiiiiiiiine. If you want to see Beech's full vegan range, get yourself over to the vegan page on their website.

And because I need to pretend that I don't just eat sweets and chocolate, I sort of tried to get some raw chocolate to counterbalance the less virtuous goodies.

Here's the raw chocolate brownie I tried wth Himalayan rose salt. I love salt in my cakes - salted caramel and the like - so I was a sucker for these. It was a bit of a jaw work out to get it eaten, but I couldn't complain about the dark, grownup chocolaty flavour going on.

These little beauties were something of a revelation to me - Délice de Chanvre. Now, my French is a bit rusty these days, and I'd always translated délice de chanvre to mean goat's milk, and mentally filed these under the non-vegan section. Only chanvre is hemp (it's chèvre that's goat!) On browsing my local health food store, I spotted the Sojade label, went for a second look, and was really pleased to see these bad boys are vegan.

I don't eat a lot of hemp, but I would if it all tasted like this...

As you can probably guess from this post raving woozily about the joys of vegan chocolate goods, I've kind of lost my cooking mojo. I just can't get into cooking these days - I can barely warm over some soup, or maybe something on toast. This is a most distressing state of affairs. Any tips on how to restore the cooking love?