Chef cooks up a real taste of hot chocolate - in a Curry

A free-thinking food fan has combined two of Britain’s favourite tastes – chocolate and curry.

Paul Morris, who runs Ramsbottom’s Chocolate Cafe, has created a chicken tikka masala chocolate.

Paul said the café created the unique concoction after a suggestion from a customer on Twitter.

He said: "It is quite rich and creamy with a bit of heat.The chocolate really compliments the spices and acts like the yoghurt in the masala recipe.

"I just hope people will give it a try."

The curry, which will be sold in bars, has a shelf life of around two weeks, because it contains dried chicken.

It is made with fresh chicken which is freeze dried and added to coriander, cumin, all spice, ginger, tumeric, garam masla and cayenne pepper.

This is then added to the cafe’s signature milk chocolate, made with almost twice the amount of cocoa as the average bar.

Paul, who has been running the cafe for four years, has created it to mark Ramsbottom chocolate festival, which takes place on Saturday, March 31 and Sunday, April 1.

Last year’s event attracted around 27,000 people.

Paul, who creates a new chocolate every year to mark the festival, turned to Twitter to help him come up with new ideas.

He said: "People came back with suggestions of wild garlic – which tasted horrible when we tried it, winberries and rhubarb but we couldn’t source them locally."

"Then we asked people for things they associated with the north and people kept saying curries, Ramsbottom has great curry places and people go to the curry mile in Rusholme".

"We found out the most popular curry is chicken tikka masala and the most popular chocolate we sell is chilli so we knew the spices would work. "We’ve served Mexican Mole in the café before and that’s got chicken and chocolate and was really popular. I hope people will get past their preconceptions and give it a try".

The bar goes on sale on Monday, March 19 at £3.50 and all proceeds go towards the running of the chocolate festival.

Last year the café created an exploding bubble wrap chocolate and the year before a Manchester tart bar both of which proved a great success.

Source: Men Media