National Chocolate Day is a great chance to celebrate wonderful treat

Hats off to the genius who decided to mark this occasion at the end of a potentially depressing month.

There’s archaeological evidence that the Olmec tribe in Mexico were eating chocolate around 1900BC. The ground beans are bitter and unpleasant in their natural state and need fat and sugar to make them delicious and palatable. It was a man from Northern Ireland who was the first to discover that adding the dark chocolate to milk transformed it into a drink that could be enjoyed. Hans Sloane, from Killyleagh, was physician to the governor of Jamaica, the 2nd Duke of Albemarle, from 1685. He noticed that the Jamaican people drank the beans with hot water but the liquid was nauseating. We have him to thank that he had the good sense to add it to sweet milk and the hot chocolate drink was born.

The Quaker families, Cadbury and Fry were the first to introduce chocolate bars in the mix 19th century. Nowadays we enjoy 605,000 tonnes annually in the UK. While sugar laden milk chocolate isn’t exactly nutritious, dark chocolate with a cocoa percentage of over 70% is actually good for you. The great news is that a 100g bar contains 67% of the daily recommended intake of iron, 58% of magnesium and plenty of potassium, zinc and selenium – vital for mental health and immune system boosters. A small square of good dark chocolate actually works quite well as an appetite represent if eaten before a meal. My problem is I have a couple after the meal too……

To celebrate this cheery day you could bake a deliciously simple chocolate sponge but my first recipe is for molten chocolate cakes with a hot white chocolate sauce. These cakes often feature on the Masterchef TV programme and much is made of how tricky they can be. This particular recipe calls for chocolate truffles to be poked into the mixture half way through cooking. Normally the molten part comes from the chocolate cake mix but this is a more fool proof method. Mix it up a bit by adding different flavoured truffles. They’re served with a white chocolate sauce but you could add a scoop or two of chocolate icecream for a bit of pure decadence.

The other recipe this week is for chocolate meringue cake layered with a vanilla and raspberry cream. This recipe came to mind when I was cleaning out a drawer in the freezer this week and discovered an assortment of bags of frozen raspberries. There was very little in any of them and they’d broken up – so ideal to mix in to sweetened mascarpone and cream for a zingy note to the sweet crunchy meringue.

National Chocolate Cake Day? The perfect antidote to all the Veganuary nonsense.