Meet Northern Ireland's highly talented chocolatiers

Most of the chocolatiers have also had their commitment to outstanding flavours recognised in international competitions including the annual UK Great Taste Awards.

Deirdre McCanny, for instance, is collected a string of awards from the prestigious Academy of Chocolate for her delicate truffles and bars. Northern Ireland’s best-known artisan chocolatier, Deirdre runs Co Couture in Belfast and has also picked a host of Great Taste Awards from the influential UK Guild of Fine Food.

She’s a trained and experienced chef who has been handcrafting a wide range of chocolates in small batches since 2008.

“Winning Academy of Chocolate awards is a tremendous endorsement of the quality, originality and, above all, taste of my chocolates,” she said.

Shane Neary, a graphic designer, runs quirky Neary Nogs in Newry with Dorothy, his American born wife. Founded in their home kitchen in 2014, Neary Nogs is the first chocolatier here to create a gluten-free bar handcrafted from cocoa beans. Originally from Seattle, Dorothy brought the chocolate recipes from the US. All the flavours are developed by at their small production unit at Flurrybridge in Co. Down.

The stone-ground chocolate features single origin cocoa beans from Ecuador and is part of an unusal portfolio of 30 handmade soft chocolates in unusual flavours such as lemon and green tea, toasted walnut, mojito macha, almond nut buttercup and cardamom and clove.

“We are certainly the first bean-to-bar producer here and only the second in Ireland. It’s quite a skill turning small batches of cocoa beans into chocolate for moulding and bagging,” said Shane.

Neary Nogs, which began as an initiative to raise funds for a local charity, imports cocoa beans for roasting, shelling, cracking and winnowing to produce cocoa nibs. “We then grind the nibs by hand to create a paste for use in producing the bars with a 70 per cent cocoa content,” he added.

What led Lurgan-based Caroline McArdle, another graphic designer, to launch Cobden and Brown, was a desire to enable her son, a coeliac, to enjoy chocolate treats. She began making chocolates for him in her kitchen and then faced approaches from family, friends and other contacts seeking to taste her chocolates.

Caroline then decided to launch the artisan business focusing on a range of chocolate bars that she now sells throughout Northern Ireland under the Cobden and Brown banner. She hasn’t looked back since setting up the small business in 2011.

“It’s a very competitive market dominated by longer established brands with huge marketing budgets. I reckoned the only way I could hope to compete was to promote the quality, outstanding taste and handcrafted nature of my products,” she said.

In addition to being gluten-free, the chocolates are free from wheat and eggs. The dark chocolate is also dairy-free. Another key feature of the chocolates is that they are free of any processed ingredients.

They are carefully handmade in small batches to recipes that she has developed and are fully tested as being gluten-free by a fully accredited laboratory.

Saintfield’s Ann McCandless is used to dealing with tough challenges. She spent most of her life working in overseas development with ’Third World’ charities such as Save the Children and War on Want, much of the time tackling poverty and malnutrition in refugee camps in Sudan, Somalia, Tanzania and Guatemala.

“Working in the camps with very limited medical provision for example certainly toughens you up. It taught me to be self-sufficient and reinforced one of my great qualities, being a self-starter. Times were usually tough and the conditions often difficult” she explained.

She could have decided to put her feet up in retirement but decided instead to start her own small business in Saintfield. It was based on her love of cooking and especially chocolates. In June 2012, Ann opened Norr & Brown to make delicious handcrafted chocolate truffles and celebration cakes in a home she had bought for retirement. Norr & Brown identity is taken from the Christian names of her parents.

She took a chocolate course at Belfast Metropolitan College before converting her garage into a small production unit shop and kitted-out a production unit. Her rural roots influenced her commitment to use only the best local ingredients with provenance in making the chocolates, celebration cakes and pastries.

The business also makes its own quality ingredients such as the honeycomb used in the truffles and ice cream.