Melting chocolate

I love any recipe where I have to melt chocolate. There is a fantastic cookie recipe in the Hummingbird book where you melt dark chocolate and then stir in the rest of the ingredients, and I love making caramel shortcake as just melting the chocolate for the topping is so satisfying.

I was recently sent some goodies from Thorntons to use in my baking:

Some milk chocolate buttons (ideal for melting as they had extra cocoa butter in them), 85% dark chocolate, milk chocolate with orange and cardamom, and some chocolate marzipan (although I have just been eating this and not using it in anything!).

I used the milk chocolate buttons to make these caramel shortbreads. The chocolate melted so well- I think small buttons melt easier than big chunks anyway, but it did go really smooth.

Earlier in the week I made some fudge (as a thank you to the people who helped me raise money for The British Heart Foundation). I went for my peanut butter fudge recipe, with some almond extract, swapped dark chocolate chunks for the white chocolate, and topped with a few cocoa nibs for extra crunch.

The dark chocolate was quite bitter (in a good way), so it went with the sweet fudge really well. I have not used the orange and cardamom chocolate yet, but I can imagine that the flavours so well together, so maybe some sort of spiced orange loaf cake? I was impressed with the range of chocolates from Thorntons, I have not looked at their chocolate for ages, but they have some more unusual flavours now (they do one with salted pistachios, and dark chocolate with salted macadamias which I think sounds amazing) . You can see the dark chocolate available from Thorntons here.

What is your favourite chocolate recipe?

* In conjunction with Thorntons.