Head Pastry Chef at Coworth Park, Simon Jenkins, has created a unique chocolate concept for guests dining in John Campbell at Coworth Park, the country house hotel and spa’s fine-dining offering.
As one of very few hotels in the country to have its own chocolate room within the kitchen, the pastry team are in the unique position of being able to make and blend their own chocolate. A stylish presentation board featuring a selection of hand-crafted petit-fours will be offered at the end of a meal, providing an interactive experience and marking the final punctuation of dinner in John Campbell at Coworth Park.
Jenkins and his team work tirelessly with flavours and blends to come up with the unique chocolates offered on the presentation board. With each individual chocolate, their aim is to create something different yet subtle. One of the most popular creations is a blackcurrant jelly topped with a Manjari ganache, a Valrhona produced chocolate with slight acidic notes that blend perfectly with the fruitiness of the blackcurrant.
Coworth Park’s signature chocolate is a ‘Hay Chocolate’ created especially for the hotel and made using hay cut from Coworth Park’s meadow. The hay is sterilised, dried out and sent to a local chocolate-maker who was commissioned to come up with something that reflected the hotel’s natural rural landscape. The result is a beautiful milk chocolate married with saffron and with hay and rose tones. Guests can find the Hay Chocolate on the presentation board or in the Hay Chocolate dessert, a chocolate mousse with saffron jelly, a malt puree and a sour sop sorbet topped with saffron foam. The dessert is a true blend of flavours, a recurring philosophy throughout the culinary offerings at Coworth Park.
The use of chocolate is not only confined to the creation of desserts and petit-fours at Coworth Park. ‘Chocolate has become a far more important flavour in recent year,’ says Jenkins. ‘Chefs view it as a more versatile product these days and the more that they progress the more it is recognised as a key ingredient not only for desserts but for main dishes also. Chocolate works particularly well with gamey meats such as venison and hare for example.’
- Coworth Park
Coworth Park is a 70-room luxury country house hotel set in 240 acres of picturesque Berkshire parkland just 45 minutes from central London and 20 minutes from Heathrow airport. Its location, unrivalled in the UK for ease and convenience of its transport links, is also enhanced by its own helipad. The estate itself boasts an eco-luxury Spa at Coworth Park with indoor pool and three restaurants, including relaxed dining in The Barn and the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant overseen by Michelin-starred chef eponymously named, John Campbell at Coworth Park. The only UK hotel to feature its own polo fields, current facilities include stabling for 30 horses together with self-contained accommodation for grooms and a full programme of polo tournaments.
- Dorchester Collection
Dorchester Collection manages a portfolio of some of the world’s foremost luxury hotels in Europe and the USA. By applying its unrivalled experience and capability in owning and operating some of the world’s great individual hotels, the company’s vision is to become the ultimate hotel management company, with a passion for excellence and innovation, honouring the individuality and heritage of its iconic hotels. This will be achieved through acquisition as well as management of wholly owned and part-owned hotels. Dorchester Collection’s Chief Executive Christopher Cowdray has set out the company’s goal to have between 15-20 hotels by 2015.
The current portfolio includes:
The Dorchester, London
The Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills
Le Meurice, Paris
Hotel Plaza Athénée, Paris
Hotel Principe di Savoia, Milan
The New York Palace, New York
Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles (closed for refurbishment until October 2011)
Coworth Park, Ascot, UK
45 Park Lane, London (September 2011)