Chocolates made of Dorset cheese

By Sue Paz BBC Dorset

The wife of a leading Dorset cheesemaker is making wedding cakes out of the business' cheese and decorating them with cheese chocolates.

Tanys Pullin, of Ford Farm in Litton Cheney, used to work as a Cordon Bleu Chef in London.

For his birthday her husband, Mike, the Managing Director of the farm, asked her to make him chocolate covered cheeses.

Since then she has been concocting many different combinations.

'Like cheesecake'

Tanys said: "We had lots of different flavours of cheese and my husband thought it would be really nice to put chocolate around them.

A batch of 20 chocolates can take up to two hours to make

"Savoury often goes very well with sweet.

"Mixing the two, cuts the fat in the chocolate, and cuts the fat in the cheese, which makes a fantastic combination.

"I do a pyramid shape which has a smoked cheese, with sweet chilli and is coated in white, milk and dark chocolate.

"There's a square milk chocolate, with Wensleydale and cranberry.

"There are little port and Cheddar round cheeses, with dark chocolate and dusted in cocoa.

"I also use apricot with stilton and more rugged, mature cheeses in my chocolates too.

"The more creamy cheeses with chocolate, taste like cheesecake - they're for the less hardened pallet.

"The smoked cheeses are much more hardcore and for the real cheese buff."

Exclusively for Dorset

The process of making cheese chocolates can be quite time consuming and a batch of 20 can often take Tanys up to two hours.

She said: "First I melt the chocolate and drizzle it into a chocolate mould, then it goes into the freezer to set.

"If I'm doing a tri-colour chocolate it has to set in the freezer each time I add a different colour chocolate - white, milk or dark.

The cheese comes from milk produced by 700 Dorset cows

"Once the chocolate is set I put the cheese on top and then I put more melted chocolate on top of that.

"It goes into the freezer to set for the last time before I pop it out and it looks just like a 'normal' chocolate."

Tanys supplies her cheese wedding cakes and cheese chocolates exclusively to people in the Dorset area.

She said: "They can say to their friends, 'the cheese rounds that make up the wedding cake tiers come from Dorset, and the lady at the farm where it's made created the cake, and the cheese chocolate decorations'.

"We're all for sourcing food locally. It's all about traceability.

"We know where our milk comes from - from one of 700 cows on our estate farms."

If you are unsure whether you would like the combination of chocolate and cheese, Tanys has this advice for you:

"Just make some cheese on toast, with your favourite variety, and then drizzle some melted chocolate on the top, and give it a try.

"It really is delicious!"