You’ll have to excuse my photography. This post was a bit of a last minute idea and this is just a quick snap from my phone.

Sometimes, I think rice cakes are the devil’s work. Those times are generally when some well meaning soul gives me two or three plain rice cakes and calls them ‘gluten free bread’, as happened to me this weekend. I was in France for a wedding, and having suffered watching my friends tuck into delicious pastries and croissants for breakfast each morning, I get given plain rice cakes with my meal with the texture of polystyrene packing chips and nothing to put on them. Depressing, to say the least. Not that there isn’t an abundance of lovely bread-less gluten free food available in Bordeaux, it’s just that I had to have ‘that conversation’ before every meal in what remains of my A-level French. (Thankfully, only a very minor cross contamination occurred over the weekend, and I came away largely unscathed.)

For me, rice cakes signify disappointing gluten free food and are always a last resort… Unless they’re covered in chocolate, it turns out. A very strange transformation occurs to a rice cake when it is coated in chocolate.

I was in a motorway services a few weeks ago when I came across a small pack of dark chocolate coated rice cakes. I’ll be honest – they were on one of those racks of goodies that you have to meander past whilst waiting for the checkout. I figured I deserved a snack as the rest of the family were eating biscuits, so I succumbed. Not the sort of thing I’d usually buy, but I have to say, I was rather pleasantly surprised.

These Kallo rice cakes in the picture are not the motorway services ones, but some I picked up in Sainsbury’s on Monday. These lured me by the cute owl and the promise of Belgian dark chocolate (their branding is really nicely done). There are 8 squares of rice cakes, with rounded corners, and a thin topping of rather good quality dark chocolate. The clever thing is that the rice cakes are thin enough that you don’t feel you’ve got a mouth full of polystyrene but it gives a nice crunch when you bite into it. And the chocolate is spread just the right thickness (for me) so I enjoy it without feeling guilty.

I try to be very careful with sugar, but a bit of dark chocolate here and there seems reasonable to me! Each rice cake contains 2.6g of sugar, which is quite tiny compared with a biscuit or a raw food bar. Well done Kallo!

The only problem now, is that the packet is open downstairs, and it’s calling to me.