The Dessert Grazing Board: Australian Chocolate, Honeycomb & Salted Caramel
The savoury grazing board has had its decade. The dessert board is the encore — and it’s easier, because nothing needs cooking, slicing thinly, or keeping cold. You are arranging very good chocolate on a platter and accepting the credit.
Ours leans deliberately Australian: QQ La Praline’s Melbourne-made chocolate bars for the shards, Sophie Jade’s rocky road for the rubble, raw honey for the drizzle, and a jar of salted caramel flavour pearls — tiny bursting spheres that turn a plain bowl of mascarpone into the thing everyone photographs first. It doubles as a gift box you can eat, which is the only kind worth giving.
What you need
- 3–4 QQ La Praline chocolate bars (made in Melbourne) — the red gum honeycomb and hazelnut wafer are the crowd favourites
- Rocky road and coconut choc bites from the treats shelf
- 1 jar salted caramel flavour pearls
- 250 g mascarpone (or a tub of vanilla ice cream, if serving straight away)
- Raw honey, for drizzling
- Strawberries, grapes and a handful of roasted nuts, for colour and contrast
Method
- Start with the bowls: spoon the mascarpone or ice cream into one or two small bowls and anchor them on the platter, then crown each with a generous layer of salted caramel pearls.
- Snap the chocolate bars into irregular shards and cluster them by type — abundance reads better than symmetry, so pile rather than fan.
- Fill the gaps with rocky road, choc bites, fruit and nuts until the platter has no bare timber left.
- Drizzle honey over the fruit and nuts just before serving, while everyone watches.
- Serve with espresso and teaspoons. The pearls disappear first; this is normal and correct.
The assembly rules are the same as any good board: odd numbers of clusters, height in the middle, no bare timber. Beyond that, temperature is the only real trick — chocolate straight from a cool pantry snaps cleanly and holds its shine, so keep the platter away from the heater and add the mascarpone bowls last. Summer version: swap the mascarpone for ice cream and serve immediately, spoons already in hand.
Gifting rather than grazing? The same line-up packs beautifully into a box — and for the person who claims to have everything, truffle chocolate tends to settle the argument.
