Our regular attempts to give up chocolate have all been a fail but we’ve found a chocolatey loophole! Chocolate that really tastes like chocolate but is completely sugar-free.  Cavalier’s luxury bars are sweetened with Stevia which was discovered by a Swiss-Italian scientist in Paraguay in 1887…anyway, fast forward to “now” and it’s already taken off as the healthy new sweetener and if you’re a botanist you’ll know it’s extracted from a South American plant.

But forget botany, back to the chocolate! The crispy white bar (right) is divine, the two milk versions (one with nuts) are delicious and the dark bar is very dark, with cocoa nibs – the white and the milk chocolate with hazlenuts were our favourites.

The bars are all Fairtrade, suitable for diabetics and available at various retailers including ChocBox

Do they celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Russia? We don’t know (if you do, Tweet us @FoodShortlist!)

Ireland’s one of our all time favourite places, the food’s fantastic, the people are warm and there’s something magical about The Emerald Isle and the spirit of the Irish, so here’s a toast to St. Paddy’s Day! Best enjoyed with a large Guinness, or an Emerald Isle Cocktail or two.

The Emerald Isle

www.russianstandardvodka.com (available at Tesco’s)

Quick vodka history lesson…At the imperial court in St Petersburg, the Tsars of Russia were legendary for demanding only the finest in luxury and quality and their national drink – vodka – was no exception. In 1894, Dmitri Mendeleev, a brilliant Russian scientist received the decree to set the Imperial quality standard for Russia vodka and the ‘Russian Standard’ was born. (And so were a lot of cocktails, we imagine?)

Russian Standard Vodka is distilled in St Petersburg using winter wheat from the Russian Steppes, pure glacial water from Lake Ladoga. And equally enjoyable in a Russian snow-covered landscape, or on a sunny spring day in the UK…