The Winter Nine

How your bar was made. Inside the process.

From the beginning, our goal with The Winter Nine was to take a classic pairing — orange, spice, and chilli — and make it our own. We wanted the sweetness and acidity of orange to cut through and cool the gentle heat of chilli, while the spice would build warmth and complexity, preventing the chocolate from feeling too heavy or too light. It’s a balance that continues to define the bar.

The Winter Nine — named after the nine key flavours often associated with the winter months — is one of our original chocolates, created in the first weeks of MayHawk in 2007. Since then, we have continued to refine both the chocolate and its ingredients while keeping the core flavour — orange with warming spices — unchanged.

When ingredients share more volatile natural flavour compounds, they interact in a more harmonious way. Yet those bright, layered flavours also need a stable base to support them. The latest version of this bar uses olive oil and smooth oat-milk chocolate as that base, allowing the orange, spice, vanilla, and chilli to develop into a more rounded, elegant profile.

To introduce texture that contrasts with the smooth chocolate yet complements its main flavours, each bar is finished with pieces of candied stem ginger and orange zest, whose gentle heat enhances the flavour of our own greenhouse-grown chilli peppers, stone-ground into the chocolate. This version stays true to its origins while representing the smoothest and most balanced Winter Nine we have made.