Lindt Excellence Passion Fruit Intense

The eldest son had his 18th birthday party a while ago. This meant that The Lady Of The House and I had to make ourselves scarce – apart from when it came time to do a Pizza run. A trip to the Pizza shop saw me requesting ‘t other half do a quick detour to pick up any chocolate that was going cheap (as you do). One of the things she came back with was this Lindt Passion Fruit – proudly emblazoned with “New”.

Rather than rush gobble it down, I waited until a suitable family gathering where we could all eat ourselves silly in the warm Australian spring sunshine, drink too much good wine, and scoff a bit of chocolate. Part of the reason for waiting was to get a few other opinions, because passion fruit in chocolate?? It seems a bit of a strange combination and I was very unsure about this one.

Passion fruit are one of those odd things here, where if you live in the right place, they grow very well – until the plant gets a virus whereupon it promptly drops dead. And of course all later attempts to replicate the success fail miserably. When I was child we had a Passion fruit vine which was prolific. During summers, my parents would go out each day and shake it, then collect a plastic bucket full of passion fruit off the ground. I think there are still some old photos of my younger sister aged about 4, with a plate covered in ½ shells, a happy smile on her face, and a teaspoon – having polished off most of the daily bucket-full by herself.

Anyhow – I digress. The ingredients list on this pack shows several interesting things. Firstly, this one is actually made at Kilchberg in Switzerland; most Lindt in Australia is made in France. And secondly, the passion fruit preparation is only 7% of the contents, and of that passionfruit makes up 39%. So the actual passionfruit amount is pretty small – under 3%. So it should not have a lot of flavour impact, right? Errr…. WRONG!

From having my doubts (and it is still a bit unusual) this is an intensely passionfruity chocolate. Opening the pack lets the smell drift out and unlike some things where the flavour takes a while to develop, this just reaches out and smacks you in the mouth: WHACK! WHACK! Take that for FLAVOUR! It really is quite incredible. Perhaps my only remaining reservation is that the flavour is so intense that you really don’t want to eat a vast amount in a single sitting. But that makes more for a bit later on, which has to be a good thing.

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