Whittaker’s Dark Caramel
Not to be outdone by the surprising taste of Whittaker’s Favourite Kiwi Fruit milk chocolate block, we returned from a day sightseeing the joys of Auckland and stumbled upon a long-held dream choco-combination of mine – top notch dark chocolate and caramel, humbly lurking in a mini-market next to the hotel.
Whittaker’s have used their bittersweet dark chocolate – at a not-too-shabby 62% cocoa content – as the serious outer coating for their frivolously flowing caramel filling. I was so excited I rushed back to the hotel room, flung it on the bed and took a photo of it. No other niceties were observed as this chocablogger was even more eager to strip it of its inviting gold wrapper:
The chocolate is almost black in colour and my first square (which admittedly was munched eagerly and not slowly savoured) failed to provide anything but the barest hint of caramel right at the very end of swallowing.
Learning from this, I took my time eating the second, third, tenth and twentieth square. Letting the dark, gritty chocolate establish itself amongst my receptive bitter and sweet taste buds was the first step to heaven; the second was the release of the sweet, honeyish caramel after the chocolate surrounding it had warmed and dissolved. A blissful double bonus. Bittersweet chocolate coupled with a sickly-sweet inside is as nice as I’d always dreamed it would be.
What a bugger, then, to turn over the wrapper and read the ingredients list. The chocolate components were all fine, but the caramel, making up one third of the block, was a fair bit dodgier. After the usual suspects of glucose and sweetened condensed milk was invert syrup and confectionery fat. What on earth is confectionery fat? Isn’t that what my butt becomes after eating confectionery? Why add it before?
Perhaps I’ll ponder it in more detail after I finish the entire block…
Posted by Kath on 11 Oct 2008 at 10:10 AM
| 1 Comment
Filed in Reviews under caramel, dark, new zealand, whittakers
October 16, 2008 : 9:36am
According to Google confectionery fats are cocoa butter, milk fat, palm oil……
Palm oil is a cholesterol no-no, choc-a-bloc with the bad lipids.