This is more of a preview than a review, because these attractive chocolate enrobed cakes and brownies won’t actually be available until next month.
Lucky’s sent us three cakes (“Sour Kick”, “Fancy Fudge”, “Nutty Delay”) and three brownies (“Mocha Madness”, “Chunky Nutter”, “Fruity Rhapsody”) to try. All the cakes and brownies are completely encased in thick dark, milk or white Valrhona chocolate.
As you can see, the cakes are beautifully presented. I’m not entirely sure how Lucky’s have managed to completely enrobe their cakes in such a uniform way, but when you put them altogether they look almost like giant, chocolatey Lego bricks.
The cakes & brownies themselves vary in quality. They’re all variations on a theme, with the cakes being a light spiced honey cake. My favourite here was the Fancy Fudge, which was beautifully moist and dripping with an almost liquid caramel. The honey cake works perfectly with the dark chocolate, but not so well with the milk chocolate and slightly dry, lumpy apricot jam in the Sour Kick.
The brownies are soft, moist and dense. My favourite here was the Chunky Nutter, a rich, dark brownie with chunks of white chocolate and pecans, all covered in milk chocolate. The brownie almost resembles cookie dough in both texture and flavour.
My least favourite was the Mocha Madness, a coffee flavoured brownie covered white chocolate. But then I’m not overly fond of either coffee or white chocolate anyway.
Overall, I’m really excited to try more of these in the future. Although they don’t look particularly large, the thickness of the chocolate and the richness of the cakes makes them a substantial mouthful.
In general, the darker and simpler varieties appealed to me most. It’s very easy to pack cakes with unusual and exciting sounding ingredients, but I hope Lucky’s concentrate on quality rather than variety.
They do apparently make non-chocolate cakes as well, but I love the concept of completely encasing cakes in thick chocolate. It’s something which should allow them to achieve a longer shelf life when using fresh ingredients. That makes financial sense as well as cakey sense.
Look out for more of these in the near future!
Although I didn’t realise it at the time of purchase, Mitzi Blue is an offshoot of the slightly eccentric Zotter brand. A quick look at the web site reveals that there are a couple of dozen Mitzi Blue products available (I deliberately avoided ‘bars’ or ‘slabs’ for reasons that will become aparent shortly).
As you can see, the ‘ML’ stands for ‘Mit Liebe’ – ‘With Love’ for you non-German speakers out there, and like all of Josef Zotter’s creations the majority of the ingredients are either Organic, Fairtrade or both. only the salt and soya lecithin are neither. So why did I refrain from describing this product as a bar or slab?
Here’s why.
It’s a disc, divided into 11 pieces (using some strange methodology). and what struck me at first was how ‘un-white’ the white chocolate is. It’s more of a waxy colour, and I’m assuming that this may well be because the cocoa butter hasn’t been chemically bleached (they do that sometimes y’know). We tasted unbleached white chocolate at a Thornton’s event a while ago, and it makes a big difference to the flavour).
Flip the disc over, and here’s another surprise.
Flowers. Cornflowers, roses and marigolds, to be exact. As you can see, the cornflowers seem to have the upper hand here (they’re the blue bits) but there are plenty of the other blooms in there as well. It’s similar to the Labooko ‘Blumenstrauss’ bar that Dom reviewed, but without the daisies.
Taste wise, the chocolate does indeed have much more depth of flavour than an ‘ordinary’ white chocolate. There’s a richness you don’t find, and it’s much less sweet than a regular white chocolate. The flowers add a rather pleasant and subtly fragrant element to the overall taste of the chocolate. It’s still a little on the sweet side (too sweet for me to enjoy more than a piece or two at a time) but there’s a depth of flavour here that makes it so much more than just another white chocolate. Definitely not for kids (especially with a Zotter price tag!) and probably too unusual for everyday consumption, this is nonetheless a very interesting creation, typical of the Zotter product range. I like it in the same way Dom liked his flowery Austrian chocolate.
You can buy Zotter chocolate online – there are links from their UK website and you’ll get this as Mitzi Blue ‘LO’. There’s also a great little Zotter chocolate song and a short movie telling ‘the story of Mitzi Blue’ (below), from which I learned that Mitzi Blue bars come in many forms. These videos are also proof that Herr Zotter is bonkers, but we kind of already knew that.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQvWWyr3dd8
Time for another Hotel Chocolat goody bag! I do love these things, despite the fact that they come in a little handbag and are probably not aimed at me. I think there’s something exciting about ripping open a bag full of unknown treasures. So that’s exactly what I did.
The Summer Good Bag contains five items:
Gemstones
We’ve already seen these little chocolate drops in the Pretty In Pink Goody Bag, and they’re just as delicious as they’ve always been. Little drops of white & dark chocolate, heated on the outside to give a marbled effect. The slightly different ratio of dark to white chocolate in each one makes every mouthful a little different. Very, very moreish.
Salted Caramel & Praline Marbles
Something else that’s very difficult to stop eating! A 140g bag of sea salted caramel & praline spheres. The mix of praline and caramel has a fudge like texture, but retains all the flavour of a salted caramel. Perhaps a touch too sweet, but the touch of salt really lifts the flavour. Not on the same level as some of the fresh salted caramels we’ve had recently, but still rather nice.
Eton Mess Lick
White chocolate on a stick. Or white chocolate with freeze dried strawberries and pieces of meringue, at least. Very similar to the “Strawberry Meringue Lick” that came in the Pretty In Pink goody bag, except this one is square with Union Jacks embossed on the surface.
It’s very sweet, a little sickly, and altogether too pink. But none of those factors prevented me eating it in around 30 seconds.
Banoffee Mini Slab
A 100g slab of milk and caramel chocolate with shortbread cookie pieces and real banana ‘crisps’. I’ve mentioned many times how much I love Hotel Chocolat’s caramel chocolate (a blend of milk chocolate and caramel), so it goes without saying I love this bar.
But half of the slab is an interesting banana flavoured milk chocolate – something I haven’t seen before, but would love to see more of.
It’s packed with lots of tiny, crunchy shortbread pieces and thin slices of crisped banana, which I wasn’t that keen on. The chocolate had more banana flavour than the actual banana.
I did enjoy this, but as with the rest of the goody bag, it’s very sweet. After eating a few pieces of it, I not only had to put it down, but needed to take a break before completing the rest of the review!
Summer Selection
Last up, we have a selection of individual summer chocolates. Or rather, we have three pairs of chocolates – a white chocolate Raspberry Yoghurt heart and a milk chocolate Billionaire Shortbread.
These are both nice, soft centred chocolates, but they’re not outstanding. I found the citrus of the raspberry yoghurt a little jarring with the creamy white chocolate, but I did like the milk chocolate. I’m not convinced that two different chocolates constitutes a ‘summer selection’ though, and I don’t know why Hotel Chocolat couldn’t find six different chocolates that fit into the summer theme.
Overall then, a nice little goody bag, but one that I think could be improved with a little more variety. I particularly enjoyed the Gemstones and Salted Carmel Pralines, but neither of those are particularly summery in themselves.
Information
- Buy it online from:
- Filed under assortment, banana, caramel, dark chocolate, hotel chocolat, milk chocolate, praline, raspberry, shortbread, strawberry, uk, white chocolate.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh-s3auYdKo
Update: This competition is now closed.
This is the new ad from Cadbury that will start airing on Saturday 7th August. It’s part of what they call their “most exciting ever marketing initiative”.
Because marketing initiatives are just so exciting!
The idea behind the campaign is apparently to get you to go to the Spots v Stripes web site, pick a side and play all kinds of games. The campaign will continue until 2012, when Cadbury can cash in on the London Olympics. Yay, Cadbury!
To celebrate this exciting initiative, Cadbury sent us a big box of marketing stuff that we haven’t looked at and 20 bars of chocolate that (1) we’ve already reviewed and (2) contains palm oil which we don’t like.
But we can’t bring ourselves to throw it away, so we’ve decided to give the chocolate away to one of our Twitter followers. We know lots of you still love it.
To enter, all you need do is retweet the link to this post, and we’ll pick a random winner on Friday 6th August.
Note: This competition is open to UK residents only. One entry per person.
Over the weekend, we’ll pick a winner and next week we’ll send the chocolate and as much of the marketing bumf that came with it as we can fit into a reasonably sized box as we can and send it to the winner.
Update: This competition is now closed.
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