Reviewing chocolate all day is of course, a fantastic job. But it does have its down sides. One of the biggest is that I can never leave the house because I’m always expecting a chocolate delivery and someone has to answer the door to the postman/courier.
So this idea intrigued me. A box of chocolates that’s pretty much guaranteed to fit through your letterbox. Send it to anyone you like and you can be fairly certain that you won’t have caused them headache and disruption by having to arrange a re-delivery or driving to the sorting office simply because your little gift arrived while they were at work.
This particular box arrived while I was up in Derbyshire visiting the Thorntons Factory, and apparently fit through my letterbox with ease. Upon opening, I was greeted by this… er… timely “Merry Christmas” message. Clearly I’ve been sent leftovers, which is fine (they hadn’t passed their use-by date), but not a great first impression.
I then spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out the instructions which cover most of the packaging. Instructions on how to fold and manipulate the box in order to send them to someone. It’s all horribly confusing, in multiple languages, and clearly not helped by the fact that these had already been sent to someone – me.
Suddenly, a great idea turns into something over-complicated and frustrating. If these are being bought online to send to someone else, you should be able to get them to deliver direct via the web site. And if they’re being sold to give away to someone in person, then all those confusing instructions should come away so the recipient gets a nice, pretty box of chocolates.
Instead, we have what looks like a chocolate origami class.
Onto the chocolates themselves. There’s no description of what they are, but there are four each of four varieties. Two milk, one white, one dark. Remove the cellophane wrapper from the tray and you’re greeted by a strongly alcoholic smell. If you’re planning on sending these to someone who can’t/won’t touch alcohol, you can forget it. The ingredients are listed on the web site, but they’re easy to miss.
Ingredients: Sugar, Cocoa butter, Whole milk powder, Cocoa mass, Vegetable fat, Hazelnuts, Water, Flavourings, Skimmed cocoa powder, Alcohol, Liquid invert sugar syrup, Glucose syrup, Dextrose, Emulsifier(E322 Lecithin, E471 Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids), Skimmed milk powder, Milkfat (anhydrous), Vegetable oil, Butter, Fructose, Coffee, Colour(E160a Carotene, E110 Orange yellow S, E129 Allura red AC), Thickener(E440a Pectin), Acid(E330 Citric Acid)
Taste-wise, they’re OK but nothing to write home about (Useless Puns ‘R’ Us). The Belgian chocolate is smooth and glossy, but they’re all quite sweet. The alcohol in one of the milk chocolates is overpoweringly strong, but the flavours are quite pleasant.
It would have been nice to see a little more variation in the chocolates themselves. If you don’t like one particular chocolate, that’s a quarter of the box gone in one go. Although at only 80g in total, you don’t get much if you do happen to like them either.
And that brings me to my final complaint – the price. £9 (plus postage) for an 80g box of mass produced chocolates is, frankly, outrageous. It’s also a little bit off that they charge £1 for postage, when the stamp on the box says they paid 72p. And there’s no extra packaging around the box to pay for either.
All in all, this is a great concept, let down by poor execution and a silly price. If they come back with more variety, simpler packaging and half the price, then they might have potential, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend them in their current form.
Despite having been around since just last year, Q.bel already has a healthy range of seven products, in the form of wafer bars and wafer rolls. The backstory? After having natural foods at home, their son came home from school wondering why he didn’t have the same snacks as everyone else. Oh, the influence of schools! Taking matters into their own hands, they created Q.bel. The “bel” is for Isabel, the founder’s wife, and the “Q” for quality foods.
When I opened up my box of offerings, I was pleased to find doubles of everything, not even considering what exactly everything was. As I began pawing through them, however, I grew more pleased. These are essentially natural replacements to candy bars. Yet the wrappers are only marked by the pair of words “All Natural.” That is refreshing after all the labels you see nowadays. Besides this, the design is careful not to over-promise: colorful, slightly shiny, it shows we’re looking at something casual here.
What do I tear into first? The Double Dark wafer bar, which uses a 70% chocolate. There are two bars, three wafer layers thick, in each package. My first impression was that the wafer was a little too stiff — maybe because of the different ingredients? It certainly is thicker than a KitKat, anyway. Once I got past this, it really was enjoyable. The chocolate has a bit of a coffee taste and is of good quality.
Next up was the Mint bar, which also uses dark chocolate. The chocolate taste is less here, what with the fresh and light mint, as well as the wafer, diverting your attention. What is more interesting is that the wafer didn’t seem hard this time.
The Cripsy Rice is in both dark and milk chocolate. It seems as if that layer of crisped rice beneath the top layer of chocolate traps more chocolate in. Those are the two differences from the plain ones: a little more chocolaty, a little more texture. The milk version is a bit sweeter and, well, milky than the dark version. I’m impressed that the milk chocolate also is good quality. Not jaw-droppingly, of course, but that isn’t what Q.bel is going for. This wafer really can replace a candy bar: it easily equals the deliciousness.
The last wafer bar is Peanut Butter, also with milk chocolate, and complete with that fatal peanut butter aroma. It’s quite creamy, the taste and texture both, even with the wafer. Really, I don’t know why the wafers seemed to get softer as I went along; I couldn’t have been simply getting used to them since my tasting took place in more than one sitting. Anyway, the peanut butter bars run on the sweet side of peanut butter versus on the salty side, so they may not work as an exact replacement for your candy fix. But if you don’t mind this difference, this wafer is just as pleasant.
The wafer rolls come in bigger packaging, but are actually only 26 grams as compared to 32 in the bars. Each one has a tray of two rolls. They have a lighter crunch and a thinner bite. There seems to be more chocolate in its ratio with the wafer, which means a little more sweetness. These are the only differences with the Crunchy Crispy, milk and dark, wafer rolls from the bars. same with the Peanut Butter — more buttery, more sweet, less entertaining and long-lasting crunching. I like the bars more, but I am partial to wafers, so I like getting more of them. It’s a choice between wafer or flavor dominance.
Q.bel has good values and a very much edible range. Give them a try for those pesky urges for candy and sweets, and I think you’ll agree.
Easter is nearly upon us, and the first item to catch my eye on the shelves of my local Tesco was this little packet of mini eggs from Lindt. Once again, I fear I may have been led by pretty packaging over quality – or even quantity. Ah well.
What you see above is the entire contents of the 70g packet that cost me £1.99. That works out at 15.3p for each 5.3g egg in case you were wondering.
So not the greatest value perhaps, but still pretty to look at. Once insides the coloured foil though, things become a little more boring.
These are just solid milk chocolate eggs. No fancy sugar shells, no truffle fillings, just 30% cocoa solids milk chocolate.
Again, that wouldn’t be so bad, but the chocolate itself isn’t that great either. It’s sweet, slightly grainy and very ordinary. A step above the average supermarket own-brand Easter Egg perhaps, but not the kind of quality you’d expect from a name like Lindt.
So I’m at a bit of a loss who these are aimed at. It looks like they’re meant for children, but frankly, if I was a child I would rather spend £2 on a bigger bag of cheaper and sweeter Cadbury Mini Eggs with their pretty sugar shells than these. The Cadbury chocolate may be inferior, but they’re more pleasing to look at, have an interesting crunch and you get more for your money. In this case, you’re just paying for the name and a bit of shiny foil.
Definitely a case of paying a premium for an Easter-shaped product, I’m afraid.
Guest Chocablogger Catherine May takes a look at something fruity from Godiva…
When I first saw this, I was immediately struck by the fact that there is no percentage of cocoa solids listed on this 45 gram ‘Dark Chocolate’ bar. Cocoa mass is the second ingredient to be listed (after sugar) and it’s got a lovely dark brown colour so I’d hazard a guess that it’s reasonably high.
The bar is composed of four large square sections with a large ‘G’ written into each to reassure you that this isn’t some supermarket brand and is part of the, much more expensive, Godiva empire of products. Once bitten into, you discover that the raspberry comes in the form of 0.2% frozen raspberries embedded in a chocolate fondant filling inside each of the squares. The chocolate shell is smooth and very enjoyable; in fact, I think I’d have preferred to eat a solid block of this chocolate without the filling.
Whilst dried raspberries are listed as the means by which the raspberry taste is incorporated in the bar, ‘flavours’ are also stated to have been used. To me, this took away anything natural about the flavour of the fruit. It doesn’t taste of a fresh raspberry, nor does it have the flavour or texture of freeze-dried raspberries. Instead the flavour is slightly too unnatural for my liking, almost resembling the taste of a fruit yoghurt marketed for children. Think of the shelves of yoghurts with bright colours and characters shaped like fruits and you might get an idea of the flavour that I felt came through in the chocolate’s filling.
If you’re after a cheap snack then this certainly isn’t for you. Equally, I’d be unlikely to suggest it for the consumption of anyone who wants a flavouring free treat. However the dark chocolate itself is rather pleasant and has encouraged me to try more Godiva in future. Which I guess makes this bar a success.
