So, we’re back with another 45g bar of chocolate flavoured with Guinness. This time it’s a milk chocolate with a “truffle” filling. The format of the bar is exactly the same as the dark chocolate caramel version, and it contains exactly the same amount of Guinness – a whopping 0.2% – a fact I still find a little odd, considering the ‘Luxury Truffles‘ Simon reviewed back in 2007 contained five times as much.
The milk chocolate here is 32% cocoa solids, and in my opinion it’s much nicer than the dark chocolate version. For one thing, it does actually taste of chocolate. Surprisingly, it’s also less sweet than the dark chocolate version.
That less-sweet chocolate makes all the difference to the other flavours too. You can actually taste the Guinness in this one. Of course, for a non-Guinness lover like myself, that’s not necessarily a good thing, and I personally think it just tastes like the chocolate is a little stale. But true Guinness aficionados will no doubt get more out of this than its sibling.
Yet I still wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. It’s still a gimmick made with cheap ingredients and hardly any of the black stuff. You wouldn’t buy something like this for yourself, but if you were thinking of buying it as a gift for a Guinness lover, you’d be better off buying them a pint and a block of Thorntons Pistachio instead.
Having been quite literally bitterly disappointed by the Absinthe bar from Venchi I tasted last year, I was hoping for better things from this truffle bar I found in Berlin.
Rudolf Läderach is a Swiss chocolatier and this is a 60% cocoa bittersweet chooclate with a truffle filling containing 3% absinth. Now if you know absinthe you also know that it’s not usually a drink one associates with delicate flavours. Indeed, it’s usually drunk pretty quickly, with added sugar or possibly having just been set on fire. It’s not a drink you savour, in other words. The Venchi bar managed to come out tasting like aniseed – very strong aniseed – indeed, looking back at the review I remember just how strong the smell of that bar was.
I’m happy to say that this bar has a much more subtle aroma about it – much more in the way of chocolate and a mere hint of potential alcoholic nastiness. Break open one of the squares and you can see the dark, creamy filling.
This is where the flavour lies, so when you start to taste this bar, the chocolate introduces itself first. Soft, delicate cocoa flavours, slightly sweet with dark undertones give way to the richer absinthe truffle centre as the shell disappears. Then the centre takes over, flooding the mouth with the mildly alcoholic, aniseed like flavours of the absinthe. In spite of the strong flavour of the centre, it didn’t overrun my palate, and a few minutes after tasting all I had in my mouth were the flavours of the chocolate with a whiff of the alcohol.
All in all, I rather enjoyed eating this chocolate. I have to retract my comment that some things were not meant to be paired with chocolate, because this bar mixes absinthe and chocolate and pulls it off rather well. Obviously this isn’t a flavour that everyone’s going to love, but as far as alcohol and chocolate combinations go, it’s a pretty good one.
Guest Chocablogger Natasha Faria is back with a look at the South African version of Nestlé’s Milo Bar.
I understand that Milo is sold pretty much everywhere except Europe, but as far as I know, South Africa’s Milo bar is different to Australia’s. Kath wrote about a Milo bar that included caramel a while back, and although we seem to share the same memories of Milo, the South African version is clearly better! *kidding*
Milo and its chocolatey counterparts are a mainstay of South African youth and varsity life, but I have never known Nestlé to present it in any manner other than the powder or the chocolate I’m about to describe. The slab is regular Nestlé milk chocolate, with Milo mixed in. Our Milo seems to be chunkier than that of Australia (Kath implied that theirs was pretty powdery), but I guess most things in South Africa are a little rougher than elsewhere. The slab is obviously left to settle, because the Milo is spread all over but mainly at the bottom of the bar.
Eating this kind of chocolate is pure heaven. I’m a chewing taster, but either of the chewing or melting approaches to tasting allows you to enjoy this. The crunchy, slightly salty and honey-flavoured taste of the Milo really complements the creamy Nestlé chocolate and I think the contrast of textures definitely works in the slab’s favour. So, either you chew and enjoy the crunchy, creaminess of this, or you let it melt in your mouth and just chew the left-over Milo after. Either way, it’s definitely a win-win situation.
In my humble opinion, our Milo slab rocks. However, I think that the simplicity of this bar wins over the Australian version, as does the fact that this Milo is rougher. I honestly don’t think that we need the addition of caramel to up the flavour quotient of this, and I challenge the Oz Committee to defy me!
This review is coming at you from Tel Aviv, where I am currently wintering. As my family have been showering me with gifts of chocolate, some old favourites, as well as well as others that are new to me, there is plenty of work to be done while I’m here.
First up is definitely a bar from the “old favourites” department. The Elite biscuit chocolate is, for some strange reason, one of my favourite chocolate bars of all times. I say “for some strange reason”, because when you look at it objectively, it’s not all that great. The milk chocolate is nice enough, but very sweet and blatantly mass-produced. The biscuit is basically a petit beurre, a type of French digestive that’s very popular in Israel. It’s a decent digestive, but nothing special. The Biscuit chocolate bar also includes an uneven layer of “cream” made from powdered milk and powdered cream. All in all, this combination should be passable at best and possibly even rather sickly. And yet…
Although definitely very sweet, the combination of the chocolate, cream and biscuit seems to work to create something new that is actually very moreish. Add that to the fact that even though the bar is divided into cubes (rather than squares), the biscuit refuses to play ball and breaks according to its own rules and you’ll see why it’s hard to stop at a few pieces. Although it’s closer in shape to a square than a rectangle and weighs a 100g, I do view this bar as a “single-sitting” bar, as I would, say, a Twix, rather than a standard chocolate bar to be consumed one square at a time.
