The Halloween costumes are gone and the supermarket shelves have been filled with brightly coloured tat, which can only mean one thing. Christmas is right around the corner!
This little bag was seen hiding in the “Edible Brightly Coloured Tat” aisle of my local Tesco and being the season of goodwill, I thought it only fair that I gave it a home.
“Snow Bites” are really “snow balls”. They are very simple little things – marble-sized balls of solid milk chocolate (with lovely added vegetable fat), coated in a crisp white sugar shell and rolled in icing sugar.
Think of them as the result of a late night encounter between a bag of Maltesers and a tube of Smarties in a Tate & Lyle factory.
So what we have then is a already sweet Cadbury milk chocolate, coated in sugar then rolled in more sugar. They must be awful, right…?
Wrong!
These little things are seriously addictive. They taste very similar to Smarties, but with much more chocolate in each one, they’re incredibly addictive. Yes, they’re sweet, but they’re also completely unputdownable.
They’re also rather cute to look at, so I guess they would make fun Christmas cake decorations, or just put a few bags out into bowls for guests at your party.
They really aren’t anything special at all, but I just can’t stop eating them. Luckily, there’s a generous 100g in each bag, so I’ve still got some left….. er… oh. They’ve gone.
Well, this was a big surprise. It turns out that Canada, being the forward thinking country that it is, has taken it upon itself to pump up the cocoa solids in their KitKat and Aero bars to a whopping 70%. So these aren’t just the usual “dark” versions of the bars that have been showing up in other places around the globe, these could potentially be the holy grail for dark chocolate lovers if they pass the taste test.
The Aero is actually a little disappointing. The problem is that apart from the bubbles, there isn’t anything else added to the chocolate and so that means this is just some rather ordinary 70% chocolate with some texture. And that’s about it. Plus, as is the trend with the darker incarnations of bars, it is a little on the small side at just 42g.
The KitKat, on the other hand, is not disappointing at all. Quite the reverse. The combination of the dark chocolate and the wafer works really well. Plus the wafer centre doesn’t come across as being too sweet either, which was my real fear, so it isn’t battling the bitterness of the covering. Instead, it is a wonderfully harmonious experience that was over way too quickly. My only advice would be to buy them individually because you can imagine what is going to happen if you keep several of them in the house.
Nestlé are very aware of the perceived healthiness of 70% chocolate and so have noted on the wrapper that both bars are “an excellent source of magnesium and naturally occurring polyphenols” although there is also something about balanced diet and exercise too, so let’s not kid ourselves.
I’m really not sure if Canada is just ahead of the game when it comes to using 70% chocolate in popular consumer bars (we also have 70% M&Ms on our store shelves…), but given the love piled upon Dark KitKats in the past., I’m expecting to get a lot of people begging for me to share these. Maybe we can work something out…
Here we have the offspring of a sticky liaison between the Tesco Turkish Delight Bar I reviewed back in June and a box of After Eight mints. This isn’t going to be pretty.
As far as I can tell, this is the same 25% milk chocolate (with vegetable fat) and filling (primarily glucose syrup) used in the bar, and it’s really quite bad. It’s very, sweet and very sickly.
Which is why it boggles me that this product even exists. Clearly it’s going for the ‘after dinner mint’ market, but if you present this garish pink box after a dinner party, I can pretty much guarantee your friends will never speak to you again.
Admittedly, the format of these ‘Thins’ gives a slightly better (and less sticky) experience than in the bar format, but everything about them just screams “I couldn’t be bothered”. So my advice is not to be bothered and avoid these entirely.
If you’re looking for a more sophisticated after dinner sweetie that won’t prompt your guests to disown you, I recommend the Bendicks ‘Bitters’ range. Proper 95% dark chocolate with strong, refreshing flavours (as opposed to a lingering chemical aftertaste that you get with these things).
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a box of pink yuckiness to dispose off.
I picked up this bar and the Tcho “fruity” bar at the recent Chocolate Unwrapped show (Dom had the other two). As I am not personally a fan of dark chocolate, I recruited a friend to share the experience with me. Dom already described the packaging and general appearance in his post about the “Nutty” bar, so I shan’t go into that, though my friend did point out her mild annoyance at the fact that the bars don’t break evenly into pieces along the marked lines, which seems odd for such attractive, seemingly well thought out bars.
This bar was made with Madagascan chocolate beans, that are said to have a citrus edge to them. Like the “nutty” bar Dom reviewed, the “citrus” bar did not taste very much at all like citrus to me .It offered a short burst of freshness to begin with, which quickly faded into the bitterness I usually associate with dark chocolate. My friend, while noting more of the citrus tones (lemony, rather than orangey, she said) also noticed the quick fade.
Neither of us felt the sour cream finish mentioned in the blurb on the back of the packaging, but the bar was rather creamy compared to many other dark chocolate bars I have sampled in the past (though still not as creamy as milk chocolate, obviously).
I found the concept behind this series of bars interesting, as they seemed to me from the blurb to be educational in nature – teaching people who don’t know much about chocolate how to be connoisseurs, at least in their own eyes. Having tried this one, I found the flavour description reminiscent of the blurb you often find on wine labels telling you about the wine being fruity, flowery or spicy. More often than not, the flavours hinted at seem practically nonexistent, as was the case here. As I prefer strong flavours in my chocolate, this wasn’t really the bar for me at all, but purists or aspiring purists may find it interesting.
