It wouldn’t be Europe if I couldn’t find another ‘previously unknown’ Lindt bar or two. This is one of a brace I bagged in Vienna, and as you can see from the packaging, Lindt have decided to go all rustic with their Provence range.
What we have here is a 60% bittersweet chocolate with a hint of orange flavour which is backed up by the somewhat unusual inclusion of thyme, and that is exactly what you get. Pop a square of this into your mouth and you immediately get a light tangy orange flavour. As the bittersweet chocolate starts to melt, the subtle thyme flavour is allowed out onto your palate, building in intensity as the chocolate breaks down. The finish is a rather delightful herby/citrus combination which never becomes too much of one thing. It’s a well balanced combination of tastes which (hopefully) will be sold more widely across Europe (i.e. in the UK please).
I’ve tried chocolate with herbs before (when in Belgium) but I’ve never seen anything like this on sale as a bar before. As someone who loves the tang of thyme, I was very pleased to be able to taste this bar. The citrus flavours are very summery, and the addition of thyme gives the whole thing a slightly unusual twist. Highly recommended, and I wish I’d bought more than one!
This is the second of my South African purchases, and this one comes from Nestlé.
The packaging describes it as “creamy marshmallow on a crisp wafer”, and being a fan of all things light and fluffy, I had high hopes for this.
Unfortunately, it seems to have been damaged somewhat in transit. I’m not sure, but I’m starting to think all these chocs have been imported from South Africa in someone’s pocket.
Given the nature of this bar (soft filling with a thin layer of milk chocolate) and the fact that it has travelled at least 6000 miles to get to my tummy, some squashage is inevitable, but that shouldn’t affect the taste. And Chocolate Log doesn’t taste anywhere near as nice as I had hoped.
What I was hoping for was something like a large Milky Way Crispy Roll, but stead, the marshmallow taste more like a very soft version of the nougat in a Double Decker. In theory, that should be pretty good, but in practice it’s just a bit sickly.
The wafer and the milk chocolate are fine. Standard Nestlé fare. But the slightly odd flavour of the marshmallow spoils what could have been something great.
Oh well. 2 South African bars down, 3 more to go. Things can only get better, right?
Call them what you will – Bog Bars, Poo Sticks or Caddyshack Candies, the good old Cadbury Picnic has been around for donkeys’ years and is still worth sinking your teeth into every now and then when your craving insists that absolutely nothing else will do. Obviously though, if you’re unlucky enough to get an old one that has stale wafer inside sealed up with rock-hard caramel you won’t feel like reaching for another one any time soon, and this has happened to me at least half of the time.
However, next to the old favourite at my local shop was a new flavour: Honey Almond Nougat. Well, I had to buy them both and try them out for you, didn’t I?
Luckily for me, the classic Picnic bar was nice and fresh – crunchy peanuts, crispy thin wafer and nice chewy layers of caramel with a thick coat of Dairy Milk. Weight-wise, the bar is a fifty gram log, of which 16.5 was fat – certainly not one of the healthier choccies to chew on, but sinfully satisfying nonetheless.
I admittedly didn’t have particularly high hopes for the Honey Almond Nougat variety. Cadbury had previously released an unsuccessful choc-honeycomb version a year or so ago, and I thought I’d done a thorough job of eradicating it from my memory. (Obviously not: I recall feeling as though I was eating a forest log filled with semi-dried bumble bees).
Once again, luck was on my side Picnic-wise. This one tasted delicious! The full flavour combination of honey, nougat and almonds was very noticeable and it perfectly complemented the Dairy Milk coating. It was reassuring to read on the ingredients list that it did indeed contain roasted almonds, real honey and egg white, a key ingredient of nougat. Note to Cadbury – real ingredients are noticeable and are appreciated.
Oddly enough, the bar was 45g instead of the normal 50g classic Picnic – presumably because almonds are a more expensive ingredient than peanuts – but, less oddly and more importantly, it has almost half the fat of the original Picnic bar – a mere 9.2g. Yay, I can now eat two! Fingers crossed that this new flavour goes the opposite direction to the Cadbury Desserts range and stays on our shelves permanently.
Last time I reviewed a Marks & Spencer chocolate, it looked like they were trying to copy a well-known brand, only their version came out not-quite-as-good-but-more-expensive.
This time around, the product being copied isn’t as obvious from the packaging, but I’m quite sure the name will have come up at the M&S product meetings where they discussed this bar.
In terms of looks and taste, this bar is quite obviously meant to ride on the back of the success of Green & Black’s – and in particular, their Dark 70% bar.
I happened to have some G&B’s 70% and was able to compare. The formats of the bars are slightly different, but the average person would not be able to tell them apart on taste alone.
Now in theory, third parties making good quality dark chocolate is a good thing. But as with the M&S version of Toblerone, this bar was more expensive than the original. But more seriously, there’s absolutely no information on country of origin or indication that any of the ingredients used are organic or fair trade – and that’s a major reason why many people buy Green & Black’s products.
So while this is a perfectly decent bar of chocolate, once again I find myself recommending you go for “the original” instead.
