The “proper” name for this would be ‘Cadbury Dairy Milk With Caramel Egg’, but the whole Dairy Milk superbrand thing is really starting to annoy me now, so I’m not going to play Cadbury’s silly branding game. As far as I’m concerned, this is a Caramel Egg.
With that out of the way, as you can see, I bought a 3 pack of eggs again. Purely in order to give you a well rounded review, of course.
The eggs are the same size as a Creme Egg (and the Mars Egg for that matter).
As you can see from this photo, eating a Caramel Egg can be a messy experience. I don’t recommend pausing to take photos unless you absolutely have to. The caramel is thick and soft, but seems to flow as though it has a life of its own.
Taste-wise, it’s very sweet but doesn’t have a lot of other flavours going on. I’m not convinced the caramel works particularly well in egg form, as there’s just too much of it. In the Caramel bars, you get significantly more chocolate than filling, so it just adds a nice chewyness to the chocolate. With so much filling inside an egg, you can’t help but notice the ordinariness of the caramel.
Cadbury’s Caramel is one of the chocolates I buy fairly regularly, but I don’t think I’d consider buying it in egg form again – I would actually rate the Mars Egg above this one.
My search for a Creme Egg killer will continue….
First impressions, as they say, count.
This little box of delights from New Orleans certainly made a good impression on me. The thick, mint green box made from high quality card and decorated with a ribbon is stylish and fun. I knew I was in for something interesting even before I pulled the ribbon.
When I had finished staring longingly at the box, this is what greeted me inside:
Eight beautifully finished little chocolates carefully packed in. The chocolates all have a hand made look, but it’s a good kind of hand made. A lot of thought has obviously been put into the design and finish of these chocs.
This particular box doesn’t have a name on it, but judging by the enclosed leaflet, Sucré do around 24 different chocolates and then group them together in different ‘collections’. My little box contained:
Lemon Confit
A zest dark chocolate ganache with candied lemon.
Magnolia
Pecan ganache flavored with Praline liqueur.
Paris
Milk chocolate ganache scented with black tea infused with fruit, citrus and vanilla.
Blangé
White chocolate ganache finished with fresh banana and a hint of rum.
Sicilian Pistachio
Roasted Sicilian pistachios compliment a smooth white chocolate ganache, finished with a hint of cinnamon.
Torrone
Double cream milk chocolate paired with sweet hazelnut wafer crunch.
Meuniere
A brown butter infused white chocolate ganache.
Sucré Dark
Sucré’s signature, “showcasing our single bean chocolate from the Maracaibo region of Venezuela”.
Having tasted each and every one, I can safely say that the chocolatiers at Sucré are the kind of people who like to experiment with flavours. There’s some really interesting and often slightly weird taste combinations going on here. I found the Blangé (white chocolate, banana and rum) a particularly strange one.
But there’s also some utterly divine flavours like the Magnolia (Pecan / Praline).
The one thing all the chocolates have in common is quality. The finish may not be quite up to the standard of the likes of Hotel Chocolat, but it’s not meant to be. The hand made feel of these chocolates is a major part of the appeal and that’s something larger chocolate companies simply can’t replicate.
It would also make them an excellent gift… but probably not so much if you live outside the US, what with the cost of international postage. It is worth noting that Sucré have a real, physical store in New Orleans, so if you’re in the area it’s definitely worth stopping by.
I have to admit to being a little surprised that Green & Black’s make Easter Eggs at all. It just seems a little frivolous for what is normally such a serious chocolate brand. Something tells me they wouldn’t have done this in their pre-Cadbury days.
We’ve already reviewed this chocolate in bar form and given it a positive review, but sometimes the shape of chocolate can affect the case so I was curious to see if this was any different.
As you can see, the packaging is decidedly average for a good quality chocolate egg. A cheap card box with a cheaper plastic insert and some gold foil. Not the best start.
My biggest disappointment was reserved for the contents of this egg though. It’s 100% organic air! No artificial flavours or colours. No… well, anything.
With the Green & Black’s range expanding rapidly, you’d have thought they could fill their eggs with something interesting. At just £2.39, I wasn’t expecting much, but something would have been nice.
The actual chocolate is just as tasty as it is in bar form. If anything, I think I prefer it slightly. Because it’s a little thinner than the bars, it melts in the mouth a little more quickly. It’s smooth, tasty and quite sweet for a dark chocolate.
But looking at what’s left of my egg, my overwhelming feeling is one of disappointment. Green & Black could have done something spectacular with their eggs, but instead they’ve apparently just chosen to make them as cheaply as they could.
Easter eggs should be fun. At the very least they should make you smile, rather than stare blankly at them and say “Oh. Is that it?”. I have so many childhood memories of incredibly disappointing Easter eggs, and I think I’d be getting that feeling again if I received this. So I can’t really recommend it. If you like Green & Black’s, you’d be better off buying a couple of bars instead.
Red Tulip chocolates were founded in 1949 but have since been acquired by Cadbury Schweppes. Despite this, they are still regarded fondly by most Aussies and still considered to be a separate identity because we all have memories of just how delicious our Red Tulip Easter Bunnies tasted every year.
I was interested to find out if the long-held belief that “Red Tulip makes the best Easter chocolate compared to cheaper brands” was holding up. As such, I found the classic ‘Elegant Rabbit’ which has been in the same, slightly daggy, foil wrapping for my entire life. It literally rules the chocolate shelves in the months leading up to Easter and is obviously the biggest seller. As you can see from the photo, I also tend to subscribe to the foolish notion that chocolate, immediately followed by fruit (grapes in this case) implies that the goodness of the fruit has cancelled out any of the evils of the chocolate, thus meaning that nothing has been eaten. My scales do not yet support this theory.
Cheapie Easter choccies come and go, but Heritage has been a brand associated with ‘bargain buys’ for the past few years and seems to be a stayer in the market. I had one friend who disliked her super-sized Heritage egg so much that she left it in her room, only to be discovered by her not-so-fussy Alsatian a few hours later. Wired to the eyeballs and frothing at the mouth, he left dozens of slimy brown vomits throughout the house before they could catch him and take him to the vet. Unsurprisingly, Helen’s been a tad reluctant to try them again.
Time to compare the ingredients.
Red Tulip: 30% cocoa solids, normal-sounding ingredients, 24.6% fat.
Heritage: 24% cocoa solids and not-so-tasty ingredients that include vegetable fat and whey powder. 28.8% fat.
Here’s the taste test surprise though: Heritage tasted significantly better. Red Tulip was too sweet and sickly – and that’s something coming from a reviewer who has been known to eat six Cadbury Creme Eggs in an afternoon – and trust me, I ate two rabbits to make sure! Heritage tasted creamier, smoother and finer. The sad thing is that it doesn’t have the cachet of Red Tulip. Perhaps people could buy the loose eggs and remove them from their labeled bag and thus enjoy them without stigma or unfair pre-judgments.
