This is the second ‘nutty’ Côte d’Or bar I have tasted (the Pecan bar being my first) and I have to say I was a little disappointed.
The chocolate is okay I suppose. Milk chocolate, creamy, a little on the sweet side for my tastes, fairly unremarkable but edible enough. The ‘filling’ is just a little, well, dull really. Unlike the pecan bar, which was positively groaning with chunks of caramelised pecan nut, this one is shot through with chips of almond which, to be honest, I found a little annoying. Instead of an almond or even a decent sized piece of almond, I found my mouth being assailed by tiny fragments of the stuff.
Now, I happen to quite like almonds, but it’s a little like eating nuts at Christmas – overdo the mouthful and you find yourself lumbered with a load of bits that just don’t seem to want to go down. Once the chocolate had gone, I was left with a mouthful of pieces whose sole aim seemed to be to lodge themselves in every nook and cranny available to them, and that’s just annoying.
I think Côte d’Or should stop messing about and let the UK’s chocolate lovers have a go on the Pecan bar. This, I’m afraid, isn’t much to write home about and should be consigned to the ‘Failures’ archive. It’s a very average bar with delusions of grandeur, and for the money there are loads of alternatives which offer a good deal more in the way of taste.
Sorry, Côte d’Or. Not a winner with me at all.
Some time ago now I compared two brands of milk chocolate – one cheap, the other not so cheap – to see if it were possible to buy a good quality chocolate at bargain basement prices. My tasters unanimously rejected the cheap chocolate, thereby leaving me to conclude that cheap chocs are not worth the money.
Well, I was in my local Sainsbury the other day and I came across these and my interest was piqued. Could it be possible that Sainsbury’s had come up with something to rival the Lindt Lindor Balls, but at less than half the price? A tall order indeed, given my high regard for the Swiss cocoa alchemists. Anyway, inquiring minds needed to know (well, this one did) and so I popped a bag into my basket.
“We’ll soon see” I thought.
For many reasons, I was somewhat sceptical about these truffles. Despite the fact that they contained 33% cocoa, I had been ‘bitten’ by the nasty, nasty Ikea chocolate, and these were nothing less than proud to be cheap. Ah well – only one way to find out…
I was surprised that the package claims ‘no fancy packaging’ because once you get them out of the outer wrapper, these chocs are wrapped in a surprisingly thick foil. Certainly a good deal more ‘posh’ than one might expect.
As for the taste, well that was a surprise. These are pretty damned good choccies. The milk chocolate is smooth (if a little sweet) and the filling does a passable imitation of the Lindor liquid truffle filling. Take these out of the bag and pour them into a fancy serving bowl and nobody would know you’d spent pennies rather than pounds on them.
So there you go – expectations confounded and a pleasant surprise from a supermarket chain. Well worth the money, I’d say.
I think I need to stop thinking of Thorntons as a speciality chocolate maker. Or even as a “chocolatier” at all. They’re just another large sweet manufacturer. They’re a public company and their products are mass produced. Their products aren’t bad, but they always seem to be trying a bit too hard to convince you they’re something a bit more special than they actually are.
Take these Thorntons Coffee Creams, for instance. They’re made with a middle-of-the-road 30% chocolate, which looks a little dull, despite the white chocolate decoration. The filling is made with real cream and a whopping 1% coffee, but again, it’s nothing special.
The also come in an awful looking, cheap plastic bag. But the less said about that, the better.
But for some reason, this 120g bag disappeared within an hour. You see, despite their ordinaryness, they’re incredibly moreish. They’re chocolatey and creamy and coffee-ey and, much like the fruit cremes I tried earlier this week, pretty good.
So perhaps I’ve been giving Thorntons too much of a hard time over their presentation, when I should see them for what they are. Good quality, mass produced, every day chocolates. For grannies.
Picture the scene… It’s a dark and rainy January night and somewhere in a dingy lay-by on the outskirts of Bournville village, a Chocolate Orange and a Crunchie are going at it like rabbits in the back of a white S reg Ford Escort…
Admittedly, it’s not the most pleasant scene to have to picture, but I can only assume it must have happened, because this weird looking addition to the Terry’s family can only be the bastard offspring of such an encounter.
Yes, it’s a Chocolate Orange bar with pieces of crunchy honeycomb. Please don’t ask me why – I thought it was weird enough when they made Chocolate Orange into a bar shape in the first place. But now it seems they’ve just started taking random chocolate bars off a shelf and mixing them up.
But the really weird thing is just how well this works. It’s tasty and crunchy and just downright delicious (even if I did find myself shaking my head and “tut”ing under my breath while eating it).
Despite having respectable middle class parents, this bar is most definitely not upmarket. In fact, I could almost feel it trying to jump out of my hand and into a pair of white stilettos. And I swear I heard it try to order a Babycham earlier.
Maybe that’s why I liked it.
