In a follow up to the Guinness Chocolate bar review I posted recently, I thought I’d offer my opinion on one of my birthday presents.
As you can see, Guinness have produced Milk chocolate truffles ‘enhanced’ with the flavour of Guinness. This statement alone merits a raised eyebrow – after all the question of whether or not the Guinness flavour enhances the chocolate is a pretty subjective one.
A glance at the box revealed a good sign – ten times more Guinness in these babies than was in the chocolate; a whopping 1%! I was beginning to think that these truffles might deliver the sort of flavour that the chocolate bar had only managed to hint at, which could only be a good thing.
The truffles themselves were – unsurprisingly enough – made up in the classic ‘Pint of Guinness’ style. Milk chocolate cups with a white chocolate ‘head’. Amusing, yes, but unlikely to have any bearing on the overall flavour, I thought to myself.
Once I’d selected a victim and bitten through it, I was pleasantly surprised. There is indeed a lot more of the Guinness flavour in these chocs, and the truffle filling seems to act as a much better medium for the delivery of said flavour. It’s a slightly bitter, hoppy flavour which mellows as the chocolate element comes through – a little floral and bittersweet and rather pleasant.
Overall, I’d say that these sweets are much more likely to please the Guinness enthusiast, not just in terms of their presentation ( a nice posh box and individual truffles with their little white ‘heads’ ) but also because they seem to have so much more of that Guinness taste that the bar of ‘plain’ chocolate seemed to fail to deliver.
If you’re ever in Ireland or near a Guinness store and looking to treat the stout drinker in your life, I’d say spend the extra money and go for the truffles. They are SO much better than the chocolate.
Well this is more than a bit of a mouthful.
Hotel Chocolat was kind enough to send some more samples for review. We’ve reviewed a couple of Hotel Chocolat products in the past and loved them, so this has a lot to live up to.
And that’s going to be quite a tough challenge, given this is little more than a solid slab of chocolate. A very large one (500g) at that!
Make no mistake, this is a BIG slab of chocolate.
The slab has three ‘varieties’ of chocolate – milk chocolate, a caramel milk chocolate and white chocolate – marbled together to produce a rather pleasing effect.
The milk chocolate is smooth and creamy, but it’s the caramel chocolate that’s the most interesting part. As far as I can tell, it’s simply a blend of milk chocolate and caramel, but it tastes delicious. It’s similar to a Caramac bar, but more chocolatey – and obviously much higher quality.
There isn’t really enough white chocolate to get an idea of flavour, but it’s primarily there to make the bar look pretty anyway. And it does that job admirably.
If there’s a problem with the Wham Bam, it’s simply that there’s too much of it. I’ve been nibbling away at it for 3 days now and I still have over half of it left.
I don’t quite know who this is aimed at. You’d have to be a serious chocaholic to manage the whole thing. As a gift for a loved one, it certainly has the wow factor, but I’m not sure the recipient will thank you for the instant weight gain that almost certainly goes with it!
Hotel Chocolat make a whole range of these giant slabs and they all look incredibly tempting. They’re definitely worth the money but you should probably keep in mind that you’ll probably have to invest in new loose-fitting clothes if you buy more than one.
Guest Chocablogger Terry Scannell is back with something a bit nutty…
I’m actually not quite sure what the official title of this bar is. The wrapper is a mish-mash of words, the words ‘now even better chocolate!’ always make me a little nervous. How is it better? I looked at the ingredients and saw my old friends Sugar, Soy Lecithin, Artificial Flavours and… Sugar again… wondering around at the top of the list, so how is this better than what it used to be?Anyway, the premise of this bar is an ordinary milk chocolate slab that has mini peanut butter M&M’s thrown into it. It sounds promising, but personally I feel it could have been done better, but I’ll get into that later.
So opening the paper wrapper and the foil (can anyone tell me why Mars went for foil here?) wrapper reveals a thin bar that most likely will be a bit broken, as I’ve had this bar 3 times and it’s been like that everytime, sitting there. The bar is extremely thin in fact, normal M&M’s would have been too big for it, so instead you get these tiny M&M’s, which of course have a tiny amount of peanut butter in them.
And that’s where the problem lies, the flavour is just not there. Ordinary milk chocolate with a tiny hint of peanut butter. Now I mentioned earlier that the M&M’s were thrown in, and that’s no joke, there are a load of them in here. But the bar is just milk chocolate, and these M&M’s are so tiny, that they just don’t lend enough of their flavour to the bar to give a noticeable peanut butter taste, so it’s extremely plain.
My opinion is that a thicker bar with ordinary peanut butter M&M’s would have been a better idea, or a bar with a peanut butter filling (ala Reese’s) with chocolate M&M’s in it would have been better ideas, but what do I know? Mars have gone for this and it’s a shame really. A bar with unfulfilled promise, stick to the normal peanut butter M&M’s as far as this product line goes.
The bar has 230 calories (120 from fat), 3g Protein, 25g Carbohydrates (23g of which sugars) and 13g Fat (8g of which saturates).
If you read my review of the mint version of this bar, you’ll know I liked it, but didn’t find it particularly intense.
Well this bar has exactly the same format – a 100g bar divided into 10 large, flat squares of solid chocolate – but it has an altogether more intense flavour to it.
I think that’s mainly down to the nature of the beast. This is made with Arabica coffee – and while the label lists the coffee content as only 1%, it obviously doesnt take a lot to produce a rich, intense coffee flavour because this bar definitely delivers a real coffee hit.
The chocolate itself is exactly the same as the Mint Intense bar, except with this bar you can actually see the coffee when you bite into the chocolate. It’s not dissimilar to a granulated (instant) coffee embedded in the chocolate.
That might not sound particularly appealing, but it’s an interesting texture that melts away completely without leaving any nasty bits behind.
The overall effect works really well, and if you’re a coffee lover you should give this one a try. It’s probably the most genuine coffee ‘experience’ I’ve tasted in a bar of chocolate – right down to the caffeine hit at the end.
